Ketch Secor
Contains Multitudes, Too

After a quarter century fronting the frenetic bluegrass and jug band outfit Old Crow Medicine Show, Ketch Secor is finally breaking out on his own with his solo debut Story The Crow Told Me. Out now, the retrospective record looks back on the past few decades, from his own journey to stardom spurred by a chance encounter with Doc Watson to the certified platinum hit “Wagon Wheel,” through the lens of a soundtrack that’s equal parts bluegrass and contemporary country.

“Because the band [recently] celebrated 25 years, I was already in the mindset of a retrospective look,” Secor tells BGS. “I was thinking about everything that’s happened and transpired over that time and started writing about it. In fact, at first I really thought it was going to be a spoken word record before the music eventually took over.”

Talking over the phone, Secor spoke about the timing for his debut project, its connections to both Old Crow and contemporaries like Dierks Bentley, becoming the new host of Tennessee Crossroads from Nashville PBS, and more.

You mentioned this album was initially envisioned as a spoken word compilation. What led to its transformation into a fully realized album?

Ketch Secor: I was working with Jody Stevens. We had written a couple songs that were largely based around spoken word and others we were looking to add background sounds on. Those sounds started getting more and more like what I already do, which is writing songs with choruses and verses and hooks. It just evolved out of the beat poetry version of the album, which was probably a little less listenable but closer to what I was striving for. The musicality of it is a bit of a compromise to be like “Well, I’m going to make this an actual record people might want to listen to” because the spoken word records I enjoy are not highly listened to.

I recently was trying to find them again since my record collection got lost in the 2010 floods we had in Nashville. I went on Spotify, which I’d never used before, to find all these songs in my head like Amiri Baraka’s “It’s Nation Time” or Moondog – a 1950’s renegade beat poet from New York – in trying to get an understanding of how the spoken word music I heard as a kid was being utilized today. It quickly became clear that nobody listens to that stuff anymore. [Laughs] So it seemed like making it musical would make it more fun for people.

It seems a bit ironic that you had to look up all these songs – many of which would be considered part of the Great American Songbook – on a digital streaming platform like Spotify. Talk about two very different worlds colliding!

I talk a little bit about that phenomenon on the song “Junkin’.” A lot of the experience of making music with Old Crow, especially in the beginning when we were still developing a canon, was about music’s physical form. When the band first started the internet was still new and we were still selling cassettes. The last time I made a solo record was on tape, the band didn’t have a website and none of us even used email when all of this started. It meant that searching for the physical was really important.

There’s another song on the album called “Thanks Again” that highlights the personal relationships that you develop out on the road – these chance encounters that are very much real and put the wind in your sails. There’s something to be said about having to come of age in a time when information was so tactile and often involved a human touch.

With the emergence of the internet and things like streaming and social media it really is an entirely different world for artists to navigate nowadays.

I realized that I had a kind of time capsule in my mind I had yet to crack open in the days before going in to make this record, which was done quickly and often with me writing the songs as we were recording them. Opening it up was really cathartic and essential for me to process and move past because the experience of coming to Nashville when we did and the kind of band we were in was, at times, slightly traumatic. It was a very intense quest similar to a military deployment, being a minor league ball player fighting your way through the ranks or even being a teenage whaler in Moby Dick. You end up leaving everything else behind in search of this one pursuit.

It’s not unique to come to Nashville to make it big, but what made our experience unique was that we were trying to do it with these traditional sounds in an era in which technological changes were happening as we were doing it. It was almost like we were going against the literal tide with our choices and artistic motivation.

You just mentioned writing these songs as you were recording them. Is that something you’d done before?

That was a very new way of going about things. I understand that record making has changed a lot since we first started – our most popular Old Crow records that gave us a career were the early ones we made with Dave Rawlings on analog tape that we cut with a razor blade. Making a record the way Gillian [Welch] and Dave do is very studious, labor and time intensive. But now the technology exists to do it super fast.

This record almost felt like a throwback to the seminal recordings of the 1920s and ‘30s that are the headwaters of our sound. Those records were made in three minutes oftentimes without knowing what the arrangements would be. Three minutes wasn’t the time frame of hillbilly music until the record company said it was – they just sat there, watched the light turn on and played. Writing a song and building a track like that actually felt really on par with what it would have been like going to Camden, New Jersey in 1928 on a train when you’d never left your county before that. The challenge is keeping one foot in the past and one in the present. When you play fiddles and banjos and blow harmonica for a living the instrument kind of does it for you.

You name dropped Jody Stevens a few minutes ago. How’d y’all come together and what was it like working with him?

We met through my publishing company. I was going to do a co-write with him and knew he’d written a lot of songs for contemporary country artists, so I brought my bag of tricks that I bring out when I try to pretend I’m going to write the next big, top 10 country smash, except for this one time with Darius [Rucker]. I love country music even though I feel that in the past 25 years I have a whole lot less in common with it than I did when I was a kid in terms of what it sounds like today in its mainstream output versus when I was singing along to Jo Dee Messina when I was 19. It was interesting to circle the wagons with Jody because he brought such a unique perspective in record making that comes from contemporary country music even though his roots are in hip-hop.

The other thing that brought us together was that Jody had seen Old Crow a lot, especially in our early days from 2000-2005, which is the sweet spot I try to explore on this record. He’d been there at the Station Inn and the festival Lightning 100 used to do downtown and some of these other places that have since been replaced by high rises. The fact that he had been a first account witness to the band was really helpful to bounce ideas off of. His sister was also a big Old Crow fan and even though I’ve never met her I thought about her as my target demographic – someone who saw us back in 2001 and wanted to know what that time capsule looked like.

The fact that Jody had done all this work with people that rapped – only to find that 25 years later the tapes and demos he’d made with Jelly Roll were now part of a pop culture consciousness that hadn’t been there when he first started working on them – gave him a similar orientation to country music that I have about Americana. When I got started there was nothing called Americana and nobody lived outside of contemporary country music unless you were alt-country. Coming into this period of time in Nashville where it wasn’t yet determined that anyone with a banjo could make it that wasn’t bluegrass is another place where Jody and I shared commonality. The rap game has since become a massive component to contemporary country music similar to how Americana has become the tastemaker for anything roots related.

In terms of the sound on this record, the way you move between more Old Crow-esque bluegrass and those pop country flavors reminds me a lot of Dierks Bentley, another person who excels at showcasing the best of both sides of roots music.

I came up with Dierks and remember witnessing his arrival. Before [“What Was I Thinkin’”] came out there was an issue of CMA Up Close that had a story about us on the page opposite one about Dierks and I thought to myself, “Well, if a guy named Dierks Bentley can make it than probably a guy named Ketch Secor can, too.” Surely Nashville has the appetite for two oddly named boys. [Laughs] Then I went on and took a moniker that wasn’t my name. Because of that I feel very much like a brand new artist now and have developed a strong sense of empathy for the young guns who are out there trying to put their stuff out for the first time, because it’s so much harder now than when I was a kid.

What are some of those major hurdles you’ve noticed for new artists today compared to what you first encountered with Old Crow?

Now the way you stand out in a crowd is through visual means that often require the least amount of artistic acumen and the most amount of social media acumen. So far, I’m not sure it’s helping the cream rise to the top, though. The skillset should be how good can you pick a banjo, not how good can you pick the keypad on your iPhone, even though you have to do both to be successful today. When I was a kid it was about making these connections with people, knocking on doors so many times that every time something good came to me [it did] on account of me showing up and being in the right place at the right time.

Seeking a viral moment has an undue effect of potentially limiting the number of new entrants into the arena. For one generation, what was once divinized is now digitized. I’m sure that if there’s a God above that He or She can use the binary code to reach people and connect their children. I can pick up The New York Times and feel like there’s a closeness with the loss in Texas right now, which is only amplified by me having swam in the Guadalupe before and having a personal connection to the area. If you’ve plunged in the waters yourself then you’ll share something so much more vital with those who are experiencing the loss.

It’s really a metaphor for how we all have a shot at playing the Grand Ole Opry or going from the Station Inn to the Ryman like I did. There’s a turnstile in front of that and I want to see it spinning wide so that artists of all stripes can find their way up to that stage where they belong. As a steward of those stages, I want to see the people show up who have found music as the great connector that, regardless of the speed of the computer in your pocket, the speed of music breaks all other forms of sonic barriers.

In terms of personnel, what motivated you to bring in past and present Old Crow members like Willie Watson, Critter Fuqua, and Morgan Jahnig to record these songs with?

I really wanted to have all the past members of Old Crow on the record, because it felt like a bit of an offering to the gods to say “thanks.” So I really wanted a little bit of all their spirits on it. Not only that, but I read through a lot of old journals and called up some people I’d met hitchhiking, but hadn’t talked to in 25 years. I went and visited the guy who coined the term “Wagon Wheel,” because that song was always called “Rock Me Mama” until I met James Sizemore – a wonderful rascal and drug dealing Vietnam vet.

I went to see him on his deathbed and recorded phone conversations late at night with old friends. While none of that stuff is necessarily on the record in its physical form, it all went into the process of trying to bake something that really felt like I was living in the past and bringing it to the present through these songs. I think a lot about cairn stones that the Inuit people up north call inuksuit, which are like sign posts that tell you where to turn, but they’re also spiritual. So imagine a road sign that could say “300 miles to Memphis,” but also told you the ancestral route of the settlers who first brought buffalo down 7,000 years ago, sort of like the duality of a time signature.

That duality of time reminds me of one of the album’s songs, “What Nashville Was,” which highlights how much Nashville has changed over the decades while also highlighting how no matter how many venues are replaced with condos, music will always be the city’s heartbeat.

A lot about the way Bob [Dylan’s] record Nashville Skyline had a way of pointing out Nashville for the first time to anyone who didn’t live in the South or listen to country music. He was really pointing to Nashville from a unique perspective and certainly Bob Dylan’s Nashville was the kind of Nashville that I was looking for when I first started playing on the street corner there in 1996.

Similarly, I was also looking for Dolly Parton’s Nashville. I wanted the Nashville that Dolly got when she stepped out of the pickup truck and married the first guy that honked his horn at her, the kind of Nashville where Willie Nelson was laying down in the street in front of Tootsie’s thinking he’s gonna kill himself because nobody wants his songs.

I used “Girl From The North Country” as the template for a love letter to a changing place and a cityscape that has gone on to do so much stuff that it itself is largely oblivious to the price it pays for its constant reinvention. And the price is that who we’re ushering in … is probably because you were on a reality TV show more consistently than because you had a song that people couldn’t stop singing at summer camps. Not that those things are good or bad, they just change. But we’re at a point now where the legend and lore of Nashville has grown so much that we’re at risk of the bubble bursting and it being something like Seattle [Washington] after grunge or Austin [Texas] after it wasn’t weird anymore – which is a glass, monolithic, industry executive business center. Oftentimes those forces stand in opposition to the ability of songwriters, hucksters, showmen, and the survival spirit that goes into creating the next Bob Dylan of a generation. I’m hoping that we, the architects of Nashville, can endeavor to build a place that still allows a hearty hero or heroine to come through the gates just like Loretta Lynn or Jack White did.

You were recently named the new host of Tennessee Crossroads on Nashville Public Television. How’d that opportunity come about and what’s it mean to you?

When PBS called me about this unique role that had come available with the sudden and sad loss of Joe [Elmore] – who ran the show for 30 or so years – it only made sense to find someone else to step in who’s also run a business for around 30 years that’s similar to Tennessee Crossroads. Old Crow Medicine Show has been criss-crossing the American south getting inspired by quilters, gee-haw whimmy diddles, carvers, and folks that plant by the lunar signs – those are the kind of folk heroes that go into our music. They’re also the same kind of stories that this show loves to tell.

I love public broadcasting and care a lot about access to it in this country. I made my television debut on our local PBS affiliate up in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia when I was in fifth grade. I fell in love with my own backyard because Ken Burns showed me what was so rich about it and so frightening and tragic, which was the bones of the Union and Confederate armies right here, just past the fence. Ken Burns really illuminated that for me and ever since I’ve been the biggest fan of public broadcasting.

What has the process of bringing this record to life taught you about yourself?

I was born about 35 miles outside the birthplace of Walt Whitman and always wondered why I like the guy so much. Then I recently rode my bicycle there and thought, “God, this guy’s place is really popular!” There were people sleeping on a stoop and waiting for a free sandwich in the parking lot. And it turns out where Walt Whitman used to live is like the center of the drug-addled corpse that is parts of Camden, New Jersey. It looks a bit like the Dickerson Road corridor, at least as it was in about 1999.

I feel like Walt really said it best when he said he contains multitudes on “Song Of Myself, 51.” I feel as a picker of banjos and fiddles and guitars and dulcimers and auto harps; and a blower of jugs and juice harps and harmonicas; and a singer of ballads and lamentations pretty songs; and [an attender of] corn shuckins, frolics, and cotillions, that I am like you, a container of multitudes.


Photo Credit: Jody Stevens

WATCH: Old Crow Medicine Show, “Paint This Town”

Artist: Old Crow Medicine Show
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Paint This Town”
Album: Paint This Town
Release Date: April 22, 2022
Label: ATO Records

In Their Words: “This song is about growing up in a small town, and having to make fun wherever you could find it. Our band has always drawn its inspiration from those elemental American places, where water towers profess town names, where the Waffle House and the gas station are the only spots to gather; this is the scenery for folk music in the 21st century. And the John Henry and Casey Jones of today are the youth who rise up out of these aged burgs undeterred, undefeated, and still kicking.” — Ketch Secor

“At the end of the day, we’re still just trying to stop you on the street and get you to put a dollar in the guitar case. Then once we’ve got your attention, we’re gonna tell you about things like the opioid epidemic and the Confederate flag and what’s happening with the environment — but we’re gonna do it with a song and dance. We feel a great obligation to talk about the more difficult things happening out there in the world, but we also feel obligated to make sure everyone’s having a great time while we do it.” — Morgan Jahnig


Photo Credit: Kit Wood (Pictured L-R: Morgan Jahnig, Mason Via, Ketch Secor, Jerry Pentecost, Cory Younts, Mike Harris)

With Honesty and Humor, JP Harris Relives a Rough Time

On the day he released his latest album, Some Dogs Bark at Nothing, Harris took to Instagram with a meaningful post about what it’s really like to put your life out there as a songwriter. He accompanied it with a rendering of Mickey Mouse flipping the bird, a comic reflection of his own feelings about “worry, hard times, notions of ‘success,’ bad reviews and musical criticisms,” among other things.

But in a reference to the actual songs, Harris wasn’t so cavalier. He added, “They are yours now. To love, to hate, to relate to, to be repulsed by, whatever you feel they do not belong solely to me any longer. And that is very scary, as I now must relive these tales I’ve kept hidden these four years, night after night, in hopes that my own recitation helps me heal, learn, and maybe even help someone else.”

That transparency doesn’t shield heavy topics, such as his past drug use, even when those misadventures are wrapped up in a free-wheeling tune like “JP’s Florida Blues #1.” With its ‘70s swagger, the track sounds like something Jerry Reed would have cut if he were prone to singing songs about “seeking inspiration through my nose.”

“I feel like it can be really hard for people who’ve never either dealt with addiction or been close to someone — kind of truly understood someone — who’s dealt with addiction, to get why making light of a bad situation can be so funny or helpful,” he says. “And for me it’s really cathartic to look back. For years, I didn’t want to talk about it. There was a little bit of… more than a little… just ashamed of a stretch in my life when I was living really bad and real close to going hard off the rails. And now I can look back on it, and I pulled myself out of it, and I can laugh about it.”

Although he cuts an intimidating figure – tall and muscular with a long, thick beard and innumerable tattoos – Harris is remarkably easy to talk to, even when he’s wary about saying too much. “I try not to overshare about my personal life in any regard to people I don’t know well in person, or on the internet, or any other way. But no matter what you do, you gotta go out and relive all of those moments,” he believes. “You can suddenly feel the tears well up, and you’re like, ‘Okay, this isn’t gonna go that well. I need to think about baby bunnies,’ or just try and do what I can to disconnect emotionally from this story I’m telling.”

However, he will reveal that the raucous song “Hard Road” came to him literally in a fever dream. While he was in New York for a couple of gigs, an ugly illness nearly knocked him out of commission. “I was having to chug half a bottle of DayQuil to get through the gigs every night, and then spent the whole day sweating and feeling horrible in this wee little Airbnb apartment shithole in Brooklyn. And in the middle of the night, I sat bolt upright and had the melody of that song, and even a big chunk of the words. I pulled this little lamp over and turned it on, found a piece of paper, and started writing the words down.”

He adds, “That whole song is not only, again, a sort of hilarious recounting of some ill-behaved adults that I’ve known in my years, but it’s also my own incredibly subtle way to nod at a bunch of old country and blues songs. The buried references in that whole song are probably going to fly over 99 percent of the fans’ heads. Anyone who’s incredibly well-versed on the music of the 1940s and earlier is probably going to pick up on a lot of it. But there’s a nod to an old prison work song in one verse; there’s a nod to a Leadbelly song in another one. There’s a whole bunch of little winks and nods in there.”

Asked how his interest in old-time music originated, Harris explains that he lived in a remote cabin in Vermont for 11 or 12 years, with no electricity and no road access for six months of the year. For his water supply, he dug his own spring. And to get by, he was fixing up old barns, logging in the woods, and working as a farmhand. Being able to play music without electricity was essential – and although he’d played in punk bands as a teenager, he found himself in his 20s gravitating toward traditional Appalachian old-time music.

“Old-time music is much more about the fiddle tunes and the syncopation and the sound and the melody,” Harris believes. “And a lot of those old fiddle tunes don’t have any words, and if they do, it’s like one refrain that the fiddler will randomly yell out in the middle of the tune, but there’s no real words to it. They’re just tunes, it’s for dancing.”

A three-month winter tour playing with a string band proved to be a turning point. Harris says, “I got home from that tour, and I realized that [old-time music] was sacred to me in this way that I had almost ruined by trying to make a living out of it. By trying to make it more palatable to people, trying to take it into bars, and get people to pay attention. And I had started listening more and more to country music from the late ‘50s up through the ‘60s, and I realized that it was next to impossible to go see a real, old-school country band out on the road anymore. … In terms of young folks playing fairly traditional music and out on the road touring, like road-dogging it, there are very few people doing it. And it was next to impossible for me to go see a show, and it was like, ‘Well, fuck it, I’m gonna start a country band.’”

That decision prompted him to focus for the first time on writing his own songs. Considering his unconventional upbringing, he had plenty of stories to inspire him. Harris spent his earliest years in Montgomery, Alabama, before his family moved to California when he was nearly 7 years old. He remembers, “My dad worked in heavy construction, so we ended up out in the high desert for a couple of years. We moved to Las Vegas for about five or six years after that, and then that’s where I eventually split from. So I grew up in this weird mix of two worlds–a super-Southern family, but then lived in this burnt-out, high desert tiny town in California for a few years. … And then dumped into this run-down part of Las Vegas that had been a suburb in the ‘60s and now was just a run-down neighborhood on the edge of the suburbs.”

Harris declines to go into specifics about why he skipped town. (“I’ll just say it was time for me to get going, and I felt like I had some other things to go do in the world besides live out the rest of my teenage years normally.”) Roughly from the ages of 14 through 19, he hopped trains – a pastime he describes in detail on the album’s closing track, “Jimmy’s Dead and Gone.”

Harris, who moved to Nashville in 2011, says he wrote it after being fed up with other bands creating what he calls “nearly fictionalized backstories.” He admits, “I finally was like, ‘You know what? I’ve done my best to try not to brag about all this weird shit I’ve done in my past, but I need to set some records straight with a song.’ It’s a little bit of a wink and a little bit of a rib jab at everybody writing train songs.”

Not every track on Some Dogs Bark at Nothing – which was produced by Old Crow Medicine Show’s Morgan Jahnig – is quite so confrontational. The title track is a rueful number about the inevitability of messing things up, while “When I Quit Drinking” and “I Only Drink Alone” show that Harris’ memorable Instagram handle is indeed accurate: @ilovehonkytonk.

“I’m not a very prolific songwriter,” Harris confesses. “People sit down and make time to do it in these very specific windows and formatted ways, which is really admirable, but I’m for shit trying to do it that way. They pop into my brain, I write them. Sometimes I don’t write a song for six months and it’s terrifying. I think I lost my mojo and then all of a sudden in a month I write three songs that are killer. And I realized that like everything else in life, my songwriting creativity comes and goes in waves, and art’s just not predictable, and I know that I’ll be able to keep writing records indefinitely. I’ve quit being so afraid of it.”


Photo credit: Giles Clement