Reveling in Americana
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| Tell it to me – Old Crow Medicine Show has made regular appearances on NPR’s “A Prairie Home Companion.” |
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By MATT ELLIOTT World Scene Writer
4/11/2007
Old Crow Medicine Show brings its unique sound to the Cain's Ballroom
Old Crow Medicine Show's Ketch Secor was crossing America in a 45-mph electric car on his way to Tennessee's Bonnaroo music festival in 2005 when he picked up a hitchhiker in Oklahoma.
"I picked up an Indian hitchhiker about, well, just outside of Okemah," said Secor, who lives in Cape Cod, Mass. "And I took him to Van Buren, Ark., to the soup kitchen, and he was telling me about Pretty Boy Floyd and how he had Indian blood in him, as well, just talking about that landscape and the human landscape that stands on it. That's just really exciting to me."
Secor, 28, has always taken the "B roads," something his father did when he was growing up. The result was that he developed an affinity for the last 200 years of American history, drawn from its people's history of blood, sweat, war, religion and sex.
His string band, he calls it "the Old Crow," is an expression of that. It's not bluegrass. It's not country or folk, nor is the quintet a jam band. He and the band will play the Cain's Ballroom Thursday.
As its most recent album, "Big Iron World," shows, the music is all of those things and something more, steeped in the waters of Appalachian folk. The Old Crow Medicine Show is earthy, and something dark churns beneath its surface, something that burns with everything from voodoo to slavery and American Indian medicine. What you hear behind the fiddle, banjo, harmonica and vocal harmonies is fecund and wet, Secor said. It shines through on the album, especially on the song "Union Maid," a Woody Guthrie song the band covers on "Big Iron World."
"I sound like I'm selling shampoo," he said.
Most of the band's members were born in the late 1970s, so mix that in with a certain amount of modernity, and you've got its sound.
"Through music, we were able to transcend our own generations and our own era and go back to something that seemed to be something more powerful that was waiting for us there," he said.
The band formed in 1998. Secor, a fiddle player, met banjoist Critter Fuqua when he was in the seventh grade. He met guitjo player Kevin Hayes on a street corner in Bar Harbor, Maine, and at the time Hayes was working a job picking blueberries. He ran into singer Willie Watson in Ithaca, N.Y., and met bassist Morgan Jahnig on the streets of Nashville, Tenn.
Old Crow Medicine Show took its name from a period of American minstrelsy around the time of the Civil War, one of the first times that black musicians performed on a national level, Secor said. Medicine shows often paired music with the sale of some products such as health tonics and elixirs, he said.
The Old Crow put out its first album in 2001, and the group has lived as street performers playing their music for passersby. Now on the label Nettwerk Records (part of the company that manages Avril Lavigne and Sarah McLachlan), the album has shown that somewhere out there in the age of "American Idol" lies a burning desire for music that has a culture beyond pop's recycled bubblegum trivia of personal relationships.
"You can come to the Cain's Ballroom on a Thursday or Friday night and see the real thing, if you can turn off your television and have it all be all actualized in front of you -- all this musical history, all these elements of race and creed, and all of the pioneering spirit and all the travel that's been done, all the mules and men and sweat that's rolled off of a slave's back," he said.
"I mean, all of these things are inside of American song, and it's (expletive) beautiful and people need to know it. People need to sing it. People need to know it because it's in their hearts, too."
Matt Elliott 581-8366
matt.elliott@tulsaworld.com
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