“Wagon Wheel” joins a Bob Dylan fragment to verses written a generation later by Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show. Its melody and chorus come from “Rock Me, Mama,” a rough demo Dylan recorded during the Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid sessions in February 1973 and never finished or released; it circulated on bootlegs as little more than a stomping boot, the chorus and a mumbled verse. Chris “Critter” Fuqua, Secor’s school friend and later bandmate, brought one of those bootlegs home from a family trip to London. A few months afterward, while at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and homesick for the South, Secor wrote verses of his own around Dylan’s chorus.
The verses follow a hitchhiker heading south along the East Coast. He has left the cold of New England, where he lost his money at poker; he walks south out of Roanoke, catches a ride with a trucker out of Philadelphia, and hopes to reach Raleigh that night to see the woman waiting for him, saying that if he dies there he will at least die free. In the chorus he asks her to rock him like a wagon wheel, like the wind and rain and a southbound train. One line sends the trucker west from the Cumberland Gap to Johnson City, Tennessee, which lies to the east; Secor later said he got the geography wrong but kept the word because “‘West’ has got more power than ‘east.’”
Old Crow Medicine Show first put the song on their 2001 EP Troubles Up and Down the Road. They recorded it again in 2003 for O.C.M.S., their Nettwerk debut produced by David Rawlings, with sessions at RCA Studio B and Woodland in Nashville; it came out as a single on 10 February 2004, two weeks ahead of the album. When Secor went to copyright the song, he found that Dylan credited the “rock me, mama” phrase to the bluesman Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup; Secor and Dylan signed a co-writing agreement that splits authorship equally. Without much radio play the band’s recording was certified platinum in 2013 and triple platinum in 2023.
Darius Rucker’s version, recorded for True Believers with Lady Antebellum singing backup and released as a single by Capitol Nashville in January 2013, went to number one on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs and Country Airplay charts and number 15 on the Hot 100, and won the Grammy for Best Country Solo Performance in January 2014; in 2022 it was certified diamond. In Ireland, Nathan Carter’s version from June 2012 had a long run on the singles chart. The song became so common at jam sessions and in barrooms that some venues banned it, among them a regular jam on Hilton Head Island that put up signs reading “Absolutely No Wagon Wheel.”
