"Everybody's fucking driving me nuts," he says via phone, happy to take a break and wax poetic about the country folk band's 25-year history and its upcoming show at the Fort Worth Stock Show & Rodeo.
Is this the Old Crow Medicine Show's first rodeo?
"It's definitely not," Secor says. "A lot of the horse culture that I most have enjoyed participating in is centered around mules, so I like to go to mule pulls. Some people like the rodeo, and some people like to see the mutton busting with the kids. But if you've ever seen mule teams pull cinder blocks on sledges, it's the most beautiful and heart-wrenching sport of them all."
Unfortunately, Secor will have to miss the mule pulling in Fort Worth, which takes place Jan. 20–21, but for their show Thursday night, the rodeo setting is just another addition to the long list of uncommon venues the band has played.
"I find myself just loving the variety of venues and types of events that a band like ours can set up at," Secor says. "From a crawfish festival to a moon pie festival, to a church revival, to a nursing home, to an Indian reservation, a public school lunch room — it is a variety of haunts that I've had the privilege of haunting this past quarter century."
Secor challenges other bands in Nashville to play the same variety of places, not in a spirit of competitiveness but because it is in that challenge he has seen taking shape the real bonding a band needs.
"There are bands and then there are real bands," he says, "and real bands are tribes. Real bands are wolf packs. They live and die together. ... The kind of music that we play is string band music, and what a band allows you to do is to shapeshift in all kinds of locales and fit right in like you were painted on the wall."
Playing any ol' place was, after all, what the band set out to do. Beginning as a busking group in the late '90s, the band would sell cassette tapes on the curb, pulling in $500 a day on the corner while a bar would pay only $50 for a show.
"I think the spirit of discovery that has always been a part of Old Crow has made us more open to ... you name it; it doesn't have to have a roof or a turnstile," Secor says. "I don't care if it's ticketed or if there's hay bales or a dance floor or a swimming pool, I'm going to saw my fiddle and have a great time doing it no matter who's standing out there with their eyeballs or their feet flying."
Keeping a band going for 25 years is no small feat. Old Crow Medicine Show has seen over a dozen members come in and out of the band, but it has managed to stay true to its source material — the vast canon of American folk music.
"Because I'm writing most of the songs, I'm able to kind of adhere to the initial vision of it," Secor says. "Though, sometimes it's hard to remember what I was thinking when I was 19 and said, 'Hey, I'm going to start a band called The Old Crow Medicine Show and head for Manitoba.'"
Writing songs with one foot in the old time and the other in the all-time, as Secor puts it, is not without its challenges.
"I mean, it's hard to write about mules and whiskey again and again because you might run out of things to say about mules and whiskey or running from the police or what the mean old judge says to you before the gavel rings out," he explains. "But I guess doing it day in, day out, it's more the issue is a personal one of lacing up my shoes and going to do the act that I've been doing for so long."
Of course, there is one song that Old Crow Medicine Show has contributed to the American folk canon, "Wagon Wheel." Darius Rucker's diamond-selling hit song was first performed by Old Crow Medicine Show after Secor decided to add verses to a chorus written by Bob Dylan during the Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid sessions in February 1973. The result was one of the most compelling songs ever written about hitchhiking one's way home, filled with loneliness, longing and a shred of hope.
"As a devotee of Bob Dylan, I think we're all living in that shadow because it casts so wide, and I think 500 years from now, we'll still be talking about what Bob did in the 20th century," Secor says. "Here's one Bob Dylan fragment that was so mercurial and golden and fecund that it just sprouted like the graft of an apple tree sprouts a whole new crop. Even this guy's trash is fertile."There are bands and then there are real bands ... and real bands are tribes. Real bands are wolf packs. They live and die together." – Ketch Secor
tweet this
"The forces that magnify 'rock me mama like a wagon wheel' were [unpredictable] and beyond my power, so that's why I just feel kind of reverent about it and grateful because the sun really shined brightly on that tune and it wasn't any kind of light I cast."
Aside from the incredible songwriting, being an entertaining act has also helped propel the band further than any other band of buskers you can think of. With such a rich history of live performance in so many spaces, Old Crow Medicine actively works at being worth the price of admission every time, always leaving them wanting more. Even as the members get older, they still put on a highly energetic and almost athletic performance.
"There's a lot of jumping around," Secor says. "It's as raunchy as the Sex Pistols, as raucous as The Who, and it's as emotional as a Jimmy Swaggart performance. It takes a lot to pour into that kind of work, so I guess I better eat my Wheaties."
Not only does the band keep Secor's physical health in check, it keeps his emotional health intact.
"If I wasn't doing it, I sure would be sitting here crying my fucking eyes out," he says only half joking. "It's just horrible out here."
Secor adds that the whole message of the band is to "remain optimistic, keep on keeping on — just like that mule hitched up to the cinder block sled."
