Old Crow Medicine Show

It was my freshman year of high school. We'd just moved into a new two-story house which afforded me many opportunities that our single story ranch house didn't. First and foremost was the ability to stay awake to all hours of the night in the bonus room, which would later be dubbed "The Man Cave." On one such night, I was up until about 3 a.m. desperately trying to beat Red Dead Revolver on the Playstation 2. After failing to beat the boss of the twelfth level (the half bear half man one) for about the twentieth time, I angrily turned off the console. I then proceeded to retreat into the warm cocoon of teenage angst known as MTV.

Now, this was MTV back in the day when they actually played music for about a half hour every other day or so, and usually the music came on once advertisers no longer found it profitable to inundate my generation with Pepsi, Coke and Dorito commercials. I got lucky that night and found a program that covered up and coming bands in the independent music scene. The featured band that night just happened to be Old Crow Medicine Show.

This is the point where every college student in America starts to have the opening guitar riff of "Wagon Wheel" running through their heads. Yes, that is by far the most popular and commercially successful song that OCMS has ever written. It's the song that has become a staple at tailgates, parties and southern college life in general. As a fan of shagging (state dance of SC for those of you with your head in the gutter), I'm a huge fan of Wagon Wheel. If I had a dollar for every time me and Emily Adams danced to this song, I'd be a rich man. However, it's only one song in a large catalog of songs written by an incredibly talented string band. In fact, Wagon Wheel earned OCMS the ire of the entire string band community who's hallmark for years has been heritage. Radio play is not part of the heritage of string band music.

Wagon Wheel is not completely indicative of the style of Old Crow Medicine Show. If you take the time to listen to entire albums of their work, you'll find that they are very much rooted in traditional string band music. Songs like "Big Time in the Jungle" and "James River Blues" whose lyrics are melancholy recollections of monumental events in American history, show that the band is not out solely for commercial success. They're musicians in the truest since of the world. A group of guys who've come together to take a very traditional form of music and imbue it with a certain je ne sais quoi that makes you want to delve deeper into the music and lyrics to find what makes it tick.

When I decided to write about Old Crow Medicine Show this week, I sat down and listened to the album "Big Iron World" in its entirety. I've pulled out my favorite song of that album for y'all to listen to.