Old Crow Medicine Show - Big Iron World !
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Written by Kevin Fann!!
A perfect mix of Okie folk, vaudeville showmen, and Fiddle-n-Whittle Cookoff house band, the Old Crow Medicine Show
knows how to scuff a pair of hard-soled shoes kicking across the back roads.
[10.6.06]
Sometimes they play chase music. Sometimes a tender ballad. Sometimes a dark dirge. Sometimes ragtime. The Old Crow
puts music history in front of the mirror, at once reverent in parody, at once playful in seriousness. It’s old time music
played by young men. And this is one of the best damn acts you’ll see live. Even if bluegrass ain’t your thang, this band is
jaw-dropping in the way they can master a small venue, engaging across so many groups, from young in-the-knows to old
blues hounds to home-town skeptics who work days at the string and bow shop.
OCMS has five members. Ketch Secor plays fiddle and harmonica. He loves the microphone like a sugared-up sixth grader: the storyteller and barker of
the band. Willie Wilson plays acoustic guitar and has the haunting, high-lonesome vocals. Secor-under-Wilson harmony is a sound hard to resist. Morgan
Jahnig, the double bass player, may be the only Crow who doesn’t ever sing lead, but his bass lines hold each song together as an indispensable truss.
Critter Fuqua plays banjo, mostly, with slide guitar on the side. The third party on vocals, Fuqua tends to sing a slower ballad or two. Last but not least,
Kevin Hayes sticks to the “guitjo,” a guitar-banjo hybrid. His singing debut is on this latest album, the nasal ode to minding your own business entitled
“Let It Alone.”
Big Iron World is only the second studio album from OCMS, mostly because the band spends months and months every year rambling across the small
towns of Canada and, when inclined, the U.S.—playing for Looneys and plug nickels and earning their rites of passage, one might say. The band is from
Nashville, but they are from the open prairie weigh station and the street corner, too. This latest album was produced by David Rawlings in East
Nashville at Woodland Studios, home to so many other-side-of-the-tracks Nashville sounds (from Nashville Skyline on down). Gillian Welch records there
and she appears—on drums!—on several tracks.
Suspiciously fond of highlighting traditional ditties about cocaine, “Cocaine Habit” is Big Iron World’s companion tune to the infectious “Tell It to Me”
from the OCMS’ first album. “Take a whiff on me, take a whiff on me, all you rounders take a whiff on me.” Probably first recorded by the Grant
Brothers in Johnson City, 1928, this tune has resurfaced at the hands of many, from Leadbelly to Woody Guthrie to the White Stripes.
Perhaps in the same vein, “Don’t Ride That Horse” is an ominous, dark OCMS original that takes pains to allude to pains.
“To Winnepeg, Saskatoon, Eutaw, Ottawa, empty room /
Hiding bags, rolling smokes, skipping punch lines, cracking jokes…
I ain’t never going home again/
I was tugging at my mama’s breast/
The first year really is the best.”
At least those are the lyrics as I hear them. This is a song I can’t stop listening to, which fits in with the theme so perfectly I wonder there’s not
something in the disc. At three minutes, it’s just never enough.
“I Hear Them All” is a harmony spotlight on social inequality. “God’s Got It” is both a raw spiritual hymn and a sardonic look at add-water evangelism.
“James River Blues” is a traditional bluegrass ballad (“I’ve seen good men going wrong/I’ve seen bad one’s get it right.”) The album opener, “Down
Home Girl,” brings bayou grind into the equation (“I swear your perfume smells like turnip greens”), while “New Virginia Creeper” should come with a
flat-topped boater straw hat and a red-and-white striped jacket. “Union Maid” is a Guthrie remake (and, yes, looking at the concentration of wealth in
our big iron world, it’s getting to be that time again!)
The Old Crow Medicine Show is the real deal and a purely planned staging at the same time, which is the essence of great performance: pulling it in and
then blowing it out. Big Iron World is a great album and a case in point: great bluegrass is closer to punk than anything else. Bluegrass is punk, I’ve been
told. I’m starting to believe it.
www.crowmedicine.com
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