Old Crow and the Appalachian Soul
Exploring the identity crisis in contemporary Appalachia
This past May, my cousin, her boyfriend, and one other young man allegedly wrapped red bandanas across their faces—John Wayne-style—and broke into an occupied home in their native Haywood County in the western North Carolina mountains. One of the intruders shot the resident of the home in the leg, and now my cousin is in jail awaiting trial on charges of first-degree burglary. She is nineteen years old. Her brother, who is in his early twenties, has already been in prison twice, and between the two of them, they have five children, all by different partners.
My cousins would not have to look back far in their family trees to find stories of close-knit, hardworking families. Their great-great-grandparents, my great-grandparents, raised ten children in a log cabin with no indoor plumbing or electricity. They raised hogs and cattle and grew corn and tobacco and taught their children the value of hard, honest work. Nonetheless, my cousins reflect the realities of contemporary Appalachia—reckless, malcontented, drug addicted youth whose estrangement from their roots has been fueled by lack of opportunities and a loss of connection with the rich culture that shaped their forebears.
It is a reality Diane Sawyer explored in her 2009 expose on the poverty and alienation and sense of desolation that sometimes exists in rural Appalachia, a reality almost glorified in The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia, another documentary which came out that same year. These are, without a doubt, true pictures of life at certain times, in certain places in Appalachia. However, this is not our only reality. We are also creative, clever, playful, innovative, resilient, rich in all the arts—musical, literary, visual, performing—steeped in powerful oral tradition, and those of us who grew up here are constantly struggling to reconcile these contradictory parts of our lives.
No one articulates this conflict of the contemporary Appalachian soul better than Old Crow Medicine Show. When I first heard them play at Thomas Wolfe Auditorium in Asheville back in 2007, they were just on the cusp of becoming really big. I had never even heard of them before that night, but I was instantly captivated by this group that Doc Watson had only recently discovered busking on a street corner in Boone, North Carolina. Although they did not all originally hail from Appalachia (bass player Gill Landry is from Louisiana, and guitjo player Kevin Hayes is from Massachusetts ) and their audiences reach far beyond the boundaries of Appalachia, they capture the essence of this place and remind us who we are.
In part, it is their style—innovative and edgy and, well, just hard to pin down. They play traditional mountain instruments—guitar, banjo, harmonica, bass, fiddle—in new and unexpected ways, simultaneously honoring tradition and defying convention. They are blue-grassy, but not in the traditional sense. And they seem a little country, old school country like Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard and George Jones. And they have some of Sam Bush’s newgrass attitude as well. At times, they are bluesy. But the result is greater than any of the individual elements—something fresh and maybe even radical.
Old Crow doesn’t write all of their own songs, but they write many of them, and the songs they perform are as rich and diverse as the region which gave them their start. They sing about the natural beauty of Appalachia—the mountains and rivers and byways that have shaped her people. And with characteristic playfulness and Appalachian subtlety, they spin songs of love and loss so real you would swear you have met these women they have loved—women like “Genevieve” (“with your love like fire and a heart like a guillotine…Genevieve, you’re so bad/worst person I know and the greatest lover I ever had”) and “Caroline” and the unnamed women in songs like “Down Home Girl,” “The Greatest Hustler of All,” and “My Good Gal.”
These songs are both celebrations of life lived fully and laments in the truest tradition of old-time ballads. And like Conway Twitty when he croons, “I want to lay you down,” these guys can talk about sex without ever actually mentioning the act at all. They are chugging along on a train or grinding sausage, but that’s all we get—extended metaphors grand enough to rival T.S. Eliot.
Like Appalachia herself, Old Crow is multilayered, multifaceted, and songs about spirituality, about a benevolent higher being who feels compassion for the suffering of all people (“I Hear Them All,” “Take ’em Away,” “God’s Got It”), share the stage with songs about hard living. As much as they like their music to be fun, this band does not shy away from the hard stuff. They sing about the realities of this place, the new Appalachia that is struggling to reconcile her past lives with her present one. Old Crow sings about young men going off to war, about poverty and the decline of tobacco farms. And when they sing about parties, about corn liquor and the harder stuff—cocaine and methamphetamines—they don’t make it all tight and neat for us.
In the Old Crow world, as in real life, wild parties are fun, an outlet, a release (“Party of the century/no cops allowed…We got wine, whiskey, women and guns/How can you afford not to have any fun”), and though they do sing about the darker side of drug addiction in songs like “Tennessee Pusher,” we get the deep, sensual pull of cocaine in songs like “Down Home Girl” (“I'm going to take you to the muddy river and push you in/So I can watch the water roll on down your velvet skin/I'm gonna take you down to New Orleans, down in Dixie land/So I can watch you do the second line with an umbrella in your hand”).
Finally, just as it is impossible to separate the people of Appalachia from the music which has shaped their collective identity, it is impossible to separate Old Crow from the song that made them famous—“Wagon Wheel.” At once an ode to love and an ode to North Carolina, this song, co-written by the band’s frontman Ketch Secor and Bob Dylan, has become iconic in the south, especially here in North Carolina where we feel a particular joy in having our state capital mentioned by name and where we love the way Ketch says “boo-quet” and not “bow-quet” when he references our state flower.
That night when I first time heard Old Crow perform, the entire front of the Thomas Wolfe auditorium filled with smoke when Ketch sang the line about “catching a trucker out of Philly” and having a “nice, long toke.” I was reminded of that this past winter when I saw Willie Nelson at the same venue. Like Old Crow, Willie seems just as comfortable singing about Jesus as he does about drugs and alcohol, and when he sang “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die,” a song he introduced as “a little hymn I wrote,” the auditorium erupted in cheers.
The crowd was mainly local, and we locals know a rebel call when we hear it—a call to individualism and innovation and self-sufficiency. It is something that every native Appalachian, even my errant cousins, must feel. After all, we are the region that gave birth to Popcorn Sutton, the moonshiner who steadfastly refused to shut down his still even when he faced prison time, a stance which, for many of us, became synonymous with the independent spirit of our forebears.
This past May, I once again saw Old Crow perform at Thomas Wolfe Auditorium, but, this time, only one or two diehards lit up. Those people were promptly escorted out of the auditorium by security. Apparently, the civic center (now the U.S. Cellular Center) has cracked down on this sort of thing, which may or may not be a good thing, depending on how you look at it. In my book, it’s just another example of how we, as a people and a region, are rapidly changing.
We have traded paper mills for craft breweries and gift shops, diners for creperies and bistros, bear and coon hunting for mountain biking and winery tours. And in the process, some of our people have been left behind, which is why Old Crow is such an important character in the unfolding story of Appalachia. Old Crow takes us on a tour of these mountains and reintroduces us to her people.
In the music of Old Crow, the Appalachian people are no longer flat characters on a page, but real, live, breathing people, people full of humor and convictions, people with gifts and dreams and aspirations, people who have loved and lost, who have fought in wars and who have fought poverty and unemployment and addiction and boredom and displacement just the same, people whose lives cannot be reduced to a New York-based documentary or a newspaper story about a nineteen-year-old girl in search of a fix. The music of Old Crow reminds us who we are, and it invites us to begin the difficult business of redefining ourselves on our own terms. In fact, it demands that of us.
*This essay originally appeared in Now and Then: The Appalachian Magazine.
