Sleep Is Optional, Money Is Replaceable, Earl Scruggs Music Fest Is My Friend

Getting ready for the Labor Day weekend shindig with an interview with Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show

The Old Crow Medicine Show frontman on 25 years as a string band leader, habitual collaborator, and connoisseur of Saturday night/Sunday morning fiddle jams, plus a “Wagon Wheel” podcast Reprise

Update: I will be all over the Earl Scruggs Music Festival this weekend, and hope to see some of you fine Southern Songs and Stories folks while I’m on site emceeing, interviewing artists for future podcasts, hanging out at the WNCW booth, and generally talking about and taking in great music with friends old and new alike!

Thanks for checking out this text version of the podcast series Southern Songs and Stories! This post is a continuation of our Substack series of posts giving you the scripts of our audio and transcripts of our interviews. To hear the episode, simply search for Southern Songs and Stories on any podcast app, or visit us at southernsongsandstories.com for that and much more.

Catching Up With the Pied Piper, Ketch Secor

Welcome to Southern Songs and Stories, I am your host Joe Kendrick, and today we bring you our episode on Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show. 

Ketch was on this podcast two years ago in the episode titled “Painting A Portrait of 23 Years With Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show”, which is based on our conversation at MerleFest that year. Old Crow Medicine Show’s famous song “Wagon Wheel” is the subject of an episode in this series from a few years before that, on the podcast titled “Wagon Wheel: Anatomy Of A Hit”, and I am attaching that episode to the end of this new conversation with Ketch Secor for everyone who missed it the first time or who might just want to hear it again. 

[SSaS intro theme with VO by Joe Kendrick]

On August 9th, 2024, I traveled with WNCW intern and rising Carleton College senior, Will Prim, to the PNC Arena in Charlotte, North Carolina, just ahead of Ketch Secor’s show that night supporting Hank Williams Jr. Old Crow Medicine Show is headlining the Earl Scruggs Music Festival in Tryon, North Carolina, over Labor Day weekend 2024.

You will hear Will ask some questions later in this interview, which begins here with me asking Ketch about his upcoming show at the Earl Scruggs fest: 

00:04:12 Ketch Secor 

Oh well, this is our first time ever being invited to do this, and we're really honored that they asked us to come down. This is Shelby. Shelby is a cool town with a lot of interesting things happening. You know, when you do what? What I've been doing, particularly in North Carolina, of all places. Like, I came to North Carolina. In 1996 and I took a job in old time string band. That's what that song rock me momma like a wagon wheel is all about. It's about me getting this job and thinking ohh. It's going to be better when I get to North Carolina. 

00:04:45 Ketch Secor 

And and so for the past, you know, however long that's been, that's like 30 years. I've really paid attention to North Carolina and how and what a musical capital it is. And the only reason I got dragged over to Nashville is because somebody called me after they saw us in North Wilkesboro. And said you really need to come here and because all I had in my mind was. 

Screw that guitar going to get me a fiddle. I'm going to be like Elvis and I'm going to rule North Carolina. That was my plan. I mean, how about that? I should have told my high school advisor. That's what I'm going for, because that's what I really set out to do. So anyway, I'm. I digress, but anytime I hear anytime we get a chance to break new ground for the band in North Carolina, it it it resonates with that initial wish. It goes, it harkens back to my younger self where you know a couple of years ago we played for the first time. 

Pilot. Mountain and I just love Pilot Mountain. I love getting. I love mixing it up with N Carolinians. I always have. I love that the music always feels like it's making a hometown return from, you know, like a hero coming back from some war, you know, and and it really feels that way. I started. Talking with that metaphor in the beginning of this spiel for WNCW, I'm going to return to it. 

When you sign up to give your life to the Muses and make music for people all around the country, particularly when it's traditional music, when it's got fiddles and claw hammer, banjo, and a ton of harmonicas just shining all the way across the country, when you have that kind of reverberation in mind and you bring it on back. To old Carolina. It's just the it's the ripest apple. I just want to bite into it. Shelby. See you soon. 

00:06:46 Will Prim 

Yeah, I was thinking about Old Crow medicine show and Earl Scruggs Fest is so. Based and infused with collaboration as a driving force. And so I was curious. Who were some of your favorite onstage collaborators that you've gotten to work with in the past, or if there's any plans for the future or people you want to work with moving forward? 

00:07:07 Ketch Secor 

Well, I was always a real natural collaborator, you know, like I even when I was a teenager and we were playing open mic night, I'd pull drunks in from the crowd. I'd pull them up on the stage. What do you got? I was always jamming with some weirdo, man. Let me tell you. But then when I got good or whatever, good enough, I started getting. Around people that where I could take that experience and really, you know, mix it up for, for, for the common good and that's probably around the time that when I was about 23 and met Gillian and. David. 

And Gil and Dave really helped me kind of crystallize that feeling of, well, this is the gregarious Act, this music making being out on the road with them was like summer camp. 

You know, we'd go out with bluegrass bands and we loved their kinship and had such an affinity for them, but we didn't mix it up with them. We weren't. We didn't play a big encore at the end. We weren't all jamming in the hallway. 

So getting out with Dave and Gill, we got to do all those things and then that just snowballed into a kind of attitude that that I took in the in our post, Dave and Gill years in which we we played with everybody, every anybody that you know was in, if you're, if you're the opener, you're in the band pull, pull kid off the street. 

Well, a buck dancer that you saw out in front of a joint, somebody that was recommended online that plays the zither. Oh, you're in the band. You know, somebody with a blue ribbon for auto harp. Come on up, honey. 

I just always been that way and I I really like to do it that way because I feel like there's a Torchy pass of that I that ideal when the younger generation does it. So like when we mixed it up that way with The Lumineers or with Sturgill or with other acts that have gone on to do. 

Much bigger things I like to think that we planted in on a spirit of that collaboration so that they'll go do it and they'll pull in the buck dancers from, you know, Fort Wayne too. 

00:09:19 Joe Kendrick 

Arthur Grimes. 

00:09:20 

Yeah. Yeah, we love Arthur Grimes. I hope you're listening. Arthur Grimes. Love you, buddy. 

He's a if you don't know Arthur Grimes, he is probably the my most favorite dancer. He comes from the Junaluska community of Boone, NC, and he's been dancing his whole life. He loves country music and and our lives intersected out in front of Boone. Drug one day when? 

We were busking and he was dancing and Doc Watson chanced by and we've been friends ever since. 

00:09:54 Joe Kendrick 

Thinking about how old Crow Medicine Show has had these kind of. At least two sides or two sides of Old Crow medicine show maybe not the only two sides, but you know, social conscience is very much present. You know, all throughout your career with the lyrics and subject matter of your songs, but also like one of the most hedonistic bands really. With the subject matter and the shows that you put on, so I wonder if you've ever thought. About. You know, comparing yourselves or maybe having any other artists or bands that have been in that mold that you've drawn from or that you can, you can look to, as contemporaries. 

00:10:40 Ketch Secor 

Well, that's a great question and I appreciate that because I think you're so right. We do have. 

A little Saturday night and Sunday morning all mixed up in that show, and I think that that's what country music at its best. It really purports to do. You know, Johnny Cash is, you know, high on pills. And then he's telling you about the promised land, you know, in the next song. 

So we certainly had a avatar to watch, to do to, to perform that way, you know, tonight we're here opening up for Hank Junior and Charlotte and it's going to be all my rowdy friends are coming over tonight and then it's going to be. I saw the light. 

So you know, country music does this better than most, and that's what I love so much about. Country music is that duality. But for me, in terms of having an actual. Role model in that sort of, you know, hedonistic salvation orientation. You know, when I was a kid, I I lived in a small town in Virginia in the western part of the state. That was kind of kind of country kind of middle of the road and but it was the 80s, so things were. Kind of backwards. And we had sidewalk. 

Years. And the sidewalk preachers were fascinating to me like they were called to be public. You know, they they would get, they would actually get up on, like a a milk crate in the middle of the court square. And they would testify. And sometimes I see people doing some semblance of that. Now. I'm also the kind of guy that if you call me. And you're a telemarketer. I'll talk to you. You're. Off man. So how's the weather over there? What's going on? How about the election? What are you thinking? 

You know. So anyway, I love I love the the sidewalk preachers because to me, that's the feeling. You know, it's because the thing about these preachers, they look sinful, they they do not like to look like somebody that you would want your your sister hanging out with. 

And they smell drunk, and yet they're the ones called and they're screaming. And that's that's the glory. Wow. I want that kind of glory. 

00:12:53 Joe Kendrick 

I think only in the South I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, but that is quintessentially Southern right there. The, the court square preacher. 

00:13:03 Ketch Secor 

Yeah, yeah, he might as well be Elvis. I mean, he's he's got the moves. He shakes it. And he and he looks like he's not going to like Rodney says. Ain't living long like that. 

[“One Drop” by Old Crow Medicine Show, from Jubilee, excerpt]

Wrapping up their latest album Jubilee, that is a bit of Old Crow Medicine Show with Mavis Staples guesting on “One Drop” here on Southern Songs and Stories. It is almost a gospel song, I would say. 

One of the unique aspects of our time with Ketch Secor was my fellow interviewer, Will Prim. I cannot say enough good things about Will and everyone at WNCW truly enjoyed having him intern there. When we went to Charlotte to interview Ketch, it was towards the end of his internship; towards the beginning we had hopped over to Shelby NC for my interview with Larry & Joe, which immediately precedes this episode, where Will contributed notes and questions. This time, he got to jump right in and ask Ketch some questions himself, including this one: 

00:13:17 Will Prim 

I was. I was curious what your thoughts are because I remember listening back to past interviews and interviewed with WNCW a couple of years ago. You talked about the idea of kind of a New South for this. You know, pairing the ideas of social consciousness and kind of molding that into progressiveness. And I'm curious what your thoughts are on that a couple of years later and what do you think that? The South. The South looks moving into that idea of a New South or what? What your thoughts are on that issue nowadays? 

00:13:49 Ketch Secor 

Well, thanks for asking that thoughtful question. I I suspect when we talked about this last, it was probably somewhere, you know after the George Floyd riots and you know before the next presidential line. 

Mine and the and and the feeling of one of racial inequity continues, of course, because, you know, here we are down South and it's America and and yet I've I'm more optimistic than ever that, you know I've seen like I wrote a I wrote an op-ed piece one time. 

A couple of years ago about seeing the the rebel flag come down in South Carolina, and it's called the Big Red FU. I like seeing it. I like bearing witness to it, and I thought it was important to write about it because. 

Because the change that I see happening with my children and their and their generation exemplifies a kind of absolution to, I think the crimes of what it has meant. You know, the the criminal element of American his. Which I don't think is going to be the that's a wayward path, and I don't think that's how things are going to be in the future. But having been there, you know, I I didn't get to dip my feet and into the waters there when Doctor King gave his powerful message in Washington in 1963. They didn't get to hear the, you know, the voice of Sister Rosetta Tharpe. That that so Harkins to a better time. But I did get to see them lower that flag and it came down real slow and it had a guard all around it. That was mostly African American men in uniform. And I watched them take down the Confederate flag and it it felt like. Man, things are moving. 

00:15:48 Joe Kendrick 

Ketch, last time I talked to you, you were. Somewhat recently fascinated with music from Equatorial Africa and Texas border music, and I wonder if there are any new rabbit holes or what your new musical discoveries have been. 

00:16:04 Ketch Secor 

Wow, we I needed this call a couple of years ago. I when you guys must have reached out to me and we had this interview, I really needed to talk. Cause now this in reflection like I went through a divorce and I was really, really unhappy and music was just saving my asss all. Time. 

So here and you guys asked these past couple of questions, I can I can see we must have hit right after the pandemic or right before it or something. Yeah. I am always in a discovery of music right now. I think my my biggest discovery is is. Is understanding Molly Tuttle and her and her music and her style and writing these songs that have been, you know, we wrote her last album together and there's some of the best songs that I ever wrote. So I'm really in a kind of a songwriting creation type of space right now and largely with her in collaboration. 

You know, I think she's probably the best musician I've ever heard in my life. You know, just, like, kind of like. Like Dwight Gooden, you know, just like an incredibly good pitcher, a very, very thoughtful mind of for the game and calculating. 

So we've been writing a bunch of great songs and I'm sure you can hear them on WNCW y'all could do a whole day of those songs and ask me about them, because everything that we've written together and the things we're writing now for her, for, for subsequent music, for her really is some of the best stuff I've ever been involved. 

00:17:50 Will Prim 

What? What does that songwriting process look like? 

00:17:54 Ketch Secor 

It's just like any old collaboration, songwriting, you know, I I think of the metaphor with songcraft is the way that cats copulate. 

You know, it's really uncomfortable and I don't think anybody likes it, and they screamy it's. It's no fun. I hate writing songs. Writing songs is painful, arduous. I don't like nothing about it. I don't look forward to it. It's a pain in the ***. But then you get through that feeling and you're like. Oh my God, this is great. So you just keep on doing it, but there's there's nothing I. Like to do. But I've been doing it a long. Time. 

And it was difficult back then, and sometimes it you get a flow to it and it's like, oh, maybe you'll get an easy one one out every couple 100, but. Mostly. You know, it's just so painstaking when you think about how we are all editors. Everybody here is is editing their lives as they go by and a lot of that are, are ruminations about what you did wrong today. Oh, man, I really should have exed out that part where I was disgruntled. 

To a stranger on the street or the way that I treated that person at the grocery store, I really wish I or like or I didn't stand up for myself when I encountered that bully on the playground. Or, you know, much more, you know, smaller vanities of just the ebbs and flows of our lives. We're constantly editing out the things that we know could could result in the great improvements of our work and that work being our lives so. 

Think about how uncomfortable it is when you make mistakes and you're like, I gotta do that better next time. I mean, that's what that's what the the distillation of that is, is music writing. So it's, you know, it's a little bit therapy, it's a little bit you know, how would I do it with my best self. 

Every song is supposed to be your best self version of it, you know, with three choruses, 3 verses, and a chorus I. Mean. 

00:20:05 Joe Kendrick 

But what would have become of Ketch Secor if you hadn't have taken up the mantle of writing songs? I mean, where would have that, have landed you? 

00:20:12 Ketch Secor 

probably that sidewalk preacher bit, you know, just step right up on that milk. Great testify. Make me enough money to get me a pint. Do it all over again. The nice thing about being a busker is that. 

You know what, I don't really play a lot of the songs that I write when I, I mean, and I don't play on the street corner much anymore, but. Me and Molly, we busted in Key West one time a couple of years ago and we had a day off and we were busking. It was great. And nobody knew that we were famous in some light or whatever. Nobody knew that they could have paid, you know, a lot more than the dollar to see our show. 

So they just walked by, you know, buskers. You. You just think they're, like, one step up from groveling. You know, it's a begging routine. But the thing about when you bust, I don't really find that the songs that I play as a busker or anything. 

They're just quick little vignettes. You know, you just hit them hard, you don't even have to say real words. And I make up a lot of songs on the spot. 

You know, people want to hear songs about how the how the weather is right now as they're walking by you. Listen them, sirens blare and everybody's going that way. Look at. What are they looking at? You know you can just sort of get after them, get under their skin. There goes a guy with a really weird hat on. Look at that. Girl, she's you know. That's how you get a tip. 

00:21:36 Joe Kendrick 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is great. Ketch Secor on WNCW Old Crow medicine show. So good to catch up with you again. What did we leave out? What do you what else do you might want to add?? 

00:21:48 Ketch Secor 

Well, this is the 25th anniversary of Old Crow and and we're just really. Honored to have had this this long go round. And we only could do it because people cared enough to come out and see us and to, you know, crank up our music and their cars and and trucks and play our songs around the campfire the way they have done, especially in Western North Carolina, of all places. 

So we just really appreciate our western North Carolinian audience and the folks that sometimes get a bootleg single signal out of Newport, TN and county. I know you all listen, too!

And especially all the rednecks who listen and don't want their buds to know about it. But they love the bluegrass so. Music brings us together, you know, and and in times of division like these, we have to find commonality. It's our duty and and me and Earl Scruggs might not have voted for the same guy. But that guy's a saint! And if you can see a saint embodied across the aisle, that's all you got to do. 

I'm opening up for Hank Junior tonight. Right. You know, I mean, no, ain't no one's gonna call Hank Junior. A St. whatever side you're on. But I I, me and Hank, we're going to make music together and entertain this crowd together. And we're not. We don't think the same thing about this or that at all. And yet we're in this together. And if you can get to that point in your life. In your community. Well, that's gonna. I'm not I. Don't look to DC to fix this. 

Yet you know I I'm a look to spindale NC. What do you got? I looked at Cal County, Tennessee. You know, let's get some skin in the game, talk to our neighbors. Let's, let's be close with one another. 

So I I don't know, it's been a, it's been a challenging time and a lot of room for to, for, to be bummed out about this stuff. But I, I just got to keep going head on. I play the fiddle for a living, you know, and I and it draws people together. If you're a pied piper, you might as well lead them to someplace better than this. 

00:24:08 Joe Kendrick 

Thank you, Ketch. Great to talk. 

00:24:09 Ketch Secor 

To you. All right, y'all. Thanks. 

[Southern Songs and Stories outro theme]

Okay, so there’s our time with Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show from summer 2024. Don’t go away because we jump back in time to 2019 in a moment to revisit our podcast on Old Crow Medicine Show’s “Wagon Wheel”.

Thank you so much for sharing your time with us, and we hope you can help us again by spreading awareness of what we are doing. It is as easy as telling a friend and following this podcast on your platform of choice, both of which are quick, easy and free! From there it takes just a moment to give us a top rating, and where it is an option, a review! It makes a great difference because the more top reviews and ratings we get, the more visible we become to everyone on those platforms, which means that more people just like you connect with artists like Old Crow Medicine Show. 

This series is a part of the lineup of both public radio WNCW and Osiris Media, with all of the Osiris shows available at osirispod.com

You can also hear new episodes on Bluegrass Planet Radio at bluegrassplanetradio.com

Thanks to Will Prim for being a part of this episode. Thanks also to Jaclyn Anthony for producing the radio adaptations of this series on public radio WNCW, where we worked with Joshua Meng who wrote and performed our theme songs.  I am your host and producer Joe Kendrick, and this is Southern Songs and Stories: the music of the South and the artists who make it. 

Wagon Wheel: Anatomy Of A Hit

published April, 2019

Do you love a good song? Man, I love a good song. From all over the spectrum, from Big Star’s “Thirteen” to Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island” to Neutral Milk Hotel’s “Holland, 1945”, there are songs that I will go back to time and again. I love even the songs that I only enjoy for a while before burning out on them. They’re part of the soundtrack, too! You know, Soundgarden is no longer a band I’ll play on the car stereo on road trips now, but that takes nothing away from how enjoyable it was to blast Louder Than Love in my Fiero back in 1990. And all along the scale, I like to keep listening to these songs, whether they be great, good or sometimes even just okay. Or at least I like to think I will still play them even when I’m only going to just remember that they existed, kind of like I remember 1990 me existed. There’s still a relationship there, even if the only interaction it gets is the occasional Christmas card. But the song we are talking about in this episode of Southern Songs and Stories is one that is almost impossible to have a Christmas card relationship with. It is a song that is in many ways, larger than the band that made it. Over nearly two decades since it was first put on record, it has become practically inescapable. You would have almost literally had to live under a rock to miss this tune, and there is also almost zero chance that you do not have an opinion of it. This song has had such a long run, and has had such success in its original version, even more so in one of its covers, that your opinion of it likely has changed over that span of time. Your relationship with it may well have gone from falling in love to honeymoon to separation and divorce. For a lot of people, it went pretty much just like that.

Welcome to Southern Songs and Stories, and this is our episode on the song “Wagon Wheel”. 

[Osiris bumper]

On the Osiris podcast network, there is a ton going on. We recently partnered with JamBase and also welcomed Amar Sastry of amarguitar.com to the network. Amar produces the Anatomy Of A Jam video series, where he breaks down guitar jams into detail, with everything you need to know to play those jams, and he will develop more music-related video projects on Osiris in the near future too. His weekly video series The Drop is one you can check out on the Osiris YouTube channel right now. The JamBase Podcast is brand new on Osiris, and it brings you news and insights from the jam scene and beyond and features interviews with musicians and other industry professionals through behind-the-scenes segments such as Tour Stories, Quit My Day Job, The Art Of The Setlist and many more. All of these are great reasons to check out what’s going on at Osiris Media. 

[Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup “Rock Me Mama” excerpt]

Time to begin at the beginning. That’s Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup with a bit of his 1944 recording “Rock Me Mama”, which gets our “Wagon Wheel” journey rolling. Bob Dylan credited Crudup for the phrase “Rock me mama” in the first version of “Wagon Wheel”, which was never released but was an outtake from his soundtrack to the film Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid in 1973. Fun fact: this was the record which gave us Dylan’s last number one hit, “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”. Dylan sang just the chorus of “Wagon Wheel”, and that made its way into a bootleg, which future Old Crow Medicine Show member Critter Fuqua picked up on a family trip to London. His homesick schoolmate and future bandmate Ketch Secor started working on fleshing it out at school in New Hampshire, and it was in the Old Crow Medicine Show setlist from day one when they got started back in 1998. 

Beginning with Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup may not be the real beginning of this song, though, since he likely drew from this Big Bill Broonzy song “Rockin’ Chair Blues”, released in 1940.

[Big Bill Broonzy “Rockin’ Chair Blues” excerpt]

[Lil’ Son Jackson “Rockin’ And Rollin’” excerpt]

Flash forward another decade and we get to Lil’ Son Jackson’s “Rockin’ And Rollin’”, with the phrase "Roll me, baby, like you roll a wagon wheel". It is unknown to me whether this has a direct connection to “Wagon Wheel” or if it is coincidental, but there are more songs that we can connect here, like the 1939 Curtis Jones song "Roll Me Mama" that includes the lines "Now roll me over, just like I'm a wagon wheel". Very likely, wagon wheels metaphors and similes were just one of the many tools in any given songwriter’s toolbox, and like practically every song everywhere, this song was born out of the same shared consciousness and heritage that artists mine for musical gems all the time. 

[Old Crow Medicine Show “Wagon Wheel” excerpt - chorus]

Songs tell tales, they can capture myths, but how often does the song itself resemble a fairy tale? If there was a yellow brick road for songs, then “Wagon Wheel” walked all the way down. We already have larger than life characters like Big Bill Broonzy and Bob Dylan on screen, and that’s just the beginning of the movie. We are already not in Kansas anymore, or in the case of Old Crow Medicine show, we’re not in Boone NC anymore. That’s where Old Crow got an early, really big break, catching the ear of Doc Watson while busking in town. The band would busk practically anywhere, and this was foundational to their sound and their success. Several years before they self-released their first EP, in 1998, they were touring Canada, busking at farmers markets and any place that people would gather to hear them. Melissa Block interviewed Ketch Secor in 2006 on NPR’s All Things Considered, just after Old Crow Medicine Show released their second album Big Iron World, and in their conversation about that trip north of the border, Ketch explained that when busking, you have to be better than the billboards. You have to be better than where people want to go. You have to create an instant draw so that people will stop and listen. Then, it’s like a glue that rolls out into the street, and everyone’s trapped.

[The World Cafe live excerpt - 15:49 OCMS plays “Wagon Wheel” and the crowd lights up. Performed at the Theater of the Living Arts in Philadelphia in 2006]

Dave Brewer interview

9:40 Can you break down the elements of the song? How did it become ubiquitous? The lyrics, and you already mentioned that the song structure is easy to play.

I don’t know if there is any particular element. Not with a gun to my head could I write the words to Wagon Wheel, but it has lots of memorable lines. It’s not exactly a story song. It has elements of that but it’s not wholly dependent on that. I don’t know how Dylan factors in. I think it’s a co-write? My rough understanding is that it was a half finished song. 

Like a sketch, yeah.

11:42 it doesn’t have a bridge. I like having a bridge. It makes it all the more memorable. If you can do the chorus and do the versus, you know, you’re home.

Discerning between songs, which are good and which are great. What is the intangible factor contained within the Wagon Wheel formula? I do not know.  13:00

That was Dave Brewer talking to me in his home in Boone, NC, following a bit of Old Crow Medicine Show’s 2006 performance of “Wagon Wheel” at the Theater of the Living Arts in Philadelphia. Dave is a member of many bands, and often plays drums in shows with Tellico, who we profiled here on Southern Songs and Stories in 2018. Most of his direct experience with “Wagon Wheel” was with his band Possum Jenkins, who got started around the same time that Old Crow Medicine Show released their first album, in 2004. Dave got to witness the song’s progress from day one, and it soon became a crowd favorite at Possum Jenkins shows, such a favorite that it started to overshadow a lot of the band’s own material. In time, they played “Wagon Wheel” only begrudgingly, and eventually, they refused to play it at all. They were certainly not alone. Here’s Jerry McNeely:

Jerry McNeely interview

When I was in the band Velvet Truckstop, we played in a little dive bar in Folly Beach, it was across from the Holly Day Inn, called the Rock N Roll Roadhouse. It had a little knee wall and on the back were instructions, “You will start performing promptly at 10PM or you will not be paid. No “Wagon Wheel”, no “Freebird”, or you will not be paid”

Signs like that are still posted in bars and music venues all over the country, with variations like “___ days since the last “Wagon Wheel”.There was once even a website version: stopplayingwagonwheel.com/. The band’s old hometown of Asheville NC once proposed that buskers be banned from playing it. When I talked about making this episode on Twitter, I got some strong responses, like, “I hate it. So much. I just absolutely hate it”. There was some “Wagon Wheel” love, to be sure, but you get my point. This is a third rail kind of a song for a lot of people. 

[Van Morrison “Brown Eyed Girl” excerpt]

You know that song. Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl”. If you are like me, you don’t want to hear that song anymore. “Wagon Wheel” has achieved “Brown Eyed Girl” level exposure, and detractors are everywhere now. But how do you get to this point? 

Garret Woodward interview

15:42 At then end of the day, it’s a great song. But it has reverberated to the point that it is deafening to those who once loved it. Compares it to many songs from classic rock radio driving songs into the ground. Aerosmith, Ozzy, AC/DC. But then it gets to the point where we tune out after it gets played to annoyance. To 16:42 No fault to the artists! They created a beautiful song. We tune out. Possibly walk around the corner to listen to something new.

17:20 comparison of how Wagon Wheel could have been a similar song if it had been released in 1984 rather than 2004. To 17:30

Dave Brewer interview

There was a point where the backlash happened. What about for you?

5:40 not sure if there was one discernable moment; it was a kind of groundswell. The song is everywhere you go. “This song is following me!” And that’s a drag. Like cake at every meal. Eventually you refuse the cake. That level of overexposure, I’m done with it. I can’t hear it again. After working in a bar and hearing songs played ad nauseum, I at times try to take a deep breath and hear what the person who loves it hears. Wagon Wheel is going to be a revelation to some people going forward, and they’re going to love it. 

Reed Foehl interview

It is a great song but it is almost like novelty, like “American Pie” is now. I think it has been covered way too much, but the original OCMS version is great. 

You have to have a great song to get to the point where it’s overplayed.

Yeah! That’s the way it goes!”

Zac Altheimer interview

2:23 I’m guessing it’s pretty polarizing around here

A lot of people from around here experienced Wagon Wheel differently than other millions who got it later.

If you had some kind of heat map for the song, then western NC is the epicenter. To 3:28

I didn’t get sick of the song like other people got sick of it

4:00 I understand that. I think it’s a great song. You knew that immediately. I’m a big fan of melody and obviously that song has it. It felt like, coming from OCMS, a band doing well, that it would resonate. Subject matter, name checking places on the map is helpful. This is a great song, not necessarily my bag. Never sung it at karaoke. It’s now a whole other thing. Like “Don’t Stop Believing”.  To 5:10

That’s Zac Altheimer, music industry professional, specializing in marketing for bands and festivals, following singer songwriters Reed Foehl and Dave Brewer, and Garret Woodward, arts & entertainment editor at Smoky Mtn News, also music editor for Smoky Mtn Living, and contributing writer for Rolling Stone. 

So, it’s almost a spectator sport to compare “Wagon Wheel” to songs like “Freebird” now. But it’s way more than just any platinum seller which begat an even bigger platinum seller. We explore some songs that had more in common with “Wagon Wheel” than its sales figures coming up on Southern Songs and Stories 

[“Wagon Wheel” instrumental bed bridging to David Childers bit - into and out of?]

[David Childers testimonial/pitch]

Very, very few songs have the lifespan of a “Wagon Wheel”. Do you know of any songs that lasted for the better part of a decade before being covered not once, but twice by other artists who propelled their versions to an even wider audience? It’s one of the most grassroots hits of the millenium, really. Whereas a song like Ellie Goulding's "Lights" came to a boil through its long simmer on YouTube after it was first recorded and released in 2010, “Wagon Wheel” was on more of a live music burner for years, being played by not only Old Crow but also by who knows how many other bands, and being sung by even more people at karaoke, and it stayed at a kind of low boil before the Darius Rucker version took it to an even larger audience. Goulding didn’t have a hit with “Lights” at first, but in a couple years, the view counts kept climbing, and helped put the song into the charts, finally peaking at No. 2 in 2012. 

It is fairly common that an original song is picked up by a bigger artist and covered with more success than its original, but it is unique that “Wagon Wheel” had a great deal of success for such a long time leading up to the Nathan Carter and Darius Rucker covers. 

[Darius Rucker “Wagon Wheel” excerpt]

Garret Woodward interview

2:34 Trying to think of songs analogous to Wagon Wheel and it’s really hard. I can’t find anything even close. There have been covers that were bigger than their originals, and some slow burn hits, but it’s not really either. It seems akin to “Gentle On My Mind” in that it has been covered so successfully multiple times. What do you think?

3:50 that song has so many reasons it is a hot button topic. The reason a lot of people, especially musicians, get annoyed by it is that a lot of people who don’t know anything about this kind of music like it. Kind of like how people who don’t read books like Catcher In The Rye.

Zac Altheimer interview

Thinking about the phenomenon of a song that has these two iterations, both immensely popular. Darius Rucker covered it and sold several million copies. An Irish musician had a great hit with it too. This is a really odd occurrence. Almost but nothing really like a song like “Tainted Love” 

10:20 For Rucker ( or his handlers) to pick up on it was a no brainer. When we first heard it in ‘04, we knew it was special. What’s interesting is that the mainstream Nashville country has songs written by committee, or people not artists. That’s a whole other business. Songs get shopped around, and most songs haven’t seen the light of day like this song had. This song was hugely integral into OCMS success, certainly around here, but also nationally. It’s interesting that it has these two lives. (continues to ‘it’s obvious the song would do well in Rucker’s hands’) To 11:59

[“Wagon Wheel” intro from Delfest 2018]

This is a bit of “Wagon Wheel” by Old Crow Medicine Show, from their performance at DelFest in 2018, following conversations with Zac Altheimer and Garret Woodward. I went to archive.org to find that audio, posted by Jamie Burks. Old Crow seems to have a pretty healthy relationship with the song, keeping it in their setlists for all these years later, and switching up instrumentation and tempo with this example. 

“Wagon Wheel”, unlike some songs that are massive hits at the beginning of an artists’ career, does not fall into the albatross category for Old Crow Medicine Show. I’m not entirely sure about what relationship Nathan Carter or Darius Rucker have with it now, but my bet is that they still embrace it, too. Sometimes though, a young artist or band has a big hit with a song that does not jive with them in some way later on, like it does not sound like what they want to play for the rest of their careers, or it may steal all the attention away from their more current songs, and so on. And while that’s not the case with “Wagon Wheel” and Old Crow, the relationship that all the bands who covered the song has with it is not always so healthy. Here’s Garret Woodward, followed by Dave Brewer:

Garret Woodward:

 I’m sure OCMS was originally bowled over by its success. But now the song is looked at as almost taboo, like a teeny bopper thing. These hard scrabble musicians who scrounge every dollar and then go play in a bar, and to have someone yell out Wagon Wheel is almost nails on a chalkboard. They look at it as lessening their art. To 8:12

Despite being from Boone where Old Crow was discovered, we had no tangible connection to them. Fairly quickly though, the reaction to it became hard to ignore. I thought, ‘Well, people like it. That’s good. Next!’. But it became a passionate reaction and we had to play it for a while.

3:15 It was too big for your own good? Yes, it was receiving as much or more attention than songs we wrote. You don’t want to get painted into a corner in terms of what you have to play. It wouldn’t be abnormal to rotate songs in and out of the set list. Some people wanted to hear it bad. We stopped playing it eventually.

When you think about it, the song “Wagon Wheel” has done something that very few other songs in history have done: it has reached millions and millions of people over its history of two decades, it’s impossible to forget, and it’s also impossible not to have an opinion on it, at least not once you have heard it twenty or thirty times. It polarizes people, but it also unites them in a common experience. If there’s ever a lull in the conversation you’re having, you could always say something about “Wagon Wheel” and people would have an opinion on it. And also, along its long journey, it continues to introduce people to acoustic, roots music. Along with the O Brother Where Art Thou? Soundtrack, “Wagon Wheel” has probably sold more banjos and fiddles than anything since Flatt & Scruggs went to number one on the charts with “The Ballad Of Jed Clampett”. 

[OCMS “Wagon Wheel” from 2005 Haybale session] 

Another live version of “Wagon Wheel” to close out our show. That’s Old Crow Medicine Show playing it live at Bonnaroo in 2005, but not from their stage performance. Thanks to Zac Altheimer for that audio, which was from Bonnaroo’s Haybale Sessions. The Haybale Sessions were in these studio trailers which were surrounded by hay bales as soundproofing, and some of the artists would play sets and give interviews to Bonnaroo’s media partners. I got to see Old Crow do this in 2007, but they didn’t play “Wagon Wheel” that time. 

I’m Joe Kendrick, this is Southern Songs and Stories: the music of the South and the artists who make it. 

Epilogue:

During Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, Tim Kaine was at an event with Nikki Talley playing downtown AVL. Guess what song they played?

Garret Woodward

15:37 ha ha...that’s just not reading the room well!