OLD CROW MEDICINE SHOW INTERVIEW

STRINGS 'N THINGS

Old Crow Medicine Show bring their old-time stylings back to Virginia

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: August 15, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/music/

UNPLUGGED IN: Old Crow  keep the energy high acoustically.

From the foot-stomping fiddling of the raucous "Carry Me Back to Virginia," to the folksy acoustic guitar strums of the Dylanesque "Ain't It Enough," to the bittersweet harmonies of the ruminative "Ways of Man," Old Crow Medicine Show's new Carry Me Back (ATO) delivers twelve tunes that, as the title hints, carry the band way, way back through decades and decades of American popular song. Indeed, if it weren't for the crisp production, one could easily mistake just about any of the tracks here for a long-lost field recording of an Appalachian string-band hootenanny, replete with dueling banjos and thumping upright bass, as well as plenty of fleet-fingered clawhammer picking and a touch of sonorous accordion flexing. Just strings and things that you don't gotta plug in. 

The Old Crow boys – multi-instrumentalists Critter Fuqua, Ketch Secor, Chance McCoy, and Gill Landry, along with bassist Morgan Jahnig and "guitjo" player Kevin Hayes – have been putting their own often revved-up spin on folk genres that pre-date the electrified dawn of rock and roll for nearly 15 years. But the band's real roots go back further, to the early days of the alt-rock ’90s, when Fuqua and Secor, two of the last remaining members of the original line-up of a band that's seen a number of players come and go, began their musical partnership. They were both junior high schoolers in Harrisonburg, VA, and, as Fuqua recalls from a tour stop in Vermont, old-time string-band music wasn't on their radar just yet.

“I grew up with the same kind of stuff in my household that most kids my age did," he says. "And I really wasn't that different from most of my classmates. My parents listened to Neil Diamond, the Beatles, the Kingston Trio, and NPR. I was into Nirvana, Guns N’ Roses, and skateboarding. And Nirvana was really the biggest influence Ketch and I shared when we were 13 or 14. But then we started listening to Bob Dylan and I think that made us want to dig back further into the music that influenced him."

While there are echoes of early Dylan in the Old Crow repertoire, the only real vestige of Nirvana rests in the energy and attitude the band bring to the table, particularly when they're playing live, which they'll do Friday in Salem and Sunday in Charlottesville. "We may not sound like Nirvana," Fuqua readily admits, "but the drive is in there."

Fuqua and Secor's formal introduction to the musical styles they'd go on to pursue with Old Crow came by way of West Virginia's Augusta Heritage Music Center. "He went for old time banjo and I went for blues guitar," Fuqua recounts. "And we both just caught the bug."

Back in Harrisonburg, the duo hooked up with Robert St. Ours, a fellow Virginian who'd go on to start the like-minded Charlottesville string band, the Hackensaw Boys. And, happily, they found themselves in the midst of a growing scene of musicians who'd unplugged and found inspiration in old American folk idioms. "When the band we had with Robert broke up, we started the Crow and he went on to the Hackensaw Boys. . . There was just a real resurgence of that kind of music in Virginia for young people at the time."

Beyond Virginia's borders, there were broader signs of a renewed interest in old-time music, spurred on by the release of Dylan's "Bootleg Series" recordings, which began with the first three volumes in 1991, and The Anthology of American Folk Music, a six-CD collection of folk music originally released by Harry Smith between 1927 and 1932, compiled on vinyl by Smithsonian Folkways in 1952, and then reissued in 1997 to much acclaim. But the real tipping point came in 2000, with the arrival of the soundtrack to the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a compilation of trad country, gospel, and bluegrass that topped the charts with multi-platinum sales, and went on to win several Grammys, including album of the year.

"We were playing that kind of music before O Brother came out, but that was when the industry finally started to notice that there was a big audience for it," Fuqua says. "I don't think it was ever a conscious decision for us to stop listening to rock and roll and play old-time music. And, for me, it really wasn't that big of a jump. I look at us as a link in a chain. You've got the old time fiddlers and the English and Irish ballads, and then the progression to bluegrass and Ralph Stanley and Earl Scruggs, all the way on up to the Grateful Dead and Dylan. It's a progression of artists who keep going back to the sources and making it new in some way, and then newer artists start there and reach back to the some of the same sources to make it new again. We took Nirvana and the other music we grew up with, and reached back to all this great old-time fiddle and folk music, and whatever else we could find, and tried to make it our own. We just played what we loved to play and, in an organic way, it turned into what we do now."

        Just don't ask Fuqua to put any labels on what it is that Old Crow do. "I don't know," he laughs. "My job is to play. I think you have to realize that this stuff was just music back in the day. There was no label for it, especially for the artists. So I don't worry about labels too much. And I really don't know what you'd call Old Crow.” 

        (Old Crow Medicine Show and the Lumineers perform this Friday, August 17, at 8 p.m. at the Salem Civic Center, 1001 Roanoke Blvd., Salem, VA; tickets $35.)

        (Old Crow Medicine Show, the Lumineers, and Pokey LaFarge and the South City Three perform this Sunday, August 19, at 7 p.m. at nTelos Wireless Pavilion, 700 East Main Street, Charlottesville, VA; tickets $38.)