TWENTY YEARS ago, Old Crow Medicine Show, the 21st century old-time string band, began as a gigantic all-or-nothing bet on the viability of American traditions long left for dead. The kind of bet that only foolish young people could make. In 1998, fiddling frontman Ketch Secor, freshly rejected by his high school girlfriend, gathered a band of like-minded pickers and took off from upstate New York on an epic transcontinental busk-a-thon. One guy in the van was Critter Fuqua, Secor’s best friend from their school days in Harrisonburg, Va. The rest were neo-folk enthusiasts from the rural Northeast.
For the next few months, the newly named Old Crow Medicine Show pulled into towns that were barely on the map, stood in front of a centrally located store, and turned loose a blaze of ancient American music, fueled by punk-rock energy and abandon. The people came and cheered, and enough money fell into the banjo case to keep the gas tank full. The latter-day pioneers never went to sleep hungry, and they came back to the East convinced that they were onto something real and life-changing. It was a spiritual path of sorts, one rooted in the noise that began when, in the brief decades before a race-based slavery system took hold, the banjo of the kidnapped African and the fiddle of the indentured Celt met after hours in colonial tobacco fields.
Two years after their august founding, Old Crow was playing guest spots on the Grand Ole Opry. Another decade or so, and they had a platinum single and a Grammy. Today they are full-fledged members of the Opry and record for a major label, Columbia Records Nashville. Bandmates have come and gone. But for Old Crow’s two remaining founders, the childhood friends Secor and Fuqua, their youthful bet has paid off, and they are now about the business of paying back. They get to bring young country neo-traditionalists onto the Opry as their guests. In 2016, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum commissioned Old Crow to record a complete reimagining of Bob Dylan’s classic, made-in-Nashville two-record set, Blonde on Blonde.
That commitment to honoring the ties that bind a culture and a community is right up front in the title of their new album, Volunteer. Yes, the band has resided in the Volunteer State for the past 18 years, but it goes deeper than that. The Old Crow phenomenon is built on a communitarian ethos of volunteerism that goes back to the band’s creation story. They showed up in village squares and volunteered to play, and townspeople in turn volunteered to feed and shelter them. Today the band’s touring arrangements are more formalized. But if you poke around on the internet, you can find recent video of Secor and Fuqua giving free concerts at Nashville-area nursing homes and schools.
Secor, especially, has become a real pillar-of-the-community type. He’s married to that same girlfriend who dumped him 20 years ago, Lydia Peelle, a fiction writer of some note. They have two young children and, a couple of years ago, they led in the founding of Episcopal School of Nashville, a church-related and spiritually based institution created to offer a rigorous and nurturing education to children from a variety of ethnic, economic, and cultural backgrounds. Secor, whose father spent his professional life as headmaster of a series of Southern Episcopal schools, is now chair of the school’s families committee.
In music and in life, Old Crow Medicine Show is still following that less-travelled path they set out on 20 years ago, and the longer they walk it, the deeper and more meaningful it gets.
Danny Duncan Collum, author of the novel White Boy, teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!