When Old Crow Medicine Show came to Nashville in 2000, lead vocalist/fiddle player Ketch Secor recalls to Billboard, “We gravitated to that area and lived in a motel room by the week. Motels were about $26. We would stay in rooms next to people who had gotten out of jail. We stayed alongside drug dealers and sex workers and all kinds of people who were trying to scrape by and figure out their s—t like we were.
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“I think Dickerson Road represents an interesting story in the South’s saga of redistricting and urban renewal, because this corridor hung on and became a kind of testing ground for who can make it,” he adds. “It’s kind of a sink-or-swim strip.”
That history is reflected on “Dickerson Road,” the first single from Secor’s solo album, Story the Crow Told Me, out Friday (July 11) via Equal Housing Records/Firebird Music.
“Dickerson Road” is an homage to the gritty area north of downtown Nashville, filled with car sales lots, small businesses, and motels, that has served as a home for many aspiring musicians over the decades. The song is built upon rapid-fire, spoken-word vocals from Secor, along with a relentless rhythm and fiery guitarwork from The Cadillac Three’s Jaren Johnston (Secor and Johnston previously worked together on the song “Hillbilly” with Elvie Shane).
Throughout the album’s dozen songs, he distills his more than two-decade journey as a musician and Nashville resident.
“I started thinking about this unique perspective I have on the country music experience in Nashville, having come here [from North Carolina] to play this very old form of it in a modern time, and the changing Nashville,” Secor says. “It just seems my experience from when I started this years ago, this time capsule that I’m unlocking with this record, it was kind of cathartic to dive into these experiences.”
The album’s producer, and the co-writer with Secor on 11 of the songs, is Jody Stevens — a name some music fans might find curious, given that he’s better known for his work with mainstream country artists Luke Bryan, Jake Owen and Cole Swindell, but also rap-world artists including Bubba Sparxxx and early Jelly Roll. Secor says the musical collaboration came courtesy of Sony Music Nashville Publishing CEO Rusty Gaston.
“[Rusty] brought me over to Sony [Music Publishing Nashville], and I had never before really had an advocate in the songwriting business,” Secor says. “Enter Rusty, who has also since signed Molly Tuttle at Sony [Publishing] and we’ve written a lot of songs together. I started writing with people on staff, and one day I wrote with Jody. I had a lot of hooks figured out, because I was like, ‘Well, I’m going to be writing for Luke Bryan or somebody in country, because that’s what this guy does.’ But we sat down together and he was like, ‘No, I’ve seen you like 30 times [in concert]. I want to write Old Crow music.’ Jody used to come out to see Old Crow at Station Inn for like $12 in the early 2000s. It was helpful to have someone who had seen me at 23 and watched what I did and knew what was compelling about it, as a person to bounce ideas off of.”
That mix turned out to be a perfect match for Secor’s album, which blends spoken-word performances on songs such as “Junkin’” and “Dickerson Road” with his well-known, premier musicianship, weaving in elements of bluegrass, folk and country. Secor builds on his well-known fiddle work, playing nearly a dozen instruments — including bass, organ, electric guitar and even spoons.
“Jody produced records for rap artists in the early 2000s, before folks were beginning to explore rap’s relationship to country in the mainstream,” Secor says. “And that’s interesting to me, because I never even thought about rap music, certainly not with Old Crow. But I’m coming at the rap piece [spoken word] of it from my love of beat poetry.”
Other highlights on the album include “Holes in the Wall,” a tribute to the tiny clubs that shaped his artistry, and “Catch Me If You Can,” a meditation on the toll life on the road takes on relationships. Elsewhere, the breakneck “Junkin’” celebrates the joy of crate-digging in record stores to find hidden vinyl gems.
Country Music Hall of Fame member Marty Stuart, an early supporter of Old Crow, joins on “Highland Rim” and “Ghost Train” and plays mandolin on “Old Man River.”
“It felt like a hillbilly anointment when he took us under his wing and showed us a pathway,” Secor recalls. “He opened doors at the Grand Ole Opry, because he saw in us something similar to his own experience of coming to town, young and scrappy and very much rooted in music of the past. Having him on the album was a no-brainer because he’s such a big part of the story of Old Crow in its infancy.”
Old Crow’s raw, performance-forward blend of roots music sounds propelled the group to win two Grammys, earn 10 No. 1 albums on Billboard’s Top Bluegrass Albums chart and release their signature 2004 song “Wagon Wheel” (which Secor wrote after being inspired by a song verse snippet from Bob Dylan). Darius Rucker’s 2013 version of the song would go on to be certified Diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
Old Crow Medicine Show’s presence is also felt on the new album, as some of the group’s original members — Critter Fuqua on drums and harmonies and Willie Watson on harmonies — appear on several tracks.
“Having my friends from the original lineup was a joy and I loved having some Old Crow brethren present,” Secor says.
In 2016, Old Crow performed Dylan’s 1966 Blonde on Blonde album in full at the Country Music Hall of Fame’s CMA Theater. The show became the 2017 live album 50 Years of Blonde on Blonde, which summited the Top Bluegrass Albums chart.
That deep musical and cultural reverence comes full circle on this album’s final track, “What Nashville Was.” The song captures Secor’s complicated affections for a city that is rapidly changing. “What Nashville Was” includes vocal harmonies from Tuttle (who also offers harmonies throughout the project), as well as samples and interpolations from Dylan and Johnny Cash’s duet “Girl From the North Country,” which was included on Dylan’s 1969 album Nashville Skyline.
“I love Nashville for better, for worse, through thick and thin,” Secor says of the city whose population and economic power have swelled over the past two decades. “I’m just committed to it. I wanted to have a song that could kind of be a commentary on [the] Nashville Skyline album. I was already sort of hip to the idea of Bob being kind of a time signature bearer of Nashville and how it’s grown and shifted. He’s a canary in the coal mine of American music.”
Secor notes that he’s long advocated for Dylan to be honored with induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame, “But you flip to the back of the Nashville Skyline record, and you see the Nashville skyline they saw in 1969,” he says. “Looking at the back of that record, it’s hard to even imagine that it would get as big, the way we’re growing by leaps and bounds. The song is sort of a love letter to Nashville, with kind of an asterisk saying, ‘Are you sure you want to go this road?’
“I think we’ve got a real cultural zenith happening here and artistically, it’s never been richer,” he adds. “Yet I feel like the things we need to reckon with are largely outside of the music space. Do we want condos? Do we want parks? How much [like Las] Vegas do we want to be? That might be the cool choice for a generation, but I don’t know that we want to live here after the rhinestone glitter is gone.”
As a longtime Nashville resident, Secor’s love of the city (and the state of Tennessee) runs deep. In September, he’ll take over as host of the beloved travel and entertainment PBS Nashville series Tennessee Crossroads. He launched the Episcopal School of Nashville in 2016, and after tornadoes ripped through Nashville in 2020, Old Crow Medicine Show released the benefit single “Nashville Rising.” Just weeks after the tragic shooting at Nashville’s Covenant School in March 2023, in which three students and three adults were killed, Old Crow Medicine Show advocated for better gun safety laws and measures with the song “Louder Than Guns,” and partnered with bipartisan gun safety advocacy organization 97Percent.
“It goes back to that feeling that [Nashville] is where I was supposed to be,” he relates. “When the Covenant shooting happened, I felt a great safety net underneath my job that allowed me to be like, ‘Well, okay, they’re not going to stand up in mainstream country. That’s okay, they can make the decision that’s right for them. But I feel good about standing up here.’ I tried to make a blueprint for somebody else with a lot more followers than me to say, ‘That’s not going to work. If we’re in a town that is going to have mass shootings, the music industry is going to stand against it, and here’s an example.’ I’m still waiting to pass this torch to somebody with a whole lot more room on the jumbotron than I’ve been given… It’s a hugely important time for us to unite for the health and welfare of our communities.”
Like the city it centers on, Story the Crow Told Me is a mesh of old-time and modern, and in some ways, he says the recording approach felt cyclical with how some early country music records were crafted.
“We were writing songs while we were recording them, so I felt liberated by getting to do my old-timey music, but in a tech-savvy way. All those weird orations, they’re written on the spot and it feels a bit more like jazz [music] in that way,” he notes. “Imagine people coming to the first recording sessions in Nashville in about 1926, before the Bristol sessions [which recorded the music of The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers]. They go up to a furniture store in downtown Nashville and when the red [recording] light is on, they do everything they can and when the light flashes again, that’s it. It’s this one-shot effect.
“One of the interesting things Jody brought with how you make country records is that the demo might be the thing that is on the radio and it’s similar to that,” he adds. “You might have a lot more tools, but you’re throwing all the spaghetti at the wall when the red light turns on.”