Ketch Secor

00:00:02
Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast. My guest today is Catch Secor of the Old Crow Medicine Show. Catch, you're a busy guy. What keeps you going? What are you doing all this time?
00:00:15
Speaker 2: Bob, thanks so much for having me on the show. I am a busy guy. I've been in this band for twenty eight years. I'm getting married in a couple of weeks to this amazing singer. I chase after my own children. I started a school, so I'm really involved with nonprofits. I'm involved with politics. I'm I don't even know where to start on what I'm not working on right now?
00:00:39
Speaker 1: Bob, how about you? Okay, well I can tell you my story, but this is about you. So when do you get married?
00:00:47
Speaker 2: I get married on August twenty second, don't you know?
00:00:50
Speaker 1: And so the second time around, how seriously do you take it? How big a deal?
00:00:56
Speaker 2: Well?
00:00:56
Speaker 1: This is the big one.
00:00:57
Speaker 2: This is the This is that me and Molly Tuttle. I've been together for six years now, and we're we're throwing quite a bash in the Redwood forest, don't you know.
00:01:12
Speaker 1: We'll tell me a little more.
00:01:14
Speaker 2: Well, I'll tell you that I met her well, I first heard Molly on the radio. I'm a really avid radio listener. First time I ever got a radio was I was in the fourth grade. See, I had a paper route and I had to get an alarm clock because I had to get up at five point thirty in the morning. And I went down to the shop and I got an alarm clock that happened to have an AM radio on it. So all of a sudden, not only was I getting up early, but at night I could listen to the stations from Cincinnati and Detroit and Toronto and Quebec and all of these amazing ways that I felt so connected to the rest of the continent because of the power of this late night clear channel AM signal. And I love talk Net. That was a talk radio show where you had to call in with your issues, and I dreamed that I would have a problem so big that only talk radio could talk me down from the cliff. Anyhow, it was no surprise then that I would meet the love of my life listening to the radio one night when I heard this voice in this wonderful guitar playing, and I knew right then I had to meet this woman, Molly Tuttle.
00:02:25
Speaker 1: Okay, remember where you were in what station it was? Yeah, sure I was. I was next door in the house over there. I just moved in.
00:02:35
Speaker 2: You know. It was like right in the middle of getting divorced, and I had two kids upstairs asleep, you know, about six and four, and there was no furniture in the house, so just the radio kind of bare bones part of life, right. And this was in the year twenty eighteen, and the station was AM six fifty WSM and the program was called The Grand Old Lotry.
00:03:02
Speaker 1: Okay, so you hear her, you say, you have to beat this woman. What's your next step?
00:03:10
Speaker 2: Well, my next step was to leave the next day and travel to Walpole, New Hampshire for the for the new Ken Burns movie that they were having me advise him on called Country Music as a sixteen hour mini series. So I had it up there and that gave me a whole new kind of lease on LFE. I was like, I was thinking about Molly, this new person that I was interested in and confused about, and all of a sudden, I was like, Ken really sort of jogged my mind and made me feel like, oh, well, I got this. It's going to be fun. Not being married anymore and raising these kids with somebody else. It'll be good, It'll all be fine. And then back to Ms.
00:03:53
Speaker 1: Tuttle.
00:03:54
Speaker 2: The next move was to get Molly to work with me an Old Crow Medicine show. So about six months past and then Molly was opening up for Old Crow at the Ryman. We still hadn't met before, and I remember being there at the soundcheck we were performing, and she came walking across the stage at the Ryman Auditorium and I thought.
00:04:17
Speaker 1: Immediately, oh my god, look at her. I've got to break up with my girlfriends. So you were getting divorced you already had a girlfriend?
00:04:29
Speaker 2: No, No, I'd already been I was already divorced.
00:04:32
Speaker 1: Okay, but you did have a girlfriend when you saw a bother?
00:04:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, he had a boyfriend.
00:04:38
Speaker 1: That's fine, okay. So what were the new steps involved in getting together?
00:04:43
Speaker 2: Well, we just needed to become friends.
00:04:45
Speaker 1: See.
00:04:46
Speaker 2: So first we started as business colleagues, I guess probably like a lot of people with Tuttle, like I started as a fan. You know, she got a lot of fans, and then we became you know, colleagues, right because she's opening up the show.
00:05:00
Speaker 1: Well, then she's doing.
00:05:01
Speaker 2: Five other dates with us that summer, and then at sort of the last date of the summer, I said.
00:05:07
Speaker 1: Hey, how about you and I go on a duo tour.
00:05:10
Speaker 2: We'll book something around Christmas when we're both kind of off, will just be the two of us, and we'll so again just sort of pushing it, seeing how it is shape. And then I determined, well, let's just be friends. I was just going to befriend this lady. So we turned into good friends, and then we started writing songs together. She still had her sweetheart and I still had mine. And then during the global pandemic, remember how that sort of made you rethink everything you were doing, and it made if you feel like you wanted to be really truthful about the way that you were the choices you were making, really brutally honest, because it seemed like if there was ever a time to go get what you wanted, well, this would be the time. The time when there wasn't any job, anything to do all day except for what you made of your day. You know, I was running my quarantine homeschool with the kids, and I perfected this this curriculum. We started the morning every day with a spiritual program. We would read a passage from some holy book, maybe the Bible, maybe the bagavad Gita, maybe Lausu poems, maybe Gregory Corso's bomb, whatever it was. We would take in something powerful and of a spiritual persuasion. And I guess it was working on me too. And oh and I got a smartphone right then, same time I got a smartphone during the pandemic. Well that was really powerful because suddenly I was connected to what people were doing, you know, like I could like before when I had a flip phone all through the other decade. Previously, you know, i'd have to be like, what are you sending me? Or what is described this photo that you're saying that you sent me. Now I could just get real time, and now I could start. Then I could follow Molly Tuttle on social media, see what she was up to, watch her videos and anyhow, all that sort of came together, and that's when I wrote it, started writing funny. I got me a smartphone, and then I started writing her letters because I went back to my old tricks.
00:07:23
Speaker 1: Bob.
00:07:24
Speaker 2: See, you can't you can't teach an old dog new ones, even if he's got a damn computer in his pocket. I'm still just a letter writing thumb wagon hitch hiker from the nineties. I just I can't shake how I am. So I've tried to get updated.
00:07:43
Speaker 1: Anyhow.
00:07:44
Speaker 2: But when I went to declare my love to her with all of the faculties at my disposal, with every high speed Giga whatever, I had to do it with a damn pencil.
00:07:58
Speaker 1: So where was she during the pend? She lived about two miles from me, okay, And so you sent her a letter. How long until you've heard back from her about that letter?
00:08:21
Speaker 2: I think about was she she went on this road trip with her boyfriends. And that's I knew that she was going because, you know, like as a pandemic, so we were all nobody had gone anywhere, and it was so phenomenal.
00:08:35
Speaker 1: How I.
00:08:37
Speaker 2: Did the math, Bob, and I realized that I had never stood this still since I was thirteen years old, and now here I am about forty two, maybe as how old I was during the pandemic twenty twenty. Yeah, I was born in seventy eight, so I was forty two years old, and in thirty five some odd years, I had never gone six weeks without moving somewhere going, you know, like since I had been in about the eighth grade, that's how once, because I went away to high school and so that high school was like a traveling thing, you know, in a fancy New England prep school where you would go quarterly. And I was some point I was probably in Hampton Beach, New Hampshire. I'd taken the bus to Boston or the Peter Pan trailways up to Burlington, Vermont to play on the street corner and then I you know, by then I was once, I was eighteen, Lord knows, I was going all the time. So it was a big deal that Molly was heading cross country. And I wrote the letter right before she took off so that she would have my intentions on her way, and uh yeah. She sent me a message on the text about about two weeks after that and told told me that she was feeling it too. So that's when our friendship began to take this turn. We've been friends for about a year and a half and then the pandemic ratcheted up the tension, and then we started dating just a little bit, and immediately it seemed like, oh, this is this could never work, but then it did, and it just at every impasse, we just kept pushing through and look at us now.
00:10:17
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, A couple of questions, to what degree did you hang it out in that letter? To what degree did you profess your.
00:10:23
Speaker 2: Love to the to the ninth degree, to the umpteenth degree, to the to you know, shovel off to buffalo kind of degree.
00:10:35
Speaker 1: And did you think that possibly she might not feel the same way?
00:10:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it was the pandemic, so it was okay if she didn't, at least I would know, and you know, as far as like behaving honestly and openly about what I felt. And it wasn't the only relationship that I sought to do something about at that time. The pandemic really helped me want to forge a new path or you know, cut a new trail in other relationships too that were non romantic relationships. So a lot of things were changing. But yeah, she she didn't say no.
00:11:17
Speaker 1: But now you get her. Just she's going off on this cross country trip with her present boyfriend. What was that like for her?
00:11:29
Speaker 2: I think that's that she realized that she had wanted to break up with him for a while. And we were both a little our feelings were really intense, and I hadn't felt him before, you know, like, and i'd been married. You know, I married my high school sweetheart, and I dated a little bit, but most of all, and then when I got divorced, I dated a little bit and learned a few things, but most of all, I was just somebody, you know, like I'm a Roman tick bob. You know, you could probably tell look what I'm wearing. I got a pink shirt on and bright orange pants. You know, I went sailing earlier today. I'm a romantic guy. Like I'm my wind. The wind hits my sails and it pushes me forward. I'm an artist, so you know, I feel great, big feelings, and my loves are my arms are barely wide enough to contain them. I love people very much. I love music very much.
00:12:32
Speaker 1: Okay, And from the time you send that letter, how long until your face to face?
00:12:40
Speaker 2: I think it was. Our first date was like six weeks after that. She had gotten back from her big road trip. The boyfriend had moved out, see they were living together, and we had had we had a face to face.
00:12:55
Speaker 1: You know.
00:12:56
Speaker 2: It was sort of like there was the face to face and then the le It was kind of both. So yeah, then about by about July. You know, we went on our first date in the twenty twenty and we went down to Shelby Park and we saw a great music writer there, somebody that I always loved a lot named Peter Cooper, who died just a few months after that. Peter worked for the Tennessee in here, but then he got this big job working at the at the Country Music Hall of Fame. And he was somebody who had great respect for me and great respect for Mollie. And as you know, we live in East Nashville, so it's like we're around each other, like I see the same people, like I see Gilly much at the grocery store, like it's just where we live. And I saw Peter Cooper that day that we had our first date, and he was dead not six months later. And we saw him again one time when we were together, and his decline was so rapid he started to look like a ghost when I saw him that one time, and then the next time, just a few months later, he looked ashen, and then he was gone, and he died of alcoholism.
00:14:10
Speaker 1: And it was a.
00:14:13
Speaker 2: Really really painful for all of us who loved that guy, and uh and half the town of Spartanburg, South Carolina.
00:14:22
Speaker 1: Probably still morning. Okay, you've been married before, you had this brief interregnum where you were single and dating. You felt something for Mollie, did anything in the back of your mind say, I like being involved with her, but I didn't need to be married to her.
00:14:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean we started dating and then it wasn't really like that wasn't on the table. But I knew I wanted to marry her basically immediately, and that I had met my person, like my the person that I had experienced this painful divorce. You know, I felt it so strongly that I really wanted to tell my children and my ex wife, but I didn't.
00:15:14
Speaker 1: I kept that to myself.
00:15:16
Speaker 2: That.
00:15:16
Speaker 1: Oh I think I understand now what this was all for. So what caused the divorce?
00:15:23
Speaker 2: Oh? I guess most of all, she just didn't want to be married to me anymore and.
00:15:35
Speaker 1: Split. Was there a third party involved? No? So how much did that hurt? Oh? It was terrible.
00:15:47
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, she just dumped me and moved on. But that's okay. You know, she's a she's an artist too, and people, the wind hits you in the right way. So I only you're turn in another direction. But when you got two kids like I did, and you know, I had kids ages three and five, so it was a really it was truly shocking.
00:16:08
Speaker 1: That she was leaving. It was like.
00:16:13
Speaker 2: I hadn't experienced an agony in my life ever like this, you know. It was there was a level of pain that I just and I didn't see it come in.
00:16:27
Speaker 1: I had no idea.
00:16:29
Speaker 2: So I was really blindsided by this huge change that came into my life at about age forty thirty nine or something. And at that time when she split, I was I had just chartered this new school, So starting as school and going through a divorce, I think, looking back on it, I realized that this nonprofit work was sort of like my lighthouse that was keeping me from crashing into the rocks. I was also stone cold sober through the whole thing, you know, so I was stealing it all thoroughly. You know, there was no numbing of the pain. And then starting a school meant that, like, even though I was crying in every red light in Nashville and every off ramp and on ramp and beating my breast in traffic, I had to, you know, I was the chairman of the board of a nonprofit that had to like breathe life into this entity and like make it a great and wonderful place for children. So I think just having a real mission that was unrelated to my suffering and actually became a kind of holistic part of the healing, just to sort of distract me with the world's most challenging thing starting a school.
00:17:54
Speaker 1: Oh my god, that was crazy.
00:17:57
Speaker 2: And so that was you know, that was a five year project that happened right there, right as you know, right as she was walking out the door.
00:18:05
Speaker 1: So did she literally move on? Are you the soul? Do you have soul custody? Or is she still the picture with your children? What is going on there? Yeah, it's fifty to fifty, fifty to fifty, So now there's another party involved, Mollie. Are things friendly or is it tough? Yeah, no, it's it's fine. I mean, we all.
00:18:28
Speaker 2: It's a blended family. So I just my parents are married, and I didn't know that many people that were divorced. So divorce wasn't ever something that I was like wrecked on or really knew that much about. And it certainly wasn't like, as I mentioned some that I foresaw for myself at any point in my life.
00:18:49
Speaker 1: But then when it.
00:18:50
Speaker 2: Was thrust upon me, well, then I realized that all my kids' friends were divorced to every single damn one of them, and that they were all, you know, and blended family and relationships. So I mean, I say, as a blended family like the the you know, it's amicable between me and my ex, but she's not really come around that much. But yeah, everybody's friendly. Most of all, it's Molly moved in about a year and a half ago, and you know, all the kids just love her. She's such a wonderful person. God, she is really, really a very special person. She's out on the road right now in Oregon or where I'd be like, hey, come show Bob what an amazing person you are.
00:19:38
Speaker 1: And I know it may be too soon to tell, but would you anticipate having children with Molly too?
00:19:47
Speaker 2: Uh?
00:19:49
Speaker 1: I reckon not.
00:19:50
Speaker 3: But maybe let's go back to the school.
00:20:02
Speaker 1: What inspired you to start a school?
00:20:05
Speaker 2: Well, mom and dad were educators, are educators, and they're retired now from this work. But I went to five different elementary schools by the time I was in the fifth grade, in five different states. And it was all on account of my mom and dad moving around with the work that they were doing, learning about elementary education and ultimately getting to the point where Dad started schools and he did this as a as a as a headmaster, principal, school founder.
00:20:38
Speaker 1: So when I was.
00:20:41
Speaker 2: When I was about thirty three, my first daughter was born, my first child was born, and my ex wife said to me, why don't you doesn't it seem like this could be a good neighborhood for you to do like what your dad does, And I thought, okay, yeah, let me put out some feelers. That's a good idea, that'd be cool. And it just so happened that all the feelers took, you know, like they I went to It's an episcopal school, right, So my first move was to go to the bishop of the Diocese of Tennessee, and basically he gave me a punch list, and I did everything on the punch list, and then everything that I punched out on that list made me another list, and I punched that out, and then.
00:21:29
Speaker 1: The snowball just kept rolling and rolling.
00:21:33
Speaker 2: And pretty soon we had a ledgling board and a.
00:21:38
Speaker 1: Whole bunch of people on it.
00:21:39
Speaker 2: And then it was time to hire a head of school and teachers and find a location. And then they said, we want you to lead it, and I said, okay, I guess I will. And so you know, I did about eighty five shows that year that I first became the chairman of the board of this nonprofit. And I was doing it all on Like I told you, I had a flip phone at this time, so I just I had like hamstrung myself with technology. I'm at the library in Peoria, and you know, Saint Louis and Kansas City, every town I'm traveling in, I go to the library so I can make sure that the school is failing.
00:22:24
Speaker 1: It was a wild ride from the moment your wife, ex wife excuse me, said you should do this till the door's opened. How long was I four years at this point in time? How many kids? Five years? How many kids go to that school? The school is in its eleventh year starting in August, and there'll be one hundred and fifty kids in it. And how did the economics work?
00:22:53
Speaker 2: I met some people by about year six of the school who were willing to become really principal, you know, transformational gift givers.
00:23:09
Speaker 1: But in the but the first half of it.
00:23:12
Speaker 2: I was the largest donor and I did it all with my money from Darius Rucker.
00:23:18
Speaker 1: Okay, so it's an Episcopal school. I know people going to Piscopal schools where there really was not much religion involved. What is it like at your.
00:23:29
Speaker 2: School, Like you're described, it's very it's not a religious environment at all. Really it is at the chapel, but the rest of the time it's just not And like a lot of Episcopal schools, the you know, the vibe is pretty It's a school with a lot of kids that have two moms and two dads, or a school with biracial kids with biracial families or blended families, or you know. And certainly there's a lot of kids that are not Christian at all. There's Jewish kids, there's Muslim kids, there's Bahai kids. We had a big Bahi force in the in the infancy of the school. Kind of my my ald the guy I often I've often needed something to rub against, like a like a grindstone in life, like somebody to make some sparks with as a as a as a doer of hard things, like being in a band for twenty eight years. I always needed something that that I could push against. I'm a real collaborative type of artist person. And anyway, one of my principal uh counterpoints in the starting of the school comes from this faith called the Bahai Faith, which is from Iran and Persia. And so you know, I'm saying this just to show that, you know, the religion factor of the school was pretty wide open. And my idea, like during the pandemic of what is what are spiritual texts kids? Well, here's the whole name rack of them. You know, I think you know Jack London and Jack harrowac just to name a couple of Jacks.
00:25:18
Speaker 1: Okay, Now, more than any time in my lifetime, they're different education philosophies. You know, some people teach to the book, some people are banning books. What is the philosophy of the education at your school?
00:25:36
Speaker 2: Well, there's a lot of hot button issues that you that you're alluding to right there with some are teaching them, some are banning them. And we're definitely on the teaching side and not on the banning side. But I live in a state that's been very has really busied itself with making sure that these so called woke agendas are not, you know, infiltrating the school systems, and the kids aren't being forced to learn about tolerance or what slavery might have felt like or whatever.
00:26:11
Speaker 1: You know.
00:26:12
Speaker 2: Anyway, I don't really fool with that stuff. You know, there's plenty of schools out there for parents that want their kids to grow up in an environment where they don't know how richly diverse this country is, or the city is, or even their own zip code. And that's fine, you make those choices. But our school is certainly one where we celebrate all of our differences. And you know, the curriculum is really focused in a classic sense on reading and math and some of the computering stuff. It's a little slow. We probably need to get the tech going a little bit better. It's a startup so startup schools. It is different in the charter movement because sometimes charter schools, I mean, there's a lot of brand new charter schools in Nashville and this is not one of them. We're just you know, this school is sort of is made by a community, and so it really feels like a community school. You know, the overwhelming number of families come from this zip code now, and it wasn't that way when we started it when we just had sixteen kids.
00:27:22
Speaker 1: What grades does the school have.
00:27:25
Speaker 2: It starts with three year old, so that's called three K and that's new. Like when when I started the school it was it was four classes, a blended pre KK and a blended one two. So it started in four grades, sixteen kids. Two construction trailers that I diligently got Metro to agree to for two years in the church parking lot over by the show Neees that burned down by the Girst House that they demoed to build the new Taylor Swift Swift Memorial ball Stadium that they are putting up right now down the street from me.
00:28:04
Speaker 1: So presently, where is it in? What grade?
00:28:08
Speaker 2: So presently We moved to a permanent building when I got me a lease from Metro. And this was all when I was still running the board and working really closely with the head of school, who was, you know, a friend of mine. You know, we'd kind of gotten into this together.
00:28:25
Speaker 1: And we are now in a.
00:28:29
Speaker 2: Historic Metro school building built in about nineteen oh six. And it feels a little bit like Ramona Quimby being washed across the street by her father and Jesus is there. It's old school. It's very Beverly cleary school scene.
00:28:48
Speaker 1: But what grade if I start out at age three? How long could I go to this school?
00:28:54
Speaker 2: You can go until until you're finishing the sixth grade. For a while we had a middle school program, but again with the beakers and the test tubes and the computers, you know, we just didn't have the kind of program that you know, the curb appeal like we had kids.
00:29:13
Speaker 1: But when I first.
00:29:15
Speaker 2: Started it, we did this study from Belmont University and about the demographics of the neighborhood and everything said start at middle school. But then when we had a you know, K through six and then we are adding the seventh and at eighth, immediately it was like, don't start in middle school. So sometimes the numbers aren't right. I know a lot of people in the music business loved to go by the numbers, and I never I feel like it's best to be led by the spirit.
00:29:46
Speaker 1: Okay, this is audio only, but I saw you get up get a cup of coffee with the mocamaster. How'd you get turned out to the mocamaster?
00:29:55
Speaker 2: Uh? My friend got me a uh, she got this for me because she's a I don't know, works for a huge company that maybe makes these or owns these alongside. And she's married to the Senator Hickenlooper from Colorado. I know these people. Yes, yeah, he ran for president. He's a great friend of mine. And his name is John Hickenlooper, and he's just so great. I introduced him to his wife, Robin.
00:30:23
Speaker 1: She went to high school. Wait wait, wait, wait wait, I know both these people. I heard their story. How did you you know? I've heard their version. You tell me how you introduced him?
00:30:33
Speaker 2: Sure, I mean I was just just thinking about him because I was where I introduced him, which was at Red Rocks. Old Crow was there. It was twenty thirteen. I was there with my daughter and wife and and our good friend from high school, Robin, and John Hickenlooper was there because he was a friend of the Avid Brothers. You know, he's always around musicians. And we were sitting up there in the dressing rooms and I heard, you know, Robin and my ex wife talking about the guy down there, and she's like, yeah, that's John Hickenlooper. He's the governor. He used to be the mayor of Denver. I met him at a party one time, but I don't know, I think I'm gonna go talk to him. Well she did, and then they started dating and then they got married and now they got a kid, and so yeah, we're old friends.
00:31:23
Speaker 1: Now, Okay, let's jump back.
00:31:26
Speaker 2: So that's why I got the Mocha Master.
00:31:29
Speaker 1: Okay, the wedding is on the twenty fourth in the Redwood. So what's the wedding going to be. What is it going to be? How many people? Oh? Hundred and a half. But what are you doing for entertainment? Oh?
00:31:50
Speaker 2: We got a cool bands called the Hot Club of San Francisco playing some jazz standards and Stefan Gripelly type of stuff. I love that kind of music and django. And then you know, a lot of my friends are going to be there in hers too, so there'll be lots of music. You know, her family all plays, and my kids play.
00:32:16
Speaker 1: And you know, all my pals we all make music. Bob.
00:32:20
Speaker 2: It's just it's kind of like the it's sort of a skill set that I tend to find myself around a lot of pickers.
00:32:30
Speaker 1: And who's going to marry you? My dad? So let's go back to the beginning. You say you were in five different states. What were those five different states? Growing up?
00:32:43
Speaker 2: They were Louisiana, New Jersey, Missouri, South Carolina, and Virginia.
00:32:52
Speaker 1: Now they say it's very hard on kids to travel and make new friends. How was it for you?
00:32:59
Speaker 2: I didn't mind it. I didn't know that there was anything hard about it. But I definitely didn't make friends.
00:33:06
Speaker 1: You did or did not? I did not.
00:33:08
Speaker 2: The friends I had were you know, imaginary.
00:33:11
Speaker 1: You know.
00:33:12
Speaker 2: I thought Michael Jackson would have been a good friend. I sang all his songs, I acted like him and mimicked him. I thought my bicycle was a good friend.
00:33:24
Speaker 1: It took me to.
00:33:26
Speaker 2: Drug stores and back alleys and river fronts. And I loved my teachers. I really connected with my teachers. But my best friends were my sisters and mom and dad and my grandparents, the people that were getting into that VW micro bus and rolling on.
00:33:47
Speaker 1: And I had a dog. So how many kids in the family. I'm one of three, and were you in the hierarchy.
00:33:54
Speaker 2: I'm the middle child, so the stable, middle only son. And Dad was ever a very you know, Dad wasn't a rough, tough dad. You know, Dad was a dad was mild mannered, tolerant, a classic administrator. So it was a little bit like sometimes I get around somebody whose father is a preacher, and I feel a similarity. Because my dad was the head of the thing that was and because these were all independent schools, you know, dad, Dad's being the head of the school, there was an approachability factor in independent elementary education that wasn't there in the public school. Like I've had my kids in public school in the past couple of years since they ran out of grades at Episcopal, and I don't I never talked to the person in charge. But at my dad's school, you know, he called this guy all the time. He's a little bit like a priest too, because you know, a lot of a lot of the families that go to an Episcopal school, they don't go to church, and so the school kind of becomes the church. And I've been thinking Bob about because I don't go to church anymore. And I stopped during the pandemic, and I realized that I felt that the school was given me everything that the church was supposed to give me, a sense of community, a sense of purpose, a sense of right and of duty and action. But all I ever saw at the church was moch a master and gossip just shitter chat, you know, like golf scores and shit is so irritating. I wanted to I wanted it to be fiery and have radical empathy and compassion. And it wasn't until I got into the school as Church that I saw an alternative.
00:35:51
Speaker 1: And I still kind of believe that. So i'd you end up going to Exeter.
00:35:56
Speaker 2: I got in on a scholarship from readers Digest got to tell that story. Well, I got a I had really really bad test scores, like laughably bad.
00:36:11
Speaker 1: So here I had, you know, a.
00:36:15
Speaker 2: Whole thought about where I was going to go to school, and then I got my test s course back and I was like, well, I can't go to any of those schools. I better start looking at some lousier schools. But then lo and behold, just out of nowhere, and like my application process to the school like this is where Lincoln sent his kids to school, right, Like this is a hell of a place. My classmate, you know, I went to the same high school as Mark dam Zuckerberg and Gore Vidal. They all went to my school. All these great all these really great thinkers and tinkerers did mostly people in business though, so but I got in on a fluke. I don't know how, and I'm very early.
00:37:01
Speaker 1: Tell me about the reader's digest thing.
00:37:05
Speaker 2: Well, I submitted my application. It was like mostly poetry. I was really into poetry when I was thirteen, wrote a lot of poems. And I submitted this poem and then this sort of plagiarized analysis of really the only decent book that I had read, called Animal Farm by George Orwell. But like you know, straight out of cliff notes, and all of a sudden, like I got the letter back, they said you're in. And then and not only are you in, you're you're a scholarship recipient. You know, they cut the feet in more than half. And I've looked looking back on it, Bob, I think I may have represented a kind of mid nineties diversity as a person from some place really far away from New England. I mean that far away, but you know, Virginia, and living in a town that was self professed to be the poultry capital of the world, where there were feathers flying down the road, and every other high school was named for some part of a chicken, like our big rival where the Gobblers.
00:38:26
Speaker 1: Okay, where I went to college, forty five percent of the people were from prep school, and they were very well read, and they knew the game, you know, certainly and over an Exeter the absolute elite. What was your experience at Exeter. It was the first.
00:38:49
Speaker 2: Place that I really felt like I was home.
00:38:52
Speaker 1: Like it was really great. I liked it. I loved living.
00:38:58
Speaker 2: I loved being fourteen and not being with my parents, not being with my sisters, and not having my old friends, making all new friends. I loved living in New England.
00:39:09
Speaker 1: It was so rich.
00:39:12
Speaker 2: Where I had lived in Virginia, you know, all there was was what was on the radio. And when I got to New England, people listened to all kinds of music, so much music, you know. I listened to The Grateful Dead, and I listened to all this wonderful folk music and music from Equatorial Africa and the Talking Heads is so much great stuff. And then I was learning so much.
00:39:41
Speaker 1: You know.
00:39:42
Speaker 2: Then my best friends back in Virginia, you know, they were instantly. You know, I had to walk through a metal detector to go to school. School was sort of like a place to keep you before they would go send you out to go work at the dollar general or send you into the military, and you know, about half the kid went out of college and then they would forget entirely about their high school because it sucked. It was supposed to be a springboard. But for me, the whole high school experience, like, I didn't go to college. I didn't want any more. I didn't want another serving. I certainly didn't want to go spend four years at Harvard like many of my classmates did. I just wanted to go straight to playing music and getting out on the road and learn and going to see with my own eyes all these places that I learned about from the books that I read up in Exeter, New Hampshire.
00:40:38
Speaker 1: Okay, but there's a real difference between the actual people who were going to Exeter and where you came from. A lot of them are the sons and daughters of wealthy people. They live a lifestyle involving a lot of money. There's a social hierarchy. To what degree were you accepted.
00:41:02
Speaker 2: It? It was great people were you know.
00:41:06
Speaker 1: This was.
00:41:08
Speaker 2: I went to Exeter in nineteen ninety two and I graduated in nineteen ninety six, and everybody was really welcoming kinds you know, it was the I don't know how it is now, and I don't and I think it's very different.
00:41:21
Speaker 1: I got a really wonderful and famous musician friend who went to Exeter named Benmont Tench. Benmont was.
00:41:28
Speaker 2: The principal, a principal member of the Heartbreakers and grew up with Tom Petty in Gainesville, Florida, but went away to Exeter and was classed in nineteen seventy three, four or five or something. And I think in that time Exeter may have been different, or like we read this book by John Knowles called a Separate Piece that is read widely by high schoolers across the country. Well, it's that guy went to Exeter. The you know, Phineas is this Egxzonian character. The whole thing happens at my high school. And so I looked at my own experience, you know, through the lens of time, and I can see that the window in which I arrived and departed from Exeter was, you know.
00:42:12
Speaker 1: It was it was a time in which the.
00:42:16
Speaker 2: Teaching staff and the administ the the admissions team had been really hot to trot about diversity. So I went to school with a lot of kids who were from Spanish Harlem, or from Brooklyn, a lot of Aramco kids from the you know out there in the Middle East. It was really diverse, and so what it wasn't was solely the Boston, the Boston Brahmins.
00:42:45
Speaker 1: Okay, we're in this story. Do you start to play music?
00:42:50
Speaker 2: And the last town that dad started a school in was called Verona, Virginia. Like Verona, like fair Verona where where Palas Romeo and Juliet get together and do the uchiku.
00:43:04
Speaker 1: Well, that was a town that.
00:43:09
Speaker 2: Needed me to get a part in a play, and I was at the I went to Monticello, you know, Thomas Jefferson's place, and that's where I got my first instrument. If I had one here, i'd play it for you, but I guess not in this room. But I got me a jaw harp, and that was in the fourth grade, and then I got a harmonica in the fifth grade, and then the sixth grade I got a penny whistle, and then I could play all those things. But then in the seventh grade, up in my up in the attic, I found my mom's old guitar. Now she had, like a lot of people my mom's age, she grew up thinking that the Kingston Trio were just outrageously cool, and that folk guitar was the thing to do. In nineteen sixty seven, my mother got an acoustic guitar and she it just stayed with us, you know. Mom never played it, but I got it and I learned to play it when I was twelve in the seventh grade.
00:44:15
Speaker 1: How did you learn self taught? Did you take lessons? No?
00:44:19
Speaker 2: I was always self taught. And then the combination was I found my mom's guitar up there. But my uncle had moved to Manila to be a teacher, and he left all of his shit in our attic. And my uncle had My uncle had lived in San Francisco in the summer.
00:44:40
Speaker 1: I love.
00:44:41
Speaker 2: He had gone out there on a motorcycle.
00:44:43
Speaker 1: He had.
00:44:45
Speaker 2: He had gotten arrested, he had burned his draft card. He had gone to Antioch College's San Francisco affiliate called the College without Walls. I would I would get a reduce to all this. When my children were born on a hippie commune called the Farm, which was started by this guru that had been at the same time as my uncle had been in SF. He had come east and this was the back to the land movement. They started this commune down here in middle Tennessee, a place called the Farm. It was one of the most successful intentional communities of the era and their angle was mid Whippery. Anyway, that's where my kids were born. My uncle left all this crap in the attic, and so much of it were these touchstones to his counterculture lifestyle. But what spoke to me the most, Like there was mild pornography, which was really a thrill to find in my own attic at age twelve, Like whoa sweets? There was just boxes of Zippo lighters, just arts. But the most important thing that I found there was his record collect And that's when I were back to the part where I got my clock radio. I quit that job because I had a new job shine and shoes at the at the barber shop downtown, and and I took my money and I bought a record player so I could play all my uncle's records that were up in the attic. And I put these records on it was like the most powerful feeling nothing's ever really felt quite like hearing it for the first time. I could, you know, I could get emotional thinking about it. The feeling of popping this record on by Phil Oakes singing about the murder of Medgar Evers, and I was like, oh my god, what's going on this? Did this just happen? Or are there lynch mobs in this town? And god, it was so arresting to hear the music ofighteen sixty three and listening to Pete Seeger sing live at Carnegie Hall with this whole group of activists singing we Shall Overcome talking about you know how kids weren't allowed to swim in swimming pools and public pools in Alabama and Mississippi, And it was just so I was just it was staggering to hear this music of the protest movement in the sixties, and that really lit a fire for me.
00:47:29
Speaker 1: Okay, so you're listening to the record, you're playing the guitar, Are you learning the songs off the records? Are you playing with people in high school? Oh?
00:47:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, well I'm not in high school yet. I'm in the seventh grade, and that's what I Yeah, right, and I'm playing my first song. You know, it goes in the state of Mississippi. Many years ago, a boy of fourteen years got a taste of southern law, and I can sing all these other songs that felt like like a powerful urgency, like they like they needed to come through me, like they needed another vocalist, they needed like a new vessel, like they had been discovered, Like as if my attic were some sort of like crypt or what's it called where they catacomb. It's like it was like they were and as it was crazy, man, it was like I was hearing voices. It was a really powerful time in life and I felt that and my friends were like unsucked with kick. But then I started writing songs, you know, and my songs were all ripoffs of you know Mary Travers and you know Leo Kotkey, any anything I was listening to became the songs I was writing.
00:48:56
Speaker 1: So you go to actual or do you bring your guitar? Yeah?
00:49:02
Speaker 2: I brought my guitar and to Exeter And in the freshman year I petitioned the what I went to the music department. I said I'd like to get a banjo teacher because I wanted because I was by then I was listening to Bob Dylan. The thing that happened before I went away to Exeter was that in nineteen ninety I went to my first concert when I was twelve, sort of write because of the records I've been listening to and because of the talk I was hearing at the barbershop. See, we had a new black governor, the first in the nation, Douglas Wilder was his name. No state had ever elected a black governor until my state, Virginia did. And the very first thing that the House of Burgesses put across his desk was a new state law that was going to combine Martin Luther king Day in January with the birthdays of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E.
00:49:58
Speaker 1: Lee.
00:50:00
Speaker 2: So the very first piece of bill that he's got to take a look at is called Lee Jackson king Day. And the barbershop is just rife with commentary about the black governor and Lee Jackson king Day. And I'm putting that together with the records I'm hearing, and it's like, oh my god, it's real, it's still happening. It's happening right now, and I'm the only twelve year old that seems to know about it. So anyway, I heard Bob Dylan, and Bob Dylan was so much better than Phil Oakes, like.
00:50:33
Speaker 1: A lot better.
00:50:36
Speaker 2: And So I went to see Bob Dylan because I saw that he was playing in Charlottesville. My mother took me and my best friend and dropped me off and.
00:50:45
Speaker 1: We went in.
00:50:47
Speaker 2: I had never I didn't know anything about Bob Dylan, and I did it. I certainly didn't know much after the show, because I couldn't understand a word the man said. But I'll never forget that I heard him saying these forwards maybe five, Hey, mister tambourine and man, hey mister and tambourine.
00:51:08
Speaker 1: Man.
00:51:09
Speaker 2: I could make those out clearly in his mumbling voice. And I was blown away by the Bob Dylan show. So you're asking me about how I got to Exeter and when I I petitioned the school to get me a banjo teacher, right because I wanted to learn to play this part by Happy Troun on a song that goes cloud so swift the rain falling in going to see a movie called Gunga Din Well Happy Troum, who's a New York folks singer Banjo Picker played the part. He played the bluegrass role on that song called You Went Going Nowhere that Bob finally put out on his greatest hits record and Tho a song was made more famous by the Birds, and a bunch of other people cut it. But anyway, they said, no, we don't have a banjo teacher, but go through the academic you know process, and you can.
00:52:06
Speaker 1: Maybe get one.
00:52:08
Speaker 2: So I had to write letters and stand up in front.
00:52:12
Speaker 1: Of the you know, the.
00:52:14
Speaker 2: Governing body and plead my case. Well they did. They got me this banjo teacher. And yet he didn't play Bluegrats, so he didn't teach me to play what Happy Troun played. Instead, he taught me I'm looking for a banjo. He taught me to play claw hammer. He was an old time banjo player, and he had this guy, Ryan Thompson. And Ryan had played in Appalachia on these field recording trips. He had played with Tommy Jerroll who was the great fiddler and banjo player that became a hero of mine. So a real fork in the road happened for me right at that freshman year high school where I was learning to play a really really traditional form of banjo and writing songs that were mirrored after Bob Dylan and and uh and love and every minute of it.
00:53:11
Speaker 1: So you're there at Exeter are you alone in your room practicing and writing or are you forming bands and performing in front of the uh populace. Yeah. I was like a popular kid, you know.
00:53:27
Speaker 2: I wore overalls and I had dreadlocks, and I got in a lot of trouble for drugs and alcohol. But when I when I did get busted, it was with one of the kids with the highest GPA in the school, so they didn't kick me.
00:53:45
Speaker 1: Out, which was great.
00:53:46
Speaker 2: And then once I got busted, which happened in my sophomore year, I had to be real straight for the rest of it. It kind of saved my life because it kept me so focused because I couldn't get kicked out.
00:53:58
Speaker 1: I had dodged the bullet.
00:54:00
Speaker 2: I was the first kid who had been caught smoking marijuana at Exeter to not be ejected. I was playing with bands on campus a little bit, but mostly at that time, I was really leaning into my friend group at home, and especially my best friend, Critter Fuque, who was back in Virginia, and we were really enjoying our love of Bob Dylan. He would go see a Bob concert and send me the bootleg, and then I would go and send him one, and we were trading bootlegs back and forth. And then every time I'd finished a session at Exeter, I'd come back home and there was a wonderful coffee house in my hometown of Harrisonburg, Virginia called the Little Grill, and it was run by this Mennonite kind of driven, you know, kind of personality, Ron Copeland, who was like really into worker own stuff. And there were a lot of homeless people hanging around, and we could like pay for our coffee with dish detail. So I lived at this restaurant and I played there whenever they allowed me in front of the microphone.
00:55:19
Speaker 1: Okay, you said that you went to Exeter and you hear the talking heads, you hear the grateful Dead. How do you end up staying in let's call it traditional music.
00:55:33
Speaker 2: Well, I guess I felt like those were all had a lot in common with traditional music. I think punk rock is really related to old time music. In old time music, like there's no solos, nobody plays a hot part, everything is together. The fiddle plays the same melody line as the banjo. The guitar is the only thing that's sort of backing it up. In a traditional old times during band, there is no damn guitar. You know, the guitar didn't make it into country music until the nineteen twenties because of the mail order business. But nobody saying nobody played guitar in Appalachia until Sears and Roebucks said you can buy one for eight bucks. So the Carter family really were the first generation of guitar players. So like when the Bristol Sessions hit, like there isn't a history of guitar playing in the Hills, there's a history of fiddling and banjo playing even you know, to trace the course with the Blues before the nineteen twenties, what did people in the Mississippi Delta play fiddle? You know?
00:56:41
Speaker 1: Banjo?
00:56:42
Speaker 2: Get Joe six string Doughbros. Start coming through in the late teens. So anyway, for me, I drew a straight line from the Grateful Dead, who I went to see when I was sixteen, the summer that Jerry Garcia died. Think that was nineteen ninety five. I think he died in August. Don't quote me on that, but I saw him about three weeks before that in Giant Stadium Bob Dylan was opening, and I thought, well, that's that's what I do you know when I sing, when I sing, when I strum on an acoustic guitar, it really felt like the same thing. So I just didn't really draw the lines. And I think a punk rock is being related to it because of the the collectivism and that collective approach to okay, everybody all wants ready said.
00:57:39
Speaker 1: Go okay, you graduate from exit ear then what.
00:57:47
Speaker 2: Uh? Well? I moved to Greensboro, North Carolina. I enrolled in a Quaker college called Guilford College in Greensboro, and then deferred as soon as I got in.
00:58:04
Speaker 1: And did never end up going to that college. Took a job I had my.
00:58:11
Speaker 2: Saw in my senior year, I had met a bunch of musicians from Greensboro at this at this old time music camp type of place at Davis and Elkins College in Elkins, West Virginia, which is only a couple hours from where I grew up. I met two people there that really changed my life. One was one was this group of musicians from Greensboro, and the other one was this banjo player from Ithaca, New York named Richie Stearns. So I followed this group of musicians to Greensboro. But I hadn't forgotten that Ithaca, New York was also a place where there was a ton of really good old time music. So, having bounced around Greensboro and then I got a job, I put a sign up at a feed mill.
00:58:59
Speaker 1: I was at this time Bob.
00:59:01
Speaker 2: I was spending a lot of time trying to determine whether I was going to be an agriculturalist or a musician. I was really into farms. An ag I had worked on a couple of different communes.
00:59:15
Speaker 1: Had why I was.
00:59:17
Speaker 2: I loved selling food at the farmers market. I was living with this family about forty miles out of Greensboro and raising all this produce and all that thinking a lot about farms. So I was really interested in finding a job that could be like he plays music on the weekend and then he farms all a week. He gets to ride around on trackers, he's got goats, and I think, probably looking back on it, it was about trying to find something to sing about. But instead of all that, I ended up moving to Ithaca, New York in the summer in nineteen ninety seven, having been out having this part of life gets real squeezed in, like there was a lot going on. Then I was in some important bands, and I was really starting to take my buskin thing another through line this time in my life, as I first started playing on the street corners when I was about, I know, maybe fifteen sixteen, and ahead of that, when I lived in Louisiana when I was a kid. My mother always tells this story. My dad went into a store and he said, wait here, I'll be right back. I think it might have been a liquor store, because I wasn't allowed in, because why else does a parent leave their kid in front of the store, especially in New Orleans in nineteen eighty three, which was the murder capital of America, as my mother's quick to tell. Anyhow, my mom says that when they got back from the store, I was out in front of the I was out in front of the store, and I had money at my feet, and there were like what did you do to get that money? And it turned out like I had danced, which is what I had seen them do in the quarter. The kids, you know, they they take a ballpen hammer, and they put bottle caps on their bottoms of their shoes and then they get out there and dance. Apparently I had done some kind of act that earned me dough out in front of this liquor store in Louisiana in New Orleans. So having unlocked this great secret, I really saw it with my high school years to go out on the curb. You know, I was always a hustler and I always loved making money for music. Just thought that was the greatest thing. I remember reading a book, or maybe it was seeing a cartoon in which a hobo steals a pie off of a window sill in the depression, right, that's how I felt like. I feel like a thief of pies and tar like I will take things. And I always liked that feeling of living by my wits and playing music on the street corner really made me feel like ground zero of freedom, just the sense of being liberated.
01:02:17
Speaker 1: I don't have a job. I don't I'm not responsible.
01:02:20
Speaker 2: For anybody except myself, and I have this trick, and the trick is if I can go, they'll throw money at me, and then I'll really be free, so free that I can buy a case of beer and a carton of cigarettes and a motel room.
01:02:37
Speaker 1: That's how free music will set me. Okay, so you're in Ithaca.
01:02:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I followed my girlfriend at Ithaca. She was enrolled at Cornell, and I started playing as much as I could down there on the Downtown Commons it was called. It was like a pedestrian mall, and that's where I met the people that would populate Old Crow Medicine Show. I met Richie Stearns first, the great banjo player and his band, the Tompkins County horse Flies, and they were so great. They were like a punk rock old time experience. Well, he introduced me to Willie. Willie Watson and Critter came up from Virginia to join me up there, and we met the members of the band and we played everywhere we could, and then my girlfriend dumped me, and I said, hey, let's get out of here. Let's go across the border, because I had been up there before to play on the street corner in other bands. And they said okay, so we hit the road. An Old Crow Medicine Show was born in the fall of nineteen ninety eight. Pot we pulled our money together working at a and you're picking grapes and we crossed the Canadian border in October of nineteen ninety eight in a black Volvo eighty two station wagon, all rested out in a Dodge Coachman, and the seven of us headed for the Pacific.
01:04:29
Speaker 1: So did you ever go to school in Ithaca?
01:04:32
Speaker 2: Yeah? For one year. I attended Ithaca College. When I was up there, shacked up with my girlfriend who was at Cornell.
01:04:41
Speaker 1: It was a.
01:04:44
Speaker 2: Weird experience. I just didn't like it. I didn't do well. I didn't make friends, just felt like having a job.
01:04:52
Speaker 1: Now this same girlfriend who dumbs you, is that the woman you ultimately married? Yeah, Lydia, Okay, in this continuum? Do you learn how to play the fiddle?
01:05:06
Speaker 2: So, Bob, When I was when I was in Greensboro, I was in this old times string band and they were they were so good and the fiddler was incredible.
01:05:19
Speaker 1: I was the guitar player.
01:05:21
Speaker 2: Uh, And I took over the job for this woman she had been in the band, and she got another gig in a really popular band at the time called the Freight Hoppers. The freight Hoppers were one of the most popular old times dring bands in the nineties. They played on Garrison Keeler's show and everything I listened to them with with with guarded jealousy. And I think because of my personality type. I knew that that somebody that was gonna, like Spearhead a great big transcontinental trip needed to play the apex instrument in the old times dring band the fiddle. So even though I could play the other instruments like I had, you know, I had taken mandolin lessons and I met David Grisman, and I still suck at mandolin. I'm not saying I was ever good, but I could play it, and I could play the bass, and I could play the piano and the guitar and the banjo. But when I was eighteen, I knew that the buskin bit like if I was going to I saw that I could do it better with a band, and the band just needed a fiddler. And it was such a tedious instrument to learn that I don't think anyone else was willing to put up with what it was going to take to teach yourself to play the violin. It's a very hard instrument to learn. But when I was eighteen, I went to a pawn shop I bought a fiddle, and then I went alone up to the Province of New Brunswick. This was the summer of nineteen ninety seven, and before I went to Ithaca College. It was right after I can't remember anyway, ninety eight, right before we started Old Crow, and I taught myself how to play playing up there in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island and found that I could spool them uh and make money on the curb. And so I then I went back to the boys and like, okay, I can play fiddle. Now let's go wait, wait.
01:07:24
Speaker 1: Let's sut out. Why do you go to New Brunswick.
01:07:29
Speaker 2: Well, we'd already played in Ontario and Quebec. You know when I did all that. When I was eighteen, I went to Windsor and the and the up and we were trying to go around Lake Huron.
01:07:43
Speaker 1: You know.
01:07:43
Speaker 2: I was really into these quick sodics, sort of like let's go to the farthest away place.
01:07:49
Speaker 1: You know.
01:07:49
Speaker 2: Some people they they you know, they read where they watched those Jacques Cousteau films and then they want to go, you know, to the Sargasso See and they want to go to the Seychelles and swim with the dolphins. I listened to Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie, so it made me want to go to the most remote places of North America where I could meet people that felled timber, worked in mills and factories were native people's metal. I was really really focused on wanting to be around indigenous communities. So that really sent me to the to the north Woods, into the Great Lakes where there were just so many Native people. And so one of the first things that I wanted to do was also this sort of like you know, Vasco to Gamma kind of bit, where like, hey, let's go put our flag in a moon that's never been noticed before. This is at the same time, Bob, that this new Canadian territory was named and created. This happened the same year the band started. It was called Nuonabut our Land in Innuctetud. But I just I've never been. I'm still dying to go. But it really signified for me that there's this huge piece of North America that you could only be really deliberate about going to see. And at age nineteen, I was convinced that I had been picked to go lay eyes upon and I was reading that book Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose, so old Crowe basically did the Lewis and Clark trip.
01:09:29
Speaker 1: Wait wait wait, wait wait, wait, I want to get the timeline right. You're in Greensboro. Do you go to Ithaca when you ultimately go with the seven Members across the border? You went to New Brunswick before that? Correct? Yeah, did you go to New Brunswick before that year? You went to Ithaca College?
01:09:53
Speaker 2: It was the It was that same year I had finished my freshman year at Ithaca College and I went to across the border. I'd gone up to Bar Harbor, right, and I played played up there and I was solo and I met this guy in front of a jewelry store there and he.
01:10:13
Speaker 1: Gave me a dollar named Kevin Hayes.
01:10:18
Speaker 2: Later, Kevin met me in Ithaca and we and we started Old Crow more or less together. He was a busker. He was a little bit older than me, from Haveroll, Mass Well. We part of ways. He was up there to break blueberries, and that's one of the other ways. I was like, Oh, people can pick fruit. That's what you can do when you're a musician. You find itinerant farm labor. I squirreled that idea away. It was important to know it. Later when I got to Appalachia with Old Crow, was oh.
01:10:46
Speaker 1: Need money, find a job with.
01:10:49
Speaker 2: Whatever crop is being brought in right now, you know, hate work in the hayfield, tobacco, any of that stuff. He was picking raking blueberries. But you know, I wanted to get across the border. I'd always wanted to go to New Brunswick and Pei. So I went up there and played on the curb that summer. And that's where I was playing fiddle for the first time.
01:11:13
Speaker 1: Okay, how did you get from place to place?
01:11:17
Speaker 2: I had a Volvo station Wagon that I was driving at that time. You know, I had a car.
01:11:24
Speaker 1: It was, you know, a car. And then you literally took no lessons, just figured out how to play the fiddle by yourself exactly.
01:11:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, so that was a hard instrument.
01:11:36
Speaker 1: Okay, so now you're in Ithaca, seven people across the border. Tell me what happens then.
01:11:45
Speaker 2: Well, we had we had made these forays. Like before I went to New Brunswick, I went across the border with my best friends from Harrisonburg, Virginia called the Ratt eleven Boys. That was a band that was my first year out of high school, out of Exeter, and we crossed and we went all the way up in the dead of winter and we played on the curb and we were We thought.
01:12:08
Speaker 1: This is the life.
01:12:10
Speaker 2: So then I sort of sought to duplicate that in different ways. I did it alone, I do it in a duo. Now I pulled my money together. I had just been dumped my girlfriend and we all worked in dishrooms and everything we could do to make enough money. We raised about six hundred dollars and then we left. We crossed the border just to go back.
01:12:33
Speaker 1: I'm going to stop you for one second. You're in bar Harbor, you're New Brunswick. How much money can you make buski? A couple hundred bucks a day? Real good money? Oh yeah, it was incredible. And you're performing for how long for a couple of hundred bucks? Oh? Five, six, seven hours? And to what did we do? Establish relationships with the people in these areas who come to hear you.
01:13:00
Speaker 2: Iediately, And that's the that's the rosetta stone of it all is that you get out on the curb. Once you open up your case, it's like you got a damn billboard in the middle of town, particularly if you're in a shitty town where there's nothing going on, or in an off season moment, because then people come over to you and they're like, hey, I got this bottle of wine, do you want some? Or my friend runs this bakery. They'll give you a bunch of sandwiches and a whole you know, all this food if you'll go play there or you know, you can.
01:13:33
Speaker 1: You know, it felt like.
01:13:37
Speaker 2: The trade was opening up a lot of doors. And yeah, so that's how that.
01:13:43
Speaker 1: Was, okay? And were there ever any issues with the laws so you can't bust here? Oh yeah, yeah all the time.
01:13:54
Speaker 2: The I mean they were like in Bar Harbor, for example, Like I slept in my car at that time, right, and you know, they didn't let you sleep in your car. That's the first time I ever learned that you're not actually allowed to just park a car and sleep in it.
01:14:11
Speaker 1: I thought you could, you know.
01:14:15
Speaker 2: Now it's twenty twenty five or whatever, and I there's like somebody's sleeping in their car three blocks from here.
01:14:20
Speaker 1: I know that.
01:14:22
Speaker 2: And that lady's never been out of that car. Her whole life is in her car. That's all she can do. But the cops will eventually move her on too, just like they moved me on. They did the same thing in Fredericton, New Brunswick. That was the second time, but the first time was bar Harbor and the cops woke me up and I had made the mistake of sleeping without any clothes on. And I was naked in the back of this vall though, and it was like, oh, officer pardoned me, is like, you can't be here. I don't think my nudity helped endear me to the share. Happened again three weeks later in Fredericton, New Brunswick. That's when I figured out that it was really important to try and secure a place to sleep. You know, all the roads were leading up to this big transcontinental trip.
01:15:14
Speaker 1: I had taken these little for to what degree would you play on a street corner and the cops say you can't play here?
01:15:22
Speaker 2: Oh it happened all the time. I mean, oh, well, this flashing forward a little bit. But after we had done our big cross Canadian trip, I met a girl at a you know, a barmaid in Vancouver, British Columbia, and I went back to see her and I did some busking on the way and I was for the first time I was detained, you know, for about five hours and questioned in a underground building in a downtown in Pioneer Square in Portland, Oregon. I'd never been to Portland, Oregon before, and that nineteen ninety eight and ninety nine whoa town was incredible.
01:16:02
Speaker 1: I've never seen nothing like it.
01:16:04
Speaker 2: But yeah, I definitely saw like where they take they on me and shit.
01:16:10
Speaker 1: So also, to what degree would you be busking and people offer you places to stay almost every time? Okay, so now let's go back. You got your six hundred dollars, you got your Volvo, you got your seven people across the border.
01:16:24
Speaker 2: What happens, Well, they wouldn't let us in. Eight It's like we had the wrong liar in riding in the passenger seat court. You get up there to the to the window and they're like, well, what where are you doing? Where are you going? Oh, we're just gonna go see some friends. Well we're not gonna let you in. So we went to three border crossings before we finally figured and this is all in New York State, like up around Potsdam, like it sucks up there. We tried to cross Agannonockway, we tried to cross at Ogdensburg, we tried to cross at Messina. But then we got to the Mohawk Rets on Aquasasne, and I always read the newspaper up there called Akuasasni Notes. I read it at the at the college library because the living in the in the land of the Iroquois Confederacy, like I was from the South, like you know, Andrew Jackson had a very effective job to do in Indian removal. So I had the like everybody from the South, unless you lived in you know, near the Chalctaw res in Philadelpha, Mississippi, chances were all you were going to have of Indigenous America was the name of your river, the name of your state, the name of your town, the name of your county, whatever. But moving to New York State, which I did when I was in eighteen nineteen, it was like, oh, there are reservations here everywhere, like seven of them. More So, once we I was like, let's go to the Mohawk reds. I bet they'll let us across. We went to Aquasasne and it was great, and they they were like sure, come on. And then they were like, hey, can you bring the suitcase with you. We're like sure, put it in the back of the car.
01:18:07
Speaker 1: It's okay. So now you're in Canada. What do you do?
01:18:10
Speaker 2: Well, we right across the border from Aqua Sasne in New York the Mohawk, the Saint Regis Mohawk reds. Right across the border from that is a town called Cornwall, Ontario, and it's right tucked up against Quebec, south west of Montreal, about two and a half hour drive. And this town was gold.
01:18:29
Speaker 1: It was like they were.
01:18:30
Speaker 2: Like, welcome, welcome, We're so where you been.
01:18:35
Speaker 1: I mean, immediately like we.
01:18:36
Speaker 2: Get we're busting in front of some shithole and then like somebody pulls up. It's like, hey man, why don't you looked cold out there? Why don't you come play indoors tonight? So we play some because this is in you know, it's cold, it's in October. So now we're playing in the you know, in a in a proper pub. And then they got us in the next town. They're like, oh, we know a guy up there has got a place we play in there.
01:19:02
Speaker 1: Uh.
01:19:02
Speaker 2: And then we end up at in Ottawa where they got this wonderful farmers market and the Tunis and the Loonies are just reining in the case.
01:19:13
Speaker 1: And so this is when you then go cross country.
01:19:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean the plan all along was to go across the country. We we booked a couple of sort of we had We had a woman in our group that was dating the guy I met in front of that jewelry store in Bar Harbor, and she knew this uh Indian guy from Pine Ridge named Brian Brewer, and Brian was a was an important person in the in the leadership of the Lakota people. And so we had this anchor date on pine Ridge. Like eve then if you draw a line from you know, Cornwall, Ontario to pine Ridge, South Dakota, like that's basically almost the entire continent. It's so far away, and so we try I had to thread this and we did it by going just sort of following our wits and wherever the wherever the good curbs were. And also that feeling of the books I was reading, like hey, let's go north of Lake Superior and we saw the northern lights. It was just incredible seeing being in this in this vast North American landscape, places that I'd never even thought about, like thunder Bait, who goes there when they're nineteen with their band just randomly.
01:20:36
Speaker 1: Okay, you got seven guys there's not much money involved. How do you keep the act together?
01:20:43
Speaker 2: Well, and we're just we're successful. We just keep filling the and we're living on the cheap, you know, we eating ramen noodles. And you know, all you need is beer, cigarette, ramens and gas. That's all it takes. So it doesn't mean a whole lot too. You know, if you have a shitty day on the curb, you only make it fifty bucks. So that's a tank of gas right there. So if you're live in collectively, you know, and you could live off peanut butter crackers. And this is stuff that like I look at today, like i live in Nashville, Tennessee, and I'm surrounded by kids who are in bands on billboards around town around the I four for Interstate Spur. I see their pictures and I'm like, that kid don't know nothing about living off peanut butter crackers. They probably don't even know that you got enough calories in a cup of coffee, in a pack of anywhere.
01:21:35
Speaker 1: Okay, so you you go cross country, you come back, you go back to see the barmade of Vancouver. Then what well, then.
01:21:47
Speaker 2: We had been on this big, crazy trip. It was like ten thousand miles we traveled, and it was now almost Christmas, and we decided that we would leave at the c forever and we would move to either southwest Virginia, North Carolina, or East Tennessee. And so a couple everybody kind of scattered after the tour, and then I went down and started looking for a place to live. And I went to Asheville, and I went to Mars Hill, and I went to Boone, and I went to ald Saltville, Glade Springs, Bristol, all these places, looking for a place where we could farm and play and.
01:22:35
Speaker 1: Lo and behold.
01:22:36
Speaker 2: We ended up in Avery County, North Carolina, renting a farmhouse with one hundred acres attached to it. And by the summer of nineteen ninety nine, we were we had the best, you know, we had the we had the best garden of anyone. The old people would come and just look at the garden. They'd be like, who are these boys? H But we had, you know, potatoes that were just the bounty of you know, we were growing so much. The pole beans were incredible. Uh and uh. And that's when we started playing. And you know, we met Doc Watson that that that summer.
01:23:17
Speaker 1: Okay, is it the same seven people? Yeah? So how do you beat Doc Watson?
01:23:34
Speaker 2: Well? We uh, like I said, we were doing a lot of raising food. We had rabbits and chickens, and we had goats and we had a sheep and you know, we had all of us and there was a no TV. And so we just were so creative at that time, writing all this songs and making having such a good time. And we and we play on the herb and boone sometimes mostly Willie would go down there and play solo. We all kind of had to get jobs, right, so I worked manpower. That was always my go to because you can make fifty sixty bucks a day doing horrible jobs, dig a ditch and then fill it in, you know kind of thing lay pipe. But Reebar I did that for.
01:24:20
Speaker 1: A while.
01:24:22
Speaker 2: Anyway, we're playing on a curb. It's the fifth of July. The fourth of July, we'd made our first run of corn whiskey that wasn't on the stovetop. See this time, we were like reading the fox Fire book and really trying to live. The reason the garden was so good is because we planted it all by the lunar signs we were visiting with all these old time people. It was like I had found this place where where where all of the songs. This is this great book by Bruce Chatwin called The Song Lines. He's an Australian musicologist, and he talks about the way the indigenous people there are, the Aboriginal peaceeople, believe that music has has this profound pathway. I mean, people have been living there for fifty thousand years, so they ought to know. I felt like this confluence of all the songs that I had ever learned was in this town. And so it'd be like, well that song we sing about that sheep, like who's got an experience with a sheep? Well, suddenly there's one running out there, and now we're singing about it. And it all growing, all this food and then all this history too, like the war and the Civil War. There just seemed like the music was growing. It sounds like I felt like we were at the headwaters that you could just go fill a jug. And that was right when we were really participating in all of these sort of elements of the music. So it wasn't enough to sing about it. You had to do the things that you were singing about So when we met Doc Watson, it was just on a of We had made all this corn whiskey and everybody was really made sick by it. But we had missed the good busking and we were like, well, we better go down there.
01:26:10
Speaker 1: Like rents do.
01:26:11
Speaker 2: It was the fifth of July. A woman walked up. She said, I love this kind of music, and my dad loves it even more. Are you Are you guys going to be here for a while? And we said maybe. She came back twenty minutes later and she walked her dad across the street. It was Doc Watson.
01:26:28
Speaker 1: So you meet Doc Watson. How does that change your life?
01:26:32
Speaker 2: Well, Doc listened to us and he gave us a gig on the spot. He said, I love what you guys are doing, and I'd like you to play at the festival that I have in honor of my son Merle and it's about forty miles from here. I'd love to have you be there. And then, you know, Doc, then we started writing. Then I started writing letters to Rosalie, his Doc's wife, and forging this relationship.
01:26:55
Speaker 1: Because I was like, oh my god.
01:26:57
Speaker 2: We had paid you know, the biggest thing you ever lie into a tip jar was the were the words of Doc Watson saying you got a gig.
01:27:11
Speaker 1: Before then.
01:27:11
Speaker 2: I was like, well, I guess we're just gonna try and make it. I was still like I was taking a permaculture course at the time. I was like, maybe I'll get into agg instead. But Doc sealed the deal and we went to the merle Fest and uh, and that's where we met Sally Williams. Sue brought us to Nashville.
01:27:34
Speaker 1: She brings you to Nashville.
01:27:36
Speaker 2: And what happened, Well, they invited us to Well, we got to Doc Watson's place to Merlefest and we played this really shitty set, you know that with We never really used microphones before, and we were terrible at mixing, so awful ear piercing. So it was like, well, we sure was sure to put a lot into this. You know, we better do something. So we started busking at Merlefest. We just started playing and we played. We made our own stage, we called it, we gave it a name. We worked it all weekend long, and by the end of it, I mean, we were on the front page of the Wataga County Democrat.
01:28:20
Speaker 1: We were what you.
01:28:21
Speaker 2: Were talking about if you were at Merlefest and the year two thousand, I mean, I met Willie Nelson. It was incredible.
01:28:28
Speaker 1: It was like.
01:28:30
Speaker 2: The universe took notice of this band of gypsies that was there. And not just the universe, but this lady, this person from the Grand Old Opry, Sally, and she called us about three weeks later and said, hey, I'd like you to do that same bit that you did at Merlefest. I'd like you to do it out in front of the Grand Old Lopry and you could do it all summer long. And so we started working on Friday nights at the Opry. I've been in Nashville before and played on the street corner there I started. I went there in nineteen ninety six, right out of high school with that band from Greensboro. And I was like, well, and I told everybody, we got to go to Nashville, y'all that the Buskin is so incredible. It's five hundred dollars town.
01:29:17
Speaker 1: And it was.
01:29:18
Speaker 2: So we started going down to Nashville on the weekends from Appalachia, where we're living in Avery County, North Carolina, and we you know, we'd play on the on the on the curb of the Opry House on Friday, and then Saturday we play all day and all night on the street corner downtown on Lower Broad and then take all our money and go back home.
01:29:40
Speaker 1: To you know, to Boon more or less.
01:29:46
Speaker 2: So keep playing the story. Okay, Well, you know, eventually we were like, well, why don't we just move there, you know, let's let's get out of the holler.
01:30:00
Speaker 1: Moved down there.
01:30:02
Speaker 2: So we first had to get rid of all the animals, and a bunch of a bunch of bad ship was happening, like really bad ship. You know, Willie's dad died and it was super traumatic for everybody.
01:30:21
Speaker 1: Back in Ithaca.
01:30:22
Speaker 2: Uh. And we were all there, we're making a record and Mike Watson died in a horrible accident. Uh and that was really shocking. And so part of part of the let's just go to Nashville was let's get away from what's just happened. It was too tragic, let's not talk about it, let's just go. So we found, you know, we moved to Dickerson Road, which was the worst part of Nashville, and you know, we gave away all our animals.
01:30:54
Speaker 1: So now you're in Nashville, you're busking you're making records. What are you doing?
01:31:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're playing on the curb. And then eventually they they're inviting us up to play at the station in you know that was and we're playing at Bobby's idel Hour, and we're meeting people, and you know, I was always pretty savvy, you know, I like, I was good at remembering people's names, looking people in the eye, and writing a lot of letters. I was writing letters to DJ's radio stations. I wrote letters to Garrison Keeler, I wrote, I wrote, and you know, we got our opry debut. We met Marty Stewart. I started writing letters to Marty Stewart.
01:31:45
Speaker 1: And then and then one.
01:31:48
Speaker 2: Day at the station inn, this couple came that had hurt us on the radio, and it was Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. And that was sort of the beginning of really getting into living in Nashville and finding somebody to help champion our cause.
01:32:11
Speaker 1: Okay, the question becomes everybody stays together. No one says, hey there's not enough money, I'm going home, or I'm going to graduate school, none of that.
01:32:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, our bass player has a kid and leaves almost as soon as we arrive in Nashville. But we're playing downtown and Morgan walks by on Lower Abroad and throws us a dollar, and this becomes well, like I told you, my friend Kevin threw me a dollar in Bar Harbor. That's the first person that I became inextricably linked to because of busting.
01:32:51
Speaker 1: Morgan was the second.
01:32:53
Speaker 2: But then Critter dropped out of the bands because he was he couldn't stop drinking. And we're playing in New Orleans and another guy we met on the curve there, Gil Landry, became a member of the band. And at some point the majority of the players in the band had all met through chance encounters on street corners. It was just like this divinity, you know, you just you go out there and you open your case and the right things seemed to happen. It was almost like, well, it's like this universe needed there to be a band that was going to survive, particularly in those first you know, five eight years. Oh we were you know.
01:33:31
Speaker 1: We made it.
01:33:31
Speaker 2: Then we got a record deal, and right around then is when I got married. It was the year two thousand and one.
01:33:41
Speaker 1: Okay, how'd you get a record deal?
01:33:46
Speaker 2: We we went to south By Southwest and We had been doing some shows with this band that we had met when we were out in Vancouver that where they were so cool. They were like us, They were gypsies. They would go and do this thing called Hella logging or Heila logging in which like after they go like they log by helicopter up there because it's so damn romon there are no roads, so that once they carry all the woods out, then they bring these hippies in they drop them down the middle of damn nowhere British Columbia to go plant all the trees that will be the next crop. And the girls in the Be Good Tanias they would ride in on these them helicopters and drip drop them down. Then they go plant trees for a couple of weeks and then they come back. And that was like us, you know. We found a band that was really kindred and they were hugely popular in the year two thousand and one two and three, the Be Good Tanyas were. They played in Europe. We got to open up for them. So anyway, their record company, a Canadian label called Network, signed us, hoping that they were going to duplicate the same and we had two competing record deals. We could either sign with Network or we could have signed with Ricky Skaggs, and we chose the Canadian label And how did that work out? Well, it was it was cool. I mean, they agreed to fund our record and we had met this wonderful producer, David Rawlings, and he was like a member of the band. Once Critter left because he couldn't stop drinking, you know, David came in and now David was in the band and we were doing all kinds of touring together and sometimes then we started open up for Gillian Welch, and you know, the work just kept following and we had a record deal and it was and yeah, we were working. We had an agent, who is your agent, Bobby Cudd. For the longest time, for forever, for until the present, it's been Bobby cud and Bobby Cud nothing but because we love Bobby. He was our very first music business champion. We did not have a manager. I was the guy doing all the books. And then we met Norm Parento who cautioned us and said, don't sign that record deal.
01:36:17
Speaker 1: Let me look at it. That was the deal with Ricky. Okay, we're in this story. Does Wagon Wheel.
01:36:25
Speaker 2: Happen at Exeter. I wrote it there. Like I was telling you before, I was trading these bootlegs back and forth, you know, and one day Critter sent me a bootleg and I heard this song and I was like, wow, that's really good. I should really finish that. I'll doctor it up. So this is the fall of my senior year at Exeter. Around November seventeen, I wrote the song wagon Wheel, and but my band well, then I went to Greensboro and I was like, hey, guys, I've written this amazing song. Way do you hear it? And I played it for him and they were like, catch, we only do traditional material. We don't do like originals. This is not what we do. So I was like, oh, maybe maybe I don't either. Oh maybe I don't do originals. Maybe I just do traditionals. So I shelved it. And when when Old Crow was on the street corner, we hardly ever played that song when you know, it just sort of sat there until I got to Nashville. And you know, one of our first meetings was with a song plugger and they were like, well, you guys are really good and you're fun and you're you're all cute and whatnot. But this isn't a town where Annie Bellham folk music really has a stronghold.
01:37:56
Speaker 1: So what have you written lately? And I was like, well I.
01:38:00
Speaker 2: Got this song and I started playing it for him. They're like, that's a good tune. So it really helped, you know, it opened a lot of doors for us. It was an immediately popular tune back in about two thousand and two, and then we sought to publish the song for our first for our debut album. We had made records before, but they were almost all traditional recordings, you know, songs, old songs. Even the new songs were half borrowed and half stolen, and they sounded like old songs. But when Dave Brawlings went to record us, you know, that was that was one of the focus points, was let's make sure we get a good version of wagon Wheel.
01:38:42
Speaker 1: Yes, but you went to publish it and Dylan it started it tell us that story.
01:38:50
Speaker 2: Well, I didn't know anything about publishing, but I had a but you just get a publisher, you know, they signed I signed up for BMI because that's what they said to do and that we'd make good contacts.
01:39:05
Speaker 1: So we signed up for BMI.
01:39:07
Speaker 2: And and then to go register your songs, you know, you had to figure out who wrote them and split it up. So and I was somebody that was like, well, let's say we all wrote it, boys, let's everybody takes a one fifth or one sixth draw.
01:39:25
Speaker 1: Won't that be great?
01:39:26
Speaker 2: We'll all get about fifteen twenty percent, fellas, it'll be great. But then the manager was like, well, actually, it's best to like, if you wrote it, you get to keep it. And I had a real hard time with that idea. I had already tried to give away my publishing before because I really thought that collectivism was king and that part of the majesty of all this was kind of hobbling yourself, you know, like you're supposed to give it all away, you're not. None of this is yours to keep catch So that's how I felt about it. So it was really odd to me when they were like, hey, we need to have a lot of meetings about this song, and Bob Dylan like, this can't just be like a gray area. So the record had already been pressed and was being released in a matter of weeks or a month, and the song still wasn't published, So it was it was a real nail bier, And finally Norm got Jeff Rosen to pick up the phone, and Jeff Rosen said, Bob has heard the track. Bob wants you to know that he did not write that song, but he has come across that song, or it came across it in nineteen seventy three from the author of that song, Arthur crut Up. But Arthur is dead, and so Bob has agreed that he will split it fifty to fifty with Catch. And then suddenly, like manna from Heaven, it was like, ah, it's over. The negotiation is done, the song is locked in. It's fifty to fifty Catch and Bob over the loss is.
01:41:14
Speaker 1: Your reference Earlier with Darius Rutger, the song starts to have its own life. It becomes a standard. Are you totally surprised? Do you even know Darius is going to cut it?
01:41:28
Speaker 2: Darius didn't cut it until maybe twenty twelve or something, so this was all more than a decade before that. Plus I wrote it in ninety five, so I had had all this other time with it, you know, And I mentioned that, So we didn't play it very much. I was sort of embarrassed about it. It was like it's like if you showed up at you know, a knife fight and you have in your possession, you know, a bazooka. It was like, I don't let them see that you got this gold. You're supposed to all be out here hungry.
01:42:05
Speaker 1: Right.
01:42:06
Speaker 2: There was just something in my DNA that was like, you know, I didn't want to be the kid from prep school. I wanted to be like Woody got Thrie, you know. I wanted to get on a box car and ride, you know. I didn't want to be jet set.
01:42:21
Speaker 1: You know.
01:42:22
Speaker 2: I wanted to be a folk singer. So I had to act it. And so some of some of the thing about rock Me Mama, because that's what it was called. It wasn't called wagon Wheel, It's called rock Me Mama. Some of that was like me just trying to not reveal that there were to do it the hard way, like I wanted it to be hard. I wanted I thought it was important that we experience, you know, hardship to grow the band, and it's e those like it was, you know, like that's why we got an ad because because if it dies, it's on you.
01:43:01
Speaker 1: And I wanted it to be hard like that.
01:43:05
Speaker 2: But one day we were playing down in around a milltown Hickory. We're in down in the Hickory, North Carolina. You know, it was like a Sunday night. It was like fifteen people in the room. And this this old guy was who had had the tobacco allotment behind the house that we were squatting in, Me and Kevin, and he is a Vietnam vet and he was missing teeth and he was you know, he.
01:43:32
Speaker 1: And he you know, he sold drugs. He was like an air do well.
01:43:35
Speaker 2: But he was a deer of friends we had. We brought him with him down at Hickory and he heard of the show. He heard the show, he watched it. He came up to me in the parking lot, Bob, and he said, hey, Kitch, you just need to play that wagon wheel about every night. And I turned to him and I was like, what did I never heard that word wagon wheel before, Like it didn't mean nothing to me, and he had just that was the name of the song, and he really coined it for me. James Sizemore. Now James then found religion and got clean and James died with you know, a nice bass boat and you know he had a new car. He died right after Hurricane Helene, just a couple of years ago. I really miss him and I but I got to reconnect with him and tell him, you know, and he knew about Molly.
01:44:27
Speaker 1: He's like, I mean, I want you know. He gave me a lot.
01:44:32
Speaker 2: Of love right there at the end before he died. But he gave me this really powerful gift. He told me that I should change the name from rock Me Mama, So like my sisters still call it rock Me Mama because they remember from before when I used to sing it in the nineties at the coffeehouses and.
01:44:48
Speaker 1: Shit, okay, this late date, is there still significant income from Wagon Wheel? Oh yeah, that song's killing it.
01:45:09
Speaker 2: One day, Bob Dylan was sitting there for the Grammys and the Mumford Boys were there, and we'd just done a bunch of shit with the Mumford.
01:45:16
Speaker 1: Boys, so we knew him right.
01:45:19
Speaker 2: And Gil Landry, who I told you about, met him on a street corner in New Orleans and Critter was sort of flaking out, so Gil stepped in. Anyhow, Gil was there in LA for the Grammys and T Bone's there and we'd just done this project with T Bone about for a movie that never came out. T Bone's sitting there and Gil Landry's and Bob Dylan walks in. Bob Dylan sits down next to t Bone. Gil just happens to be standing there, and Bob looks around like you're seeing a ghost, and he's like, oh are you And Gil says, oh, I'm I'm Gil from Old Crow And he said, oh Crow you guys, I'm killing it, says Bob Dylan. So yeah, the song is still killing it?
01:46:04
Speaker 1: Could you live off that song alone? Sure?
01:46:08
Speaker 2: I mean I could live off of playing a banjo in Ottawa alone. I could open this door up right here and go out on Shelby Avenue and live my whole life with it, with whatever instruments that I can grab.
01:46:23
Speaker 1: Okay, so you get a record deal. Twenty odd years in soup, band members come, band members go, what's going through your mind? Do you feel like we're going up, We're having more success, we're reaching more people or do you not care about that? Do you not? Just as long as you can play What's going through your mind?
01:46:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a job in a career. It's been twenty eight years. I think if I were to I mean, the first decade was really really intense, kind of crazy, so then it became kind of a lot different, you know suddenly, and then we started having like bigger successes in about twenty and twelve and thirteen and on, and now it's kind of plateau. I think the plateau hit around maybe seventeen eighteen, and now it's just like cemented as this is this fan it's been around, it's still doing it. But the thing that has grown is is this one song wagon Wheel. You know, it's it's touched so many people, and it's been part of the story of so many artists who have found their own way in American music. You know, multiple artists that are you know, big time artists with billboards around town have told me, yeah, that was my first song. So it's like it's been carried beyond where I've been able to go.
01:48:03
Speaker 1: Okay, you talked about the career, the status of Old Crow being cemented. There was an upward arc, and then it's for you're happy that you made it to this level. Are you frustrated that you're not growing bigger? I guess so.
01:48:22
Speaker 2: I mean it's frustrating that I don't know that I'm frustrated that we're not growing bigger. I guess I feel like our influence is profound and you know, undeniable, so but you know, you kind of got to steal yourself like anybody that's you know, like I was. I was with Molly last week at Shoreline Amphitheater and Molly was opening up for Chris Stapleton and I sat in on a couple of tunes and played.
01:48:50
Speaker 1: You know, it's hard not to be like.
01:48:52
Speaker 2: Well, why aren't I selling out a twenty five thousand seat coliseum or guy. I was at Red Rocks a couple of days ago and we were opening up for Darius, And we've headlined Red Rocks on numerous occasions, but we don't anymore, and so there's a little bit like, oh, well, that feels a little salty that we're not the headliners anymore. But you know, at the same time, it's like there's ebb and flow to it. And also it's so exciting, like seeing what Molly's up to and now being so involved and invested in her rise. It's almost like I kind of get to do some of it over again, but without nearly as much stress and anxiety as when it was my own apple cart that I was trying to get up the mountain and down the other side. So I mean, I think at some point you just have to accept what your trajectory is and has been and just be like, Okay, well I got I have to do a lot of really cool stuff. There's still some you know, parts of the solar system I didn't get to visit yet. But I mean, I'll be playing Fenway next week. I'm the opener. But how many people that are that bought their fiddle in a pawnshop and taught himself how to play it when they were eighteen can say that they're going to play where the Red Sox play.
01:50:22
Speaker 1: Okay, you have this great success with wagon Wheel, Was there ever in your mind? Well this is all good? Let me try to replicate it.
01:50:35
Speaker 2: I means not really, because every year I make a new record like I happen to have. You know, Old Crow has the number one record in the Americana genre for four weeks in a row now, But that doesn't mean that we have a career song or record that's gonna last the next twenty eight years. Because when I got started and sold a million records of the song that the album that had wagon Wheel on it. Now it's twenty eight years later, and people don't sell any records at all, even like the top grossing records. They didn't sell any copies of the record. So it's just like it's.
01:51:18
Speaker 1: A little bit like the terminology.
01:51:21
Speaker 2: Has changed on success and now we you know, I didn't have a number one record in two thousand and three when My Shit came out, and I have one now in twenty twenty six. But my not number one record was a lot more powerful than my number one record twenty five years later. I don't I have never tried to, you know, write another Rockney Mama, because well, that's a magic song. I've tried to write another Your Flag Decab won't get you into Heaven anymore. And I tried to write another Uncle John's Band, and I tried to write another Rocky Mountain High. But uh, you know, I'm always in the practice. I mean, I write. I was writing songs yesterday, and I approached it the same way I approached trying to finish this Bob Dylan song. I write it all the same way. I'm a songwriter. I'll always be writing songs, and it's really up to an audience and determine is it is.
01:52:32
Speaker 1: It greater or not? Okay, when you go back, you've lived long enough the pre internet era, especially in the MTV v H one video era, there was there was a pyramid, and if you were at the top of the pyramid, everybody knew who you were. That's been aviscerting blown apart. So Mollie Mollie has a huge presence amongst a certain segment of the population, and then there's a large segment of the population who doesn't know who she is. Conversely, there are people who are listening to Balley's music who couldn't even name a Taylor Swift soul. So hey, you reference the America Americana chart. What is the status of Americana and folk in traditional music today and how has it evolved over your time in it.
01:53:31
Speaker 2: Well, it's definitely a lot different than the apex that you talk about in the nineties because in folk music and in you know, what we then called alt country, there certainly was the top. But now where everything is in a niche, you know, there's just there's something for everybody. Like I was thinking about it today because my fifteen year old was playing her music in the car, and I thought about somebody saying, who the hell doesn't know who Dominic Fike is? You know, well I don't until now, and you know, like this guy is really really popular. He's like and he's like for a fifteen year old, like that's the top. And I'm still like thinking about you know, Bill Morrissey on the folk charts in nineteen eighty nine and like, oh, maybe I'll get as big as like Laura Virs someday, or you know, just trying to keep up with.
01:54:36
Speaker 1: You know, Tom Paxton. I think that.
01:54:40
Speaker 2: Nowadays the Americana music has been a kind of alternative to country music. Ever since country music, you know, moved so far away from what we thought of his country music that a whole bunch of other or sort of niche market music's popped up and was like, okay, well here are these alternatives to country. So and that's only been further Like when I was when Darius cut Wagon Wheel, which was like eleven, twelve, thirteen. You know, our our opener at the time was the Lumineers, and I was like, well, this is a good band, maybe they're really gonna go far. Well, I had no idea that this was a stadium act that was playing small clubs with us.
01:55:32
Speaker 1: You know.
01:55:32
Speaker 2: Conversely, like I remember the Cyo More record came out and I was like, oh, this is a good band there.
01:55:37
Speaker 1: They're like the water Boys. Well, I didn't realize.
01:55:41
Speaker 2: That Mumford and Son we're going to go, you know, blow the doors off of the arena and be the biggest thing in the land. And then in country music seemed like, you know, Sturgel, who opened shows for us, was going to take it to New Heights, and you know, and christ Apleton played before Old Crow at those festivals we did. So I didn't realize that those that these artists were really the future, and that our period together was a sort of like passing of the torch onto this next you know, long distance runner. So when I think about it in the in the Pete Seeger sense of it, like back to my uncle's record collection and how this is a continuum, it's really important to pass it forward. It's really important that American music traditions continue to touch people's lives, whether it's the VH one era or everybody's got a damn computer in their pocket. It's really important that American music continue to calibrate the American experience despite whatever technologies may you know, alter our consciousness that that American music traditions be a through line to from the past, from the present to the past, no matter what our present is. So I'm really appreciative of those who have carried it beyond my reaches so that today's kids, like my fifteen year old daughter will grow up knowing, you know, eventually she'll find her way to some very rooted artist like Molly who can remind her, remind her generation that that this great experiment of making American music the most popular on earth is one of the most humanizing art forms on earth. That it it, you know, it sanctifies us, that it helps us atone that it that it is a cooling salve and a balm. That America music is a miraculous art form. We just need to be reminded of that lest we get too far afield with you know, modern technologies or whatever would take us away from the source material.
01:58:16
Speaker 1: Okay, unlike many musicians in Nashville, not only the country at large, you've taken stands politically. Tell me more about that. What do you decide to stand up? Do you factor in any risks to your image, your career.
01:58:39
Speaker 2: My band's been together twenty eight years. If we were going to get sunk by something I said at what happened a long time ago. Also, we're just not you know, that household and name. You know, we're not that mainstream. So I mean, I could see if Darius Rucker took a stance, maybe.
01:58:57
Speaker 1: But he's pretty established.
01:58:58
Speaker 2: That guy's fifty five years old, the double Nickel. So I could see if Molly were to be outspoken, maybe she could run the risk of But really, where you see people getting canceled is online, So if you don't pay much attention to it, I don't know, it's not really it's not really bothering me. I don't feel I feel like I got kind of a safety net here as an established artist who's in their middle age. And where I decided to take a stance most recently was.
01:59:38
Speaker 1: About gun violence.
01:59:41
Speaker 2: But you know, the Covenant shooting that happened here was like that shooting happened at an evangelical Christian community where our very Republican governor's wife had many many close friends, where you know, it almost like it happened on the right. And so for me to be all like lefty guy about it. You know, I'm kind of a centrist anyway, but the position can be often thought of to suggest that Commentsen's gun reform occur that can often be considered a left side.
02:00:18
Speaker 1: Of the aisle.
02:00:21
Speaker 2: The shooting that happened in Nashville, that was the catalyst for me to stand up and you know, get my name in the New York Times and whatnot, and then go make this movie that's now being shown on all the PBS channels. It was really, it was a motivating force that didn't just touch me. And and really the coming together the left and right are are essential at this impasse during the Trump years. You know, we really have to figure our shit out as a society if we're going to make it safe for children, or we just won't. You know, but if we can't get over if we can't get over each other and the you know, polarization that we're facing right now, then it just won't be safe. It just won't be healthy. It just you know, it's not the kind of America that I want.
02:01:16
Speaker 1: To live in.
02:01:17
Speaker 2: And I'm really I'm really motivated by the Trump years to seek community as an alternative to the ways that the voices that are trumpeted in the media suggest that we are wholly divided. I go out and play music for a living, and I'm privy to a very purple audience that is cohesively getting along, even though they might feel differently about the Second Amendment or abortion, or environmentalism or what war is or what the you know, defense spending budget should be. When I see him in the front row of my front row, I'm like, oh, look at this. Look at the swath of America. Nobody gets to see this. I mean, and playing country music, being a fiddler and wearing a cowboy hat like I do allows me to further bring the left and the right together. And it's a it's a it's a really lucky vantage point. So it keeps me really optimistic because I get to see it every night. I get to see that when you turn on Fox News or ABC. It's not what they're saying at all, because I'm telling you, I look out there and I see America grooving, dancing, drinking, singing along, dancing together, probably getting it on after the show's over. So I don't know what this shit is about how we're all divided. Okay, ketch very well articulated. You're notice the ambassador of country music. You're certainly that, but your parapatetic life is just fascinating. How you sustained, how you've gone. I want to thank you for taking this time with my own well, thank you so much for sharing your audience with me, Bob. And you know you are an ambassador for many many artists at much higher levels than myself. So thanks for slumming it with an old fiddler like me.
02:03:15
Speaker 1: But I gotta tell you I don't find many you and Benma. I mean you went to exeteror and you more you left your imprint on exitor than exitor left it to imprint upon you.
02:03:29
Speaker 2: I sent on my gold record a wagon Wheel, and I said, please hang this in the dorm room where I wrote this song. And that was when it was gold. Then it went platinum, and now they now it's gone diamond. Now if you can't see me at home, I'm doing air quotes here on diamonds.
02:03:48
Speaker 1: Did they hang it? Oh? Yeah, they got it up there.
02:03:52
Speaker 2: Every once in a while they'll call me up and they'll they'll say, come on up here to Exeter and give a speech to the to the graduate wait in class, and then I like to keep them hanging. I'd rather they I want to see the next folks singer come out of that damn school.
02:04:09
Speaker 1: Hopefully there will be one. Thanks a lot, catch till next time. This is Bob left Sex