Basking In The Glorious Shadow Of Bob Dylan

The relationship that Nashville-based string band Old Crow Medicine Show have shared with songwriting legend Bob Dylan over the years has been as convoluted as it is reverential. Old Crow frontman Ketch Secor is a long-time Dylan disciple – he famously once spent four straight years listening to nothing but Bob – and when many years ago he got his hands on a demo known as Rock Me, Mama, an unreleased track from a bootleg of outtakes from the 1973 Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid soundtrack, he played the song incessantly in his live sets. Even though it had changed substantially, he sought permission to release the song – now known as Wagon Wheel – as a co-write on Old Crow's major label debut O.C.M.S. (2004), discovering in the process that Dylan credited the line “Rock me, Mama” – still integral to Wagon Wheel's chorus – to blues legend Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, who in all likelihood got it from a Big Bill Broonzy recording.

Once Wagon Wheel hit the public domain it immediately took off, becoming far more than Old Crow's signature tune and calling card. Covered over the years by everyone from Against Me! to Mumford & Sons, when former Hootie & The Blowfish frontman Darius Rucker cut a version in 2013 it went through the stratosphere, notching up over 30 million YouTube views and going platinum in the USA, winning Rucker a Grammy and hitting the top of the Billboard US Country Airplay charts in the process. That's when Dylan fortuitously entered the picture once more, gifting Old Crow another unreleased track, Sweet Amarillo, which is now lead single from their excellent ninth album, Remedy.

“It's just an amazing turn of events to come full circle with a song,” Secor marvels. “The metaphor I've been thinking of lately is that it's like I put a message into a bottle and it floated down [Nashville's] Cumberland River to the Gulf Of Mexico and down all the way around Argentina and up to Malibu where it washed up on the beach, and Bob Dylan just happened to be out jogging that day and found it. Although in this case he put a message back in the bottle – a new one – and sent it my way and I received it. We've just had an elaborate and highly unlikely communication. In this world of instant communication it's so rare that there be something like this – you can be up to the minute with anybody but you never really connect, and this is a connection without ever having spoken.

“It came on the heels of having the number one record. Bob doesn't get that every day, so when Darius hit number one with Wagon Wheel Bob sent the song Sweet Amarillo – or the fragment really, because it was much more of a fragment than what Rock Me, Mama was to become Wagon Wheel, so it was a much tougher assignment. But he originally wrote me to say, 'Hey, thanks for cutting it' or 'Congratulations' – it's a lot of radio play to have a number one record. [Dylan staple] Lay Lady Lay was never a number one record, if you can believe it.

“It was a lot different [than with Wagon Wheel], because it was sent to me by Bob, with a little bit of instruction and a little bit of back and forth – as I completed the song he'd chime in. He said to cut a verse, and to play the fiddle and not the harmonica, and he told me where he wanted the chorus to come in – it was really exciting, I can't even tell you the feeling that sweeps over me to think about having this collaboration. Before it was sort of like having a collaboration with a ghost, and now it's more like the ghost was in the room – but still very much a ghost.”

Secor attests that it was an odd sensation watching from afar as Rucker took Wagon Wheel into the heart of the country mainstream.

“You know, it was strange – it is strange,” he smiles. “It's still going on and it's strange for me every time I hear it. But it's a wonderful kind of strange – I can't argue with it and I'm proud of it. Darius Rucker has been at the music game for 35 years, so he knows how to hustle, and I'm just really glad [that it was him] out of all the people in country music. I'm not really in mainstream country, and I'm not there because I play by a different set of rules, but of all of the mainstream country artists who could have cut it Darius would be my pick, man. I couldn't have picked a more appropriate voice – somebody seasoned, and somebody with his style and his swagger. And somebody black in country, c'mon!”

And with Old Crow Medicine Show continually fighting to retain the authenticity of traditional country music and instrumentation, it's completely apt that they're integral to this fascinating evolution.

“It's all part of the process, and that's what's so special to me about Sweet Amarillo,” Secor reflects. “I kind of took Rock Me, Mama and stuffed it under my coat sleeve, but now Bob has invited us to the table – Bob has said, 'Let me participate in this folk music process with you, let's do it together.' That's something that I didn't know he was into, and I love it. Really we're all just under the big umbrella of Bob Dylan – we're just basking in his glorious shadow. We're all just passing along down the line the gift that we learned from Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie and so many other old boys.”