This is an article about the way music should be. It's about a band of young musicians, calling themselves Old Crow Medicine Show, playing old-fashioned music the old-fashioned way. They first showed up on my doorstep in November, 1998, for TestingTesting #15. This article appeared in the Oxford American, which seems to have ceased publication again. I reprinted it on the TestingTesting site because it was just too good to let disappear. It also mentions my name.

Hardcore Troubadores
by Matt Dellinger

The morning after the Old Crow Medicine Show made their rousing debut at the Grand Ole Opry two years ago, I drove Ketch Secor, the fiddle player, who was twenty-two, to an auto auction. It was a one-day temp job: He would drive the used cars slowly around a dirt track while people bid on them. Ketch had not showered, and his thick nest of dark hair shined. He had the unshaven beginnings of a mustache, a bottom lip full of chewing tobacco, and some unkind things to say about Nashville. "This town is shitty," he told me. This town is everything that the mountain is not. This town is full of money. This town has no kinship. This town has no brotherly love." He spit into a clear bottle part-filled with brown, and shrugged, "But this town is where we are, and we have never been in the wrong place."

It's not what most young musicians would think to say in the afterglow of a professional breakthrough. On the face of it, he had little to be bitter about. They'd lived in Nashville only four months, and Marty Stuart, the president of the Grand Ole Opry, who met them at a music festival, had helped them land some high profile gigs. They had opened for Dolly Parton at the Ryman Auditorium, and had performed at the Opry's 75th-anniversary celebration. No, they hadn't landed a record deal, despite some big label flirtations (one crafty agent showed up on their muddy doorstep with pizza and a case of beer; and yes, Ketch was working at an auto auction to make ends meet. But listening to him talk that Sunday morning, you might think he had a lot of nerve.

That's certainly true. But Old Crow's sass has served them well, as has their homesickness for the past. Their old-time repertoire—the pre-Depression banjo ballads, Appalachian Fiddle tunes, and jug-band blues that the five young men (all but one are under twenty-five) thrash out on well-worn string instruments—is matched bv a reactionary founding philosophy that has prompted boldly archaic career moves: The two years before Nashville were spent hoboing quixotically across Canada and back, then living in self-imposed squalor in the mountains of North Carolina. They brought music nobody really played anymore to towns where no other touring performer would stop to use the bathroom, and people embraced them, fed them, sheltered them. This, in turn, fueled their sense of cosmic destiny. They had come now to Nashville not to go glitzy, but hoping that perhaps some space might remain for what once was country music—hoping, they might say, that their medicine might sell in the sickest place of all.

"At some point music went from being something people played to being something that lives in a box in the corner of the room, like a toaster. It's gone from being something from within to something that's given to you. forced on you," Ketch explained that morning. "I feel like when we play, people can feel the timelessness. They can feel that they're rooted in something. Like we're able to play for a collective feeling that's lost, that used to be a big part of everything."
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