Critter Fuqua
Christopher “Critter” Fuqua is a singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who founded Old Crow Medicine Show in 1998 with his boyhood friend Ketch Secor, playing banjo, guitar and slide guitar. He wrote and sang “Take ’Em Away,” and his song “Firewater” is on the band’s Grammy-winning Remedy.
He and Secor met in the seventh grade in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and taught themselves traditional instruments together, playing open mics at the town’s Little Grill diner. From a family trip to London, Fuqua brought home a Bob Dylan bootleg with a rough outtake called “Rock Me, Mama” and passed it to Secor, who built “Wagon Wheel” from it. In the winter of 1997 the two were busking in Portland, Maine, with Secor’s band the Route Eleven Boys. When Secor went to Ithaca College he brought Fuqua to upstate New York, where they met Willie Watson and gathered players from the area’s old-time scene; Fuqua later named Richie Stearns, the Red Hots and Mac Benford among the people there who shaped them.
The new band made a cassette, Trans:mission, busked across Canada from October 1998, and in 1999 settled in a farmhouse on Beech Mountain near Boone, North Carolina. Doc Watson heard them playing on the street in Boone and got them onto MerleFest, which led to the Grand Ole Opry. On O.C.M.S. (2004) and Big Iron World (2006) Fuqua played banjo and guitar and sang, taking the lead on “Take ’Em Away,” which was also heard on the soundtrack of the film Transamerica (2005), and on “Big Time in the Jungle.” With Secor he wrote “Doc’s Day,” about the morning Watson found them.
He left the band in 2007 and spent about three years studying English at a small university in Texas. He rejoined in January 2012, after Willie Watson’s departure, arriving for the last days of the Carry Me Back sessions, where he played accordion on one track and sang harmony; before the full band went back out, he and Secor played a run of duo shows. He was part of the group through Remedy (2014), which included his “Firewater” and won the Grammy for Best Folk Album, its 2013 induction into the Grand Ole Opry, and Volunteer (2018). His last show of that stint was the band’s New Year’s Eve concert at the Ryman Auditorium closing 2019.
In May 2024 he came back once more for the band’s twenty-fifth-anniversary Jubilee tour, playing MerleFest in a reunion with Willie Watson and Ben Gould and DelFest, but in July 2024 the band announced that he had left again.
