Old Crow frontman talks 'Wagon Wheel' origins and opening for Hank Jr.

BURGETTSTOWN – Summer concert season has arrived, and we all know what that means.

"It's starting to get hot again, and T-shirts turn to tank tops, tank tops turn to bikinis..." Ketch Secor, the fun-as-they-come frontman for Old Crow Medicine Show, said. "There's just a feeling, and it's a good one, man. The party is on when you're playing outdoors."

Old Crow Medicine Show launches a sure-to-be lively outdoor party June 10, opening for Hank Williams Jr. at the Pavilion at Star Lake's first weekend concert of 2023. Hank Jr. fans love to hoot and holler; just as Old Crow's faithful have done whenever the Grammy-winning string band has headlined Stage AE.

"We just love the Hank Williams family legacy," Secor said. "We love it because we're big fans of Hank Sr's music. We think he's probably the greatest country music songwriter of all time. We've gotten to know Hank Jr.'s daughter, Holly, really well, especially through the Ken Burns project (PBS' "Country Music"), and we got to sing with her out on the road with her dad last week. It's a family affair. You know, the Williams' call it 'A Family Tradition."

Indeed, and when Williams sings his hit "Family Tradition," crowds go wild.

Ditto when Old Crow Medicine Show revs up its "Alabama High-Test," a song about an intoxicated drug dealer hoping to outrun the law. There's often a point in that song where Secor, on fiddle, springs to the front of the stage and starts jamming along with Morgan Jahnig (upright bass), Cory Younts (mandolin, keyboards, drums), Dante Pope (drums, mandolin) Mike Harris (slide guitar, guitar, mandolin, banjo, dobro), PJ George (banjo/accordion) and Mason Via (guitar, gitjo.)

The song's cinematic lyrics like "65 southbound/Cruising with a half pound/Blue lights spinning round/Better put the hammer down" make "Alabama High-Test" a crowd favorite. Secor explains the song's origins:

"I've been writing about run-ins with the law ever since I first started running from them," Secor said. "That first happened when I was probably 7 or 8, when I first played Ding Dong Ditch. I was the kind of person who would steal out of old ladies' gardens and shoot bottle rockets at cars. I did stuff I would hope my children would never, ever do. I started smoking and chewing tobacco when I was not even a teenager. I remember when I was 14 smoking weed for the first time thinking 'well, I'm a little late to the party.' Most of my friends were doing it when they were younger than me. I don't know if middle-class white kids like me still have the same behavior.

"It's been 30 years since I started walking down the wrong side of the tracks and maybe nowadays kids are a little more obedient. Maybe it was the '80s, but we just always wanted to get in trouble. The trouble was more fun than not, and getting close to the edge was kind of the ultimate feeling," he said. "I look back at times as a parent and think, 'Shoot, I hope my kids don't duplicate this.' How many times do you put your hand on an electric fence before you're like, 'Alright, enough of that'? I kind of never learned, and I like to write songs about that feeling that capture the rebelliousness. I've always liked rebel songs. Must be the Irish in me."

Secor's Southern-tinged songs often delve into the open road and small-town joys. It's a matter of writing about what he knows best.

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"Having spent most of my childhood rambling around the South," Secor said. "And I think the biggest contributor to any maker of music is what they've seen and heard. So, my eyes and ears are my biggest motivator as a songwriter and for me what that equates to is writing about things I know, I'd have a hard time singing about the birds that sing in Zanzibar, but I know all about how they sing in the Shenandoah."

Though his most famous songwriting contribution ― one of this century's most covered country songs ― is "Wagon Wheel," spawned by a 36-second unfinished song clip Secor discovered as a teenager on a Bob Dylan bootleg.

"By 1994, when I was still a teen, I'd basically done the deep dive on Bob and learned as much of his music as I could," Secor said. "By '94, Bob had about 40 albums out, and I could sing them all, back to front, front to back. By the time I was 16 or 17, I could sing you 100 Bob Dylan songs, and I had already seen him four times in concert. I saw him with the Grateful Dead; I saw with Drivin N Cryin, and watched him on 'MTV Unplugged.' I went to my public library, and I got a copy of 'Don't Look Back.' All this was before the internet, so it's like media just felt truly sacred. You know how those first Egyptologists that would come out with their pith helmets, and they go to Alexandria and they start digging and they've been studying their whole lives to figure out how to read these hieroglyphics and then they start pulling them up and lo and behold, there's King Tut's sarcophagus? I always felt like the pre-internet media felt like that, like if you found it, it might as well have been the Dead Sea Scrolls. So, when I found this scrap of a Bob Dylan song on a bootleg, even though it was on compact disc and it was mass-produced, the fact that it come from a street vendor gave it even more mystique and I just felt like I was sitting on the world's most important unrecorded song.

"I put pen to paper and in about an hour had me a song that stole the best of Bob and put in a whole little autobiographical song and dance. The kind that a teenager might write about wanting to get back down to the sweet, sunny South and kiss the girl and hitchhike and get high and lay down and die free. That line comes from the license plates. Yeah, I didn't have my license yet, but everybody in New Hampshire had those plates that said, 'Live Free or Die,'" he said.

Secor proposed redesigning the Mississippi flag – incorporating elements inspired by Elvis Presley, author Eudora Welty and Black musical trailblazers Robert Johnson and Charley Pride – in Old Crow's 2022 song "New Mississippi Flag."

"I wrote that one because they're putting together a new Mississippi flag. I grew up down South, and because I'm from the '80s and whatnot, I saw a lot of these rebel flags coming down and being replaced by new kind of emblems of the South," Secor said. "Well, what's it going to look like? It was actually my kid asking me what's it going to look like in the new flag. I think that if country music isn't asking questions about the South's brutal path and hopefully more peaceable future then I'm not sure what country music is doing to be a part of the solution."

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On April 27, Old Crow Medicine Show released a powerful protest song, " Louder Than Guns ," in partnership with 97Percent, a bipartisan gun safety organization working to create researched-backed policies supported by both non-gun owners and gun owners. Recorded in the aftermath of the Covenant School shooting in Nashville a few months ago, Secor, a father of two and co-founder of The Episcopal School of Nashville, aligned with country stars like Rodney Crowell, Jason Isbell, Kacey Musgraves, Amy Grant, Sheryl Crow, Kelsea Ballerini, Martina McBride, Emmylou Harris, Maren Morris, Margo Price, Lucinda Williams, Mickey Guyton, the Cadillac Three and Little Big Town's Karen Fairchild in calling on Tennessee legislators to pass "common sense gun safety legislation," according to The Tennessean.

"It's been about seven weeks now since the shooting at Covenant School in Nashville, and that is the demarcation point for a lot of folks in our community; parents and teachers and students who have all come to the conclusion that enough is enough, and we need legislative change to protect our public spaces and sacred spaces," Secor said in a May 18 phone interview. "Protect our children while they're in their classrooms or on the playground, or at the movies, or at the grocery store, or at the water park or at a Pittsburgh Pirates game; anywhere that people congregate, they deserve to feel safe because we're Americans. And the fact that there's laws in the books that make it so easy for folks to run out and buy military-grade weapons that they can pop, pop, pop and take lives at random so quickly. Is a real problem for those of us here in Nashville who have seen it now firsthand and are pretty outraged about it."

"Louder Than Guns" wasn't in the setlist for the band's recent Tampa show laden with tunes like "Humdinger," "Lord Willing and The Creek Don't Rise," "Paint This Town," "8 Dogs 8 Banjos," Jerry Lee Lewis' "Great Balls of Fire," the standard "Orange Blossom Special" and ending with a classic by Hank Jr's daddy.

"Johnny Cash is no longer around, but ol' Hank (Jr.) still is, and so I really enjoy being a part of the spectacle of country music at a big outdoor place, and seeing all the people get together and sing along and have a good time and forget about their worries for an afternoon," Secor said. "I think music unites us. So, you know, we don't think the same things as Hank, and we don't preach the same things as Hank, and yet we're proud to stand up there and be able to look people in the eye and be real and they know that's what we're being. What we're brought together by is harmony, literally. Harmony of instruments and harmony of words and music working together, the way that a lyric and a lead line on a Telecaster guitar or a fiddle makes this kind of beautiful conveyance of an emotion. These kinds of forces are divine ones. It doesn't matter who's in the White House, or who's in the Senate, or who's in the mayor's office, or who's in the dugout. No, what matters is some of our moments of shared humanity. And that's how I reflect on this opportunity to spend the summer with Hank Jr., an opportunity to share music with all kinds of people, all kinds of folks."

Along with all that toe-tapping music, Star Lake spectators will find themselves captivated by Secor's loose and humorous stage banter, delivered in a convincing, testifying tone that Grammy-winning songwriter Dave Rawlings once compared to a carnival barker.

"I think I always had a little bit of the gift to gab as a kid, but I was also kind of a pensive, shy type, so a lot of the things that I wanted to say, I didn't, and I kept him in until I guess I was ready to blurt it all out at once," Secor said.

A turning point came at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh in 1986, when the 7- or 8-year-old Secor attended a Pirates-St. Louis Cardinals game with his grandfather who somehow secured on-field access. To his grandpap's bewilderment, Secor clammed up when introduced to Pirates manager Jim Leyland. But then the lad found himself face-to-face with Cardinals great Ozzie Smith.

"My hero, wow. And I found Ozzie Smith really easy to talk to," Secor said. "Nobody was looking, and it was just me and Ozzie, and I just launched right into it, and I made Ozzie Smith laugh. And that was one of those seminal moments in my childhood when I realized that I had a special gift to be able to talk with people. And then I could do it with courage. I didn't have to flake out on Jim Leyland, but it taught me when the time is right, don't hide it under no bushel."

Scott Tady is entertainment editor at The Times and easy to reach at [email protected].