Old Crow Medicine Show

Secor and Chris “Critter” Fuqua met in the seventh grade in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and played their first music together at open mics in the town’s Little Grill diner. Secor went on to Ithaca College in upstate New York, where the region’s old-time music scene drew them in; there they met Willie Watson, and with Kevin Hayes and Ben Gould among the players they gathered, they made a ten-song cassette, Trans:mission, to sell on the road. In October 1998 they set out busking across Canada, and in the spring of 1999 they moved into a farmhouse on Beech Mountain, near Boone.

It was on a Boone street corner, outside Boone Drug, that Doc Watson heard them, and he asked them to play MerleFest, his festival in Wilkesboro, in 2000. From there the band was hired to entertain crowds between shows at the Grand Ole Opry, moved to Nashville in October 2000, picked up the bassist Morgan Jahnig, a member ever since, and in January 2001 made its first appearance on the Opry stage. The band’s early sets drew on pre-war string-band, jug-band, blues and medicine-show songs. An independent album, Eutaw, came out in 2002.

Signed to Nettwerk, the band made O.C.M.S. (2004) and Big Iron World (2006), both produced by David Rawlings, and Tennessee Pusher (2008), produced by Don Was. O.C.M.S. carried “Wagon Wheel.” Fuqua had brought home a Dylan bootleg with a rough outtake built on the line “Rock me, mama”; Secor, still a teenager, added verses of his own, sang the song for years, and when he sought copyright in 2003 he and Dylan agreed to share the authorship. The record was certified gold in 2011, platinum in 2013 and double platinum in 2019, O.C.M.S. itself went gold, and the song has been recorded by many others, Darius Rucker among them.

Willie Watson left in the fall of 2011, and Fuqua, who had been away from the band, rejoined in January 2012. With the Ted Hutt-produced Carry Me Back (ATO, July 2012), recorded at Sound Emporium in Nashville, the band reached No. 22 on the Billboard 200. A year earlier it had joined Mumford & Sons and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros on the Railroad Revival Tour, a trip from California to New Orleans by vintage train; Emmett Malloy’s film of it, Big Easy Express, won the Grammy for Best Long Form Music Video in 2013. That year the Americana Music Association gave the band its Trailblazer Award. In August 2013 Marty Stuart came on stage at one of its shows in Cleveland to invite it into the Grand Ole Opry, and on 17 September 2013 Stuart and Dierks Bentley inducted Secor, Fuqua, Jahnig, Hayes, Gill Landry, Cory Younts and Chance McCoy as members, with the Del McCoury Band and Connie Smith joining them on “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” Since 2009 the band has played a New Year’s Eve show at the Ryman each year.

Remedy (ATO, July 2014), again produced by Hutt, included “Sweet Amarillo,” another song finished with Dylan, and won the Grammy for Best Folk Album. Moving to Columbia, the band released 50 Years of Blonde on Blonde (April 2017), live recordings of its re-creation of Dylan’s 1966 album at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in May 2016; Volunteer (April 2018), produced by Dave Cobb at RCA Studio A for the band’s twentieth anniversary; and Live at the Ryman (October 2019). Fuqua left for a second time at the end of 2019.

Paint This Town (April 2022) was the first album with Jerry Pentecost on drums, Mike Harris on banjo and guitar and Mason Via on guitar. For its twenty-fifth year the band released Jubilee (ATO, August 2023), co-produced with Matt Ross-Spang, with Sierra Ferrell, Mavis Staples and Willie Watson as guests; it was nominated for the Grammy for Best Folk Album. A holiday album, OCMS XMAS, followed in November 2025 on the band’s own Hartland Records, the same year as Secor’s first solo album. Union Made (Hartland, 5 June 2026), recorded in the band’s East Nashville studio and produced by Jahnig, with PJ George on bass and the former members Joe Andrews and Chance McCoy back in the lineup, looks toward the country’s 250th anniversary; its guests include Molly Tuttle, who wrote “My Side of the Mountain” with Secor and Luke Combs and sings it with Del and Ronnie McCoury, Evan Felker, Maggie Rose and John Carter Cash.