“Wagon Wheel” is co-credited to Bob Dylan and Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show, with Dylan having recorded the chorus in 1973 and Secor adding the verses approximately 25 years later. The Dylan source material comes from a demo titled “Rock Me, Mama” that Dylan recorded during the Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid sessions in February 1973. Dylan never finished the song; only the chorus and a melodic sketch existed on the bootleg recording that circulated in the years following.
Chris “Critter” Fuqua, Ketch Secor’s school friend and future Old Crow Medicine Show bandmate, brought home a Dylan bootleg from a family trip to London containing the rough “Rock Me, Mama” outtake. Secor wrote new verses around Dylan’s existing chorus and melody — the first-person traveler-rambling-down-from-Raleigh narrative that became the modern song’s center — and Old Crow Medicine Show released the completed song in 2004 on their major-label debut O.C.M.S., splitting the writing credits and royalties evenly with Dylan.
The Old Crow recording became one of the most popular contemporary bluegrass-adjacent songs of the 21st century. Darius Rucker’s 2013 country-pop cover took the song to #1 on the country charts and #15 on the Billboard Hot 100, making “Wagon Wheel” one of the most commercially successful crossover songs of the 2010s. The song has become genuinely ubiquitous at jam sessions, festivals, and open mics — popular enough that some pickers refuse to play it on principle. The song’s unusual two-author, twenty-five-year-gestation history is now part of its cultural identity.
