Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor – HuffPost 9.11.13

Mike Ragogna: What is your advice for new artists?

Keith Secor: 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.