by jon bosworth jaxvillain@yahoo.com
WHO: Old Crow Medicine Show
WHEN: Thursday, February 15th
WHERE: Florida Theatre
Even from the first strums of their new album, Big Iron World, you can tell this is an old time string band. When a bluegrass band of young fellows comes from Nashville, Tennessee, you better believe they’re going to be able to play, and these boys can pick and fiddle with the best of the best. But it isn’t their ability to play that mystifies me as much as their ability to write songs that sound like lost bluegrass treasures from an era that went largely unrecorded and undocumented in the Appalachian mountains for generations.
When you first listen to their music, you’ll swear these are traditional songs that these young and energetic boys have picked up and played for us. In some cases they are, on Big Iron World they play a Woody Guthrie song, a song by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who wrote many Elvis classics, and they also play a number of traditionals, but when they write a song, it doesn’t step out as being cut from a different timber than the rest of the album. You’ll think you’re listening to an old song until you hear the line: “If you don’t believe that cocaine is good, you ask Karl Rove and Elijah Wood.”
Its true they inject an energy that is almost punk-like to their old time string band, but there are no drums and all of the instruments are acoustic. They are picking on fiddles, banjos, guitars, mandolins, and an upright bass, but they get so much energy kicked up in a room when they’re playing live, you’ll swear you’re at the county honky tonk and this is everyone’s only night away from the backbreaking work in the fields all week long.
I caught up with Ketch, who plays the fiddle and is one of the key voices in this quintet, to find out how the Yankees react to their bluegrass compared to the down home folk.
“You don’t sound like you have enough of an accent to be asking that question.”
EU: How does Nashville react to you?
KS: Nashville treats us like one of their own. We line up at the same trough as everyone else, they give us a swift kick, and we go out to pasture.
EU: Does the traditional scene see you all as young punks, or is there a lot of reverence for the authenticity of your style?
KS: The traditional scene is three websites and a support group. I don’t think there is a traditional scene. Go to Ireland, there’s a traditional scene. Sure there’s probably a bluegrass fest in Jacksonville and some pickers get together, but they are more what we call “the bluegrassers.” They are a pot-bellied lot with a bluegrass scrab and they’ll pinch you saying: “sounds good buddy.” It’s sort of homoerotic. I’m not saying Jacksonville bluegrassers are homoerotic, but I’m from Ohio, so it comes across like that.
We traveled for several years with Del McCoury. He is more traditional than us, but they see what we’re doing is good for the industry. It’s good for string players everywhere.
EU: Is CMT the only outlet receptive to your videos? It seems like MTV should put you in a rotation. For traditional stylings, your music seems really current.
KS: We had some spins on MTV and MTVU, which I think is in Europe. I don’t know. They need to save time for all of those other bands that are so tasteful and quality-driven. They are too busy with those guys to care about music. Like Rolling Stone, they wrote about us once, but they have to write a lot of ads for blue jeans and lip gloss, so I know they’re busy folks.
EU: Virginia Creeper, is that the best country shag song ever written?
KS: I’m glad you got the twist in that number. There’s a double entendre there. It follows in a long tradition in rural and country songs like “Please let me warm up your wiener.” We’re glad to fit in there and bring a song about sex and trains back across the time span into the 21st century. My favorite line is “slide me up your ticket baby, climb onto my engine.” We busted up when Critter and me wrote that line; it was just too sexy. The Florida bluegrassers are going wild pinching themselves, they can’t handle it.
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