A Conversation with Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor – HuffPost 9.11.13

Mike Ragogna: You must be in heaven with that Grand Ole Opry celebration in your honor, Ketch.

Ketch Secor: Quite unbelievable, isn’t it?

MR: What is usually the parameter for this? How does a crew like Old Crow Medicine Show end up getting inducted like that?

KS: Well, it’s certainly a rare case. Gosh, I can’t think of a higher achievement for an old time string band than to be made members of the Grand Ole Opry. I guess it happened because we kept slugging it out. The Opry has always been a part of our play list. It’s been on our calendar for fourteen years now, we’ve been playing the Oprey from the parking lot to the portico out front to the lobby and then on up to the stage.

MR: Wow. You mean you’ve been on that stage before, I asked facetiously?

KS: [laughs] Yeah, we have, in many ways. Some of our very earliest gigs were related to the Grand Ole Opry programming, but this is the highest achievement in the land.

MR: And it seems Marty Stuart is going to be on hand, too.

KS: Yes, Marty was there to surprise us with this news in Cleveland, Ohio of all places. We’re all sitting there in the middle of a gig, playing to a good crowd and having a lot of fun and out comes Marty and it’s just like, “Oh, great, Marty’s here!” It wasn’t any real surprise that Marty would just show up, but when they rolled out the WSM microphone and the manner of his speaking turned towards the wistful past, that’s when we knew.

MR: [laughs] That’s very nice. Now please may we speak about the wistful past for a minute?

KS: Yeah, sure. The Opry was founded in 1925, and it was founded with a number of hillbilly bands. The reason this thing happened was a fluke. An old man named Jimmy Thompson stepped up into the National Life & Accident Insurance building with a fiddle under his arm. He was born before the war, so he’s about seventy-five years old. He walks up and George D. Hay–they called the song “Old Judge” later–had him play a couple of tunes and after he was done, he said, “Well, coming up next, we’ve got some great operatic singing, but truly that was a grand old opry.” So it started with a fiddle and as an old time fiddle player, I feel really honored to get a chance to saw a fiddle on the stage of the Opry again with a mind towards all of those great players of eighty years before.

MR: Are there some great players that to this day resonate with you?

KS: One of my favorite performances in the early days of the Grand Ole Opry and a source for a lot of the inspiration that we draw from that era is a singer and bandleader named Uncle Dave Macon. Uncle Dave was a banjo player and song leader. I guess in the folk music sense, you’d call him a songster, because he didn’t play just one style of music. He was an entertainer, so he would play whatever he felt people wanted to hear, and he kept in his bag of tricks quite a canon of songs. So Uncle Dave has been a great influence on us. He played the clawhammer banjo, he did tricks and hoots and hollers. Another great early start of the Opry that has had a profound effect on me is the harmonica player Deford Bailey. Deford was the first black performer on the Opry and the last for about forty years. That speaks a lot to the politics of the Grand Ole Opry, that you’d have a black performer in the beginning and then not again for a very long period of time. But in that heyday of the Grand Ole Opry, the stage was open to a wider format of artistry and that became narrower and narrower. So by including Old Crow here in 2013, they’ve opened up the gates again for old time banjos and fiddles and harmony singing in a way that hasn’t been heard on that stage since the last string band died out in the 1980s, that would have been The Crook Brothers.

MR: What was the trend after The Crook Brothers? Were they more focused on country stars?

KS: Well, we’re talking about a really long period of music history, so there are trends within the trends. When Deford was fired, it was because they were looking for a more modern sound, they said. They said he wouldn’t change, that he wouldn’t adapt to a growing audience that wanted more topical and popular songs of the day. He played his twelve songs, that’s what he did, and that’s all he was going to do. As a solo harmonica player, how adept do you need to be besides knowing your trick? Uncle Dave left the Opry for a long time, but as an old white man, they weren’t going to kick him off.

Then comes a really great, sweeping movement of country music on the Grand Ole Opry when you get into the 1950s with Kitty Wells and the Opry being a place where a lot of women performers can come and have an equal stage, with Sarah Cannon and Minnie Pearl being a real torchbearer for women in country music. That wasn’t going to happen on the stage in lower Broadway or at the big theaters in town, it happened at the Opry because the Opry wanted to try out a woman performer and loved what she brought. That continued with artists like Loretta Lynn singing on the Opry and continues through today though the times have greatly changed. That’s to suggest that eighty years ago, who was the first radio show that featured a black harmonica player who wasn’t in blackface, who didn’t talk Uncle Remus talk, who played sweetly and was included in every broadcast? Thirty years later, when it was hard as a woman to get a job in entertainment if you weren’t a stunning goddess–and Sara Cannon wasn’t. She was a country girl from a place called Grinder’s Switch, but she found a gig.

The Opry’s always had a cutting edge facility for changing ways of artistry. To answer your question, recently, if you look at who’s been inducted to the Grand Ole Opry in the past decade, it tends to be more of the groups like Rascall Flats and the polished sound of hot new country where the fiddle is definitely pushed out to a tertiary role and the aim is sales and there’s a kind of saccharine sweetness to it all. But in the past couple of years, the last three inductees were Dierks Bentley, who is a bit of a maverick in his way, a shaggy-headed Arizona singer who’s done it his own way, then the first black country singer to be inducted in probably forty years, Darius Rucker, and then the Old Crow Medicine Show. So it seems like maybe the Opry is looking to break some new ground again and to welcome in a more diverse cast from the country music family.

MR: Nice. Hey, since we’re talking wistful histories, can you give me Old Crow’s?

KS: Yeah, we bet on some dark horses and they turned out to win the race, again and again from little sandlots to the great big suites to the Triple Crown of the Grand Ole Opry. We met Doc Watson on a street corner and Doc gave us a gift that lasted a decade. It was just one gig, but I guess he just showed us some love at a time when nobody else did, and to get that from Doc is valuable stuff. He didn’t just pass that around. So Doc gave us that big break and we ended up moving to Nashville. I think probably if we hadn’t met Doc, we probably wouldn’t have moved there. It was meeting Doc Watson that lead to us performing at the Merle Watson festival in the year 2000. We met Doc on the fifth of July in 1999. During our Spring performance at MerleFest, we met a woman named Sally Williams, who was a rising star in the Grand Ole Opry family. She’s since become the general manager of the Ryman Auditorium. She was at our surprise announcement in Cleveland, and we’ve become great friends. But she heard us play in 2000 and said, “I’ve got this program I’m starting called the Opry Plaza series,” and she brought us to Nashville. So we’d come down to Nashville on Friday and Saturday and we’d play in front of the Opry and we’d do our busking set, we’d play for tips. Then when the show was over, around ten o’clock, we’d all get into our Cadillac Limousine and drive down to little Broadway and make four or five hundred dollars on the street corner and then we’d all pile into one motel room at the end of the night. Boy, we were living high. We eventually moved to Nashville and have been there for a decade and then some, and the Opry has always been a part of the way we operated. We’ve always had an eye on that prize.

MR: What do you think of the state of folk music these days? What are the highs and lows that are happening right now?

KS: Well I’d say the high was last weekend. [laughs] But man, yes, any day of the week, but it seems like the high was always last weekend. It was on the stage in front of thirty-five thousand people in Simcoe, Ontario, of all places. We were opening up for Mumford and Sons and I saw all of these throngs of people dancing and hollering and shouting joyfully to the music of fiddles and banjos and they were doing it without irony.

MR: Do you feel that bluegrass and more traditional folk music is thriving right now? Are they going through a renaissance?

KS: It seems like we have reached some sort of movement in American music that, down the line, we will look back at this time and say there were these players and some common denominator between all of the bands and the sound that they made. You could call it a revival, but that sort of suggests that it was dead before, when it really wasn’t. It’s been happening all along. I really like to think about what Pete Seeger describes as the link of chain that stretches all the way back to the origins of folk music and each generation forges a new link. Well I think that this is the strongest link that’s been forged in forty years.

MR: What are some of the reasons behind that? Because of the awareness of the genre or the quality of the musicianship, or…?

KS: I think the music has always been succinct, but it’s like the audience has come around. They weren’t there in the 1980s. You look and see what kind of tickets Bill Monroe was selling in 1990, for example. And now you look at what kind of tickets you can sell with a mandolin. We went through a great change when the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?really surprised a lot of people in the power that traditional song had–John Hartford being blasted out of speakers in imported cars; it’s just unfathomable. But it happened, and I think, by the same token, it’s hard to believe that Mumford & Sons could sell six hundred thousand records in a week, but it happened. On a smaller scale, I think that a lot of people were really surprised that Old Crow Medicine Show would be asked to be a part of the Grand Ole Opry. Shouldn’t that have been a big hit maker who’s got a number one song and the big tour that’s coming to a fairground near you somewhere in the heartland? So all of these things are a surprise, but they’re happening and they’re all happening for a reason and I’m really proud and happy an honored to be a part of this event that is country music, folk music, folk rock, Americana, whatever it is. The thing that I think is too bad, I’ll tell you, Mike, is usually these phrases get coined really early on. When Alan Watt said “Rock ‘n’ Roll,” he said that in probably 1957 or something, maybe even earlier. He said it before it became what it is. I don’t think anybody said the words that make up the scene and I don’t think anybody ever will. I think we’ve just got to call it something like “folk revival.”

MR: “Folk revival,” nice. It seems like there’s a jazz revival going on right now, too. Is it possible because of the state of the pop charts and popular music right now where there’s virtually no diversity, it seems that folk, jazz, etc., gives people a breather to go discover or rediscover music they never got a chance to?

KS: Well, then you tell that to the people that love dance music and they think that this is the most vitality in the dance music scene that there ever was. It seems like the genres have become so many and so varied and that there’s a crop of talent in all of the veins of music forging a very strong link in all of those chains. There’s some great talent going on right now that’s on all fronts of the American music scene. To say that the good music is rising up to the top, it’s all a matter of taste. If I were to look at the chart, which I don’t spend a lot of time looking at, or I listened to the radio, which I also don’t spend a lot of time fooling with, then it would tell me something different. But when I look at what my peers are doing, boy, it’s exciting.

MR: Are you listening outside of your genre to anything in particular?

KS: I feel like I haven’t caught up yet. I’m trying to get through the 1970s right now. Give me some time and I’ll get caught up to what I like about 2013. But I’m still listening to Stan Rogers.

MR: [laughs] Do you feel like Garrison Keillor has had a contribution to folk and keeping traditional or folk music popular?

KS: Well, on a personal note Garrison has really helped us in the Old Crow. Just like the Opry, Garrison gave us a radio stage where we could learn and grow, where we could rise to the occasion of a live broadcast which is a tough thing to do. The thing about the other genres is that a lot of them have a lot riding on the technology to make them sound great. When your technology is the flex of your arm and shoulder muscles to drag a horsehair bow across four strings and make somebody jump up in their seats, you’re really dependent on your own energy and spirit which is frankly just s**t you can’t download.

MR: [laughs] So the live element is still alive and kicking?

KS: Yeah, the live element will always be alive and kicking and live radio gives such a great opportunity to test it out. We learned so much from Garrison who really took us under his wing just like the Grand Ole Opry has. We’ve been playing on two long-running radio shows. We’ve been playing on them for a decade and they’ve been going on for decades and decades. They are A Praerie Home Companion and Grand Ole Opry, and to both of them, we are greatly indebted for giving us the playing field to come out game after game and try and do backflips.

MR: Beautiful. What is your advice for new artists?

KS: Oh, gosh, I don’t put a lot of credit in what’s going on currently. I often times try and steer people to listen to the source material. If you were going to write this article and they said, “Well you’ve got to talk to Darius Rucker and Marcus Mumford,” well, you’ve got to talk to the source! Darius is the source for a Darius article, Marcus is the source for a Marcus article, but if you’re going to write an Old Crow article, you’ve got to go to the source. If you want to talk about the source of old time music, you don’t talk to Old Crow, you’ve got to go unearth some of this true material. You need to go talk to Reverend Gary Davis. Unfortunately, you can’t. But what you can do is listen, and these records that were made up to 1950–including some of the folk revival in the 1960s and even the old time music of the 1970s–there are some records that just shake your soul and leave you rattled. Listen to Reverend Gary Davis or Blind Willy Johnson, if you want to talk to a blues artist. The thing about the roots is that they’re available. You can go tap into them right now. You can even use your computer to get online with them. These records will last. We’ll still be listening to these records in five hundred years, and we’ll still be listening to “Like A Rolling Stone” in five hundred years. I really believe that. It’s that powerful. It’s the American sound, this thing that happened here, the cross-cultural explosion of Rock ‘n’ Roll. Black and white coming together. It’s really astounding.

MR: You say that with such emotion. What do you think about American music’s impact on the world culture?

KS: Oh, I think it’s been like a sledgehammer on the Berlin wall.

MR: Nice. What is the future hold for Old Crow, maybe its immediate future and five years from now?

KS: I think with the Opry induction, that really puts the road time up for us. We want to do right by the Grand Ole Opry, we want to prove our worth at being there on that stage, broadcast after broadcast, and I want to get to know all of those people. I know a lot of folks on the Opry because, of course, we do it a lot. But I think that the Opry is going to be a big part of the years to come with the Old Crow Medicine Show and I’m really excited about the challenge of that, and I’m honored t o be getting to share the same stage where Roy Acuff really sawed up a storm. We’re in good company there. Country music’s going to be around. Just like they’ll be listening to “Like A Rolling Stone” in five hundred years, I like to think they’ll be listening to Hank Williams just as loudly.

MR: Any other words of wisdom before we leave?

KS: It’s an Opry story, and it’s a country music story, and we’re just getting to the good part.

MR: Sweet. Ketch, I really appreciate it.

KS: My pleasure, thank you for the press at Huffington. I look forward to reading it and sending it to my mother.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne