Old Crow Medicine Show - Musical Style

Musical Style

The band plays a wide variety of music, seeming to pull influence from any of the many musical forms that would have been performed by musicians of the turn of the 19th to 20th century to the 1940s, including old time, bluegrass, country, and folk blues. Country Music Television notes the band's "tunes from jug bands and traveling shows, back porches and dance halls, southern Appalachian string music and Memphis blues." Variously described as alt-country, old-time, Americana and "folk/country", according to Gabrielle Gray, executive director of the International Bluegrass Music Museum which sponsors ROMP: Bluegrass Roots & Branches Festival (which Old Crow headlined one night in 2012), "is in the direction of progressive bluegrass. They are open to trying anything new and exciting."

". . the Old Crows have always played this kind of music. We never played something else. We were initially a string band that has evolved into something more than a string band, writing our own songs and covering some tunes, et cetera."

Ketch Secor

By the early 1990s, the era of punk rock and grunge, Secor and Fuqua were "learning to play antiquated unamplified instruments and borrowing songs from their fathers,’ grandfathers’ and even great-grandfathers’ generations." Fuqua remembers . .

". . selling all my Pearl Jam records to get Bob Dylan records. I went back in time and I started listening to Jimi Hendrix, because I knew he’d covered ‘All Along the Watchtower.’ And I started listening to all these Memphis and Delta blues players. And Ketch went down the road to the old-time Appalachian stuff and playing clawhammer banjo. Then we kind of met back up . . and we realized we could put that energy that we loved in punk rock and Nirvana into what we were doing."

"We’re among many bands that have carried on traditions that have come before us and given it our own energy from what we grew up with. I didn’t grow up really listening to bluegrass. I didn’t grow up playing it. I grew up playing heavy metal, and hard rock, and listening to Nirvana. And then in high school, Ketch started playing the banjo, and I started listening to the blues. It’s a real organic thing that happens. This music allows for new energy to be infused into it."

Chris "Critter" Fuqua

"We just knew we wanted to combine the technical side of the old sound with the energy of a Nirvana," Fuqua adds. This path from punk to old-time they share with other acts, many of whom have followed their lead, and for the same reason . .

"Most of the musicians in the Avett Brothers, Old Crow Medicine Show, the Devil Makes Three, Uncle Earl, Crooked Still, the Duhks, the Mammals, and the Hackensaw Boys were former punk rockers who had picked up acoustic instruments. With no need for amps, they could suddenly play on street corners or in meadows, and their lyrics could be heard as never before. They weren’t imitating the baby boomer generation by playing bluegrass or folk rock. By turning instead to the pre-bluegrass genre of old-time mountain music, they could connect to a tradition older than their parents and still play as fast and hard as they had as punks." —Geoffrey Himes, Baltimore City Paper

Starting from old-time music in the Appalachian hills, the group found themselves "making a foray into electric instruments and 'really knocking up the rock 'n' roll tree' on their 2008 release 'Tennessee Pusher'." As Secor saw it . .

"On our tour we started having a bigger band. I started playing keyboards. The boys would bring out electric guitars. It was a lot of fun, but we were just blowing off steam. It's hard to be in a rock 'n' roll string band and face your fiddle every day and say, 'All right, what can we do that we've never done before?'"

On the documentary "Big Easy Express" about the Railroad Revival Tour with Mumford & Sons and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros they "practice(d) a complementary variation of folk" bringing "a pleasingly smoky amalgam of country, bluegrass, and blues." With "Carry Me Back" (2012) they've "circled back to the original sound that so excited (Secor) and Fuqua as kids . . full of old-timey string sounds updated for the 21st century — sing-a-longs that lift the soul, ballads that rend the heart and a few moments of pure exhilaration."

"It's like the name says, it's a show, there's a snake oil factor and a hip twist to the elixir." —Frank Goodman, Puremusic.com