Ketch Secor
Ketch Secor is a fiddler, banjo player, harmonica player, singer and songwriter who has fronted Old Crow Medicine Show since he co-founded the band in 1998. He wrote the band’s signature song, “Wagon Wheel,” from a fragment of an unreleased Bob Dylan recording, and with Old Crow he joined the Grand Ole Opry in 2013 and won the Grammy for Best Folk Album for Remedy in 2015.
He was born Jay Ketcham Miller Secor in Denville Township, New Jersey, in 1978, and grew up in Harrisonburg, Virginia, the son of a headmaster of Episcopal schools. In the seventh grade he began playing music with his friend Christopher “Critter” Fuqua, and the two played open mics at the Little Grill in Harrisonburg. At Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where he had a scholarship, he learned to play the banjo and found the music of Bob Dylan and Jerry Garcia. Among the Dylan recordings he came across was “Rock Me Mama,” a short outtake from the 1973 sessions for Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. Homesick for Virginia, Secor added verses about long New England winters and hitchhiking south, and at seventeen he had the song that became “Wagon Wheel.”
At nineteen he went to Ithaca College, then left to travel with Fuqua, working odd jobs and busking. He met Willie Watson in upstate New York and the guitjo player Kevin Hayes in Maine, where he was raking blueberries, and in 1998 the new band, named Old Crow Medicine Show after the traveling medicine shows, began busking on street corners in New York State and on through Canada. In 1999 they settled in a cabin without running water near Boone, North Carolina, a town known for its old-time music. While they were playing in front of a pharmacy in Boone, Doc Watson heard them and invited them to his festival, MerleFest, and soon afterward the band was hired to entertain crowds between shows at the Grand Ole Opry. They moved to Nashville in 2000 and lived by the week in motels along Dickerson Road.
“Wagon Wheel” came out on Old Crow’s album O.C.M.S. in 2004. The song was later co-copyrighted with Dylan, Darius Rucker’s recording of it reached No. 1 on the country chart in 2013, and by 2024 it had passed 16 million sales in the United States. With Secor out front on fiddle and lead vocals, Old Crow became members of the Grand Ole Opry on 17 September 2013 and received the Americana Music Association’s Trailblazer Award the same year. They won two Grammys, Best Long Form Music Video for Big Easy Express and Best Folk Album for Remedy, for which Dylan sent the band another sketch from the 1973 sessions, “Sweet Amarillo.” Their later albums include Paint This Town and Jubilee, which was nominated for Best Folk Album at the 2024 Grammys, and in 2024 the band toured to mark its twenty-fifth anniversary.
Away from the band, Secor co-wrote most of the songs on Molly Tuttle’s albums Crooked Tree (2022) and City of Gold (2023), and his songs have also been recorded by the Turnpike Troubadours and Wyatt Ellis. He co-wrote the musical Hooten Holler, which premiered at the Barter Theatre’s Appalachian Festival of Plays and Playwrights in 2022, and in May 2024 he signed a worldwide publishing administration deal with Sony Music Publishing Nashville. He was a consultant and interviewee for Ken Burns’s documentary series Country Music (2019), wrote the children’s book Lorraine (2018), a retelling of a Southern folktale, helped launch a primary school in Nashville, and co-produced the documentary Louder Than Guns with Doug Pray and David Greene.
His first solo album, Story the Crow Told Me, came out on 11 July 2025 on Equal Housing Records and Firebird Music. Produced by Jody Stevens, who co-wrote eleven of its twelve songs with him, it tells the story of his years in Nashville, beginning with the single “Dickerson Road.” That September he became the host of Tennessee Crossroads, the long-running travel and culture series on Nashville PBS, beginning with its 39th season.
