OLD CROW MEDICINE SHOW
Today, with a wider musical range than their Appalachian string band origins, O.C.M.S. play more concert halls, festival stages and rock venues than street corners, but a sense of surprise is still very much in play. Old Crow is not the only band playing pre-World War II blues, fiddle tunes, rags, hollers, hokum and jug band music, but they do so with a brazenness born of growing up around AC/DC, Nirvana and Public Enemy. The fiery result equally impresses fussy old-time music scholars; fellow modern day roots musicians and fans that forage on the frontiers of hip.
These five young men from four different states joined forces in New York and lit out gypsy style while still learning their instruments and repertoire. They rambled town-to-town across Canada in a van, playing for food and shelter. They settled for a year in the mountains of North Carolina , where their knowledge of old-time string band music blossomed and their loyalty to one another deepened.
There as well, they enjoyed their most storied lightning strike of good fortune. While playing in front of a pharmacy in Boone, a woman approached them and asked if they’d be there a while; she wanted to fetch her father to hear them. Dad turned out to be folk icon and flatpicking pioneer Doc Watson, who expressed his delight by inviting the band to play MerleFest, his four day-congress of acoustic and roots music.
MerleFest led to an invitation to play street-style in the plaza in front of the Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville and eventually the Opry stage itself, where the band earned a rare debut standing ovation. By this time Old Crow had moved to Music City in their battleship Cadillac and moved into a rented house between two highways, where they studied ever-widening circles of early American music and wrote their own new American music. As O.C.M.S. evolved toward a more urban, rollicking jug band sound, more high-profile gigs followed, including opening slots for Dolly Parton and the Del McCoury Band, an invitation to join Marty Stuart and Merle Haggard on a U.S. tour, massive jam fest Bonnaroo and public radio’s A Prairie Home Companion.
Once they’d attracted the interest of Nettwerk America , the label that launched the career of Coldplay and is home to Neil Finn and The Be Good Tanyas, O.C.M.S. was more than ready to go; for a year they had been working in the studio with a producer similarly energized by the arcane but vital influences of pre-War music. David Rawlings, duet partner of New Folk standard-bearer Gillian Welch, led the quintet into two of Nashville ’s most stories studios
