American string band Old Crow Medicine Show prefers its songs to tell a story. Shane Gilchrist reports.
The drawl of Critter Fuqua, a founding member of American roots revivalists Old Crow Medicine Show, is clearly not limited to the harmonies he has lent to many of the band's songs over the years.
Fuqua is on the phone from Salem, Virginia. Really, this is only worth mentioning because the city borders the larger municipality of Roanoke, a place that features in the lyrics to his band's best-known song, Wagon Wheel.
Old Crow Medicine Show released that track in 2004. It's what you'd call a slow-burner; in November last year Wagon Wheel was accorded gold label status by the Recording Industry Association of America for sales of more than 600,000 digital tracks; this despite a lack of radio network backing and/or significant promotion in the United States.
Still, a bit of legend helps.
As a teenager, Fuqua's old friend and band-mate Ketch Secor picked up the thread of a few lines sung by Bob Dylan in the out-takes of the soundtrack to 1973 Western film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid; Secor wrote his own verses around Dylan's chorus ("Rock me mama ..."), Dylan went along with the proposal for a co-credit and the result is a sing-along embraced by college kids, campfire crooners and covers bands alike.
But let's get back to the present.
As per one of the verses to Wagon Wheel, the members of Old Crow Medicine Show have, indeed, been "walkin' to the south, out of Roanoke" of late, treading some familiar paths on a relatively short tour spanning several weeks.
"It's very much old stomping ground for me and Ketch," Fuqua explains.
"We grew up in the Shenandoah Valley [Virginia] near here. We've been on tour for about six weeks; we've got six more gigs then we'll take a break for about a month ... people are loving the new stuff."
Fuqua is referring to Old Crow Medicine Show's new album, Carry Me Back. Recorded at Nashville's legendary Sound Emporium facility, where REM laid down Document and Robert Plant and Alison Krauss completed the acclaimed Raising Sand, the band's sixth studio effort (it follows 2008's Tennessee Pusher) is not so much shiny-bright as gnarled and dusty.
Though it treads (sometimes frenetically) through bluegrass territory while also touching on mid-tempo folk-rock, a la Dylan's collaborators The Band, Carry Me Back avoids lazy platitudes by virtue of exemplary lyricism.
Notwithstanding the technically adept playing or all those close harmonies, old-fashioned story-telling lies at the heart of this work.
In regards the album, Fuqua has found himself in a strange position: though the founding member of Old Crow Medicine Show (along with Secor and Willie Watson) says he loves Carry Me Back, he actually had very little to do with it.
Late last year, as Old Crow Medicine Show put the final flourishes to Carry Me Back with producer Ted Hutt, whose credits include the Celtic folk-punk of Dropkick Murphys and Flogging Molly, among others, Fuqua rejoined the line-up following a five-year hiatus. As he entered, fellow founding member Watson departed (apparently, the comings and goings are unconnected).
"About November last year, Willie left the band. I was in school and no-one really knew what the band would look like so Ketch and I did a little duo thing in January, March and May this year. Ketch and I had to reconnect and play again, and build it back up from there," Fuqua says.
"We were playing stuff we hadn't done in years. Ketch and I have been playing together for 20 years so it was a bit like going back in time."
The 34-year-old guitar and banjo player describes the process of rebuilding the band as "organic".
After those tours as a duo, he and Secor (vocals, fiddle, banjo, harmonica) brought in Morgan Jahnig (double bass), then new member Chance McCoy (guitar, vocals) before rehearsing with a full line-up including Gill Landry (slide guitar, banjo) and Kevin Hayes (six-string banjo).
"By the time I rejoined, they were finishing the last tracks on the album, so I just came in and helped out in the studio.
"I laid down an accordion track and some harmonies, nothing much, but enough to get back in the groove. I think I played accordion on Ways of Man and some harmonies on Country Girl and Sewanee Mountain Catfight.
"I really love the album. For me and Chance, coming to the group, we both had to learn the stuff on the album. I'm having a good time playing the songs. I actually feel more connected to the band and the music. I feel more `present'."
Fuqua says his decision to take a break from Old Crow Medicine Show in 2007 was both straightforward and difficult.
"I had to get sober and I also wanted to go to school. I had to take a step back from the band. It was kind of obvious I had to take a break. It was tough at the time but I did the right thing.
"I was torn at the beginning, but after a while I was getting into my schooling. I was studying English at a little university in Texas. I played with them on and off when they were on the road. But I was pretty happy not to be on the road.
"I never stopped playing music. It was never about not enjoying the music; I just had to get well again.
"When it's on, it feels great. It is almost intangible. Everyone is doing their best, doing their job, and when it all comes together ... well, you know when it clicks."
Growing up in Harrisonburg, near the Blue Ridge Mountains, which are referenced in various songs, including the late John Denver's Take Me Home, Country Roads, Fuqua didn't begin his musical career by playing fiddle and banjo. In fact, the first band he enjoyed US heavy rock act Guns N' Roses.
"I loved Nirvana when they came out, likewise The Pixies and The Breeders. I was in hard rock bands all through high school, but for some reason I gravitated towards this stuff."
Fuqua met Secor, Old Crow Medicine Show's key songwriter, at high school in the early 1990s. The pair clicked immediately, he recalls, going on to perform in a range of different acts and growing both technically and creatively.
"There have been quite a few pivotal moments in our career," Fuqua says, mentioning the group's 1998 cassette-only release Trans:mission, which prompted a two-month odyssey across the United States and Canada.
Among the stops was Boone, North Carolina, where the band members met bluegrass guitar legend Doc Watson, who put them on the bill for his own traditional music event, Merlefest.
From there the band was invited to the celebrated Grand Ole Opry Plaza Party, then received a helping hand from American roots revivalist Dave Rawlings, who produced 2006 effort Big Iron World and the band's 2004 major label debut O.C.M.S, which featured Wagon Wheel, a song Fuqua says has "become part of the folklore canon".
"People play it around campfires; it has taken on a life of its own without getting lots of backing. People who don't know about Old Crow Medicine Show know about Wagon Wheel."
Old Crow Medicine Show might not enjoy the same success as more mainstream country acts, yet it has still sold more than 700,000 albums, made multiple appearances on live radio variety show A Prairie Home Companion, as well as the Grand Ole Opry.
More recently, the band has been involved in a tour documentary, Big Easy Express, which premiered in March at the South By Southwest Film Festival. The movie documents last year's "Railroad Revival Tour", which featured Old Crow Medicine Show on tour with fellow American outfit Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros as well as British act Mumford & Sons, all of whom travelled on a vintage train, playing at stops along the way.
Those three bands are among a range of acts that collectively constitute an ongoing roots-folk music revival; others include The Felice Brothers, Blitzen Trapper, Fleet Foxes and, more recently, The Lumineers. It's part of a continuum that stretches not decades but a century or more.
"Folk music, roots music, Americana, bluegrass, old-time music ... I'm not too crazy about all those categories," Fuqua says. "Back in the day, it was just called `music'.
"There have been many revivals, including folk in the 1960s. I think we are a link in a long chain. For some reason the banjo and fiddle are so accessible to people and you can put the energy that goes into rock music into this.
"I think we have had something to do with this revival in the sense that now you can't throw a rock in any direction without hitting a band that has banjos and upright basses. Twelve years ago, that wasn't so much the case. I think it's great."
By investigating traditional roots music, be it fitting new words to old tunes or exploring lyrical techniques such as the classic "bait and switch" of Carry Me Back To Virginia, in which the bravado of young Civil War soldiers is suddenly replaced by scenes of gore, Old Crow Medicine Show does reveal an eye to the past.
The approach is refreshing nonetheless.
"I'm a historian - not professionally - but if you go back and look at these old songs, you are looking into the nation's past, the world's past," Fuqua says.
"You learn so much more than just about music. You learn about people, about culture, specific incidents in history, relationships between people long dead. Folk music is story-telling. You learn about legends and ghosts, all kinds of stuff.
"The story-songs are great because when you're really specific about an area, a river or an occupation, it becomes universal in the sense it is no longer abstract; it is concrete. People gravitate towards that. A song becomes more than just about a guy having a hard time; it becomes a story about a boatman on the James River who doesn't get any work because the railroad has come through.
"The resason I chose to study English at university was because I love stories. And we are just putting stories to songs."
