The campfire favorite "Wagon Wheel" was recorded by Old Crow Medicine Show 20 years ago.
The band is coming to Scottsdale Performing Arts Center on Thursday, June 13, and The Show's Sam Dingman got to talk to the band’s co-founder and lead singer, Ketch Seacor recently.
Seacor said he isn't tired of playing that song. Quite the opposite, actually. He told Dingman he sees it as part of the band’s mission. He also said he’s had music in his bones since he was a little kid.
Full conversation
KETCH SEACOR: There's a story in my family that goes when I was a kid, I lived in New Orleans, I learned to walk and talk in New Orleans, my dad left me out in front of a liquor store so that he could go in and make a purchase, that doesn't this sound like child rearing in the 1980s. And so he's like, wait here, son. And I had seen people in the French Quarter dancing for change, and I started dancing. And when he came back out of the liquor store, I had a pile of money in front of me.
SAM DINGMAN: Well, there's an early signal that music can be a viable career, right?
SEACOR: Yeah.
DINGMAN: Yeah, you also said once, when you, when you drag a bow across four strings, it's like a bodily smile. When do you remember having that feeling for the first time?
SEACOR: I can't think of the first time I felt it. But the reason I started playing the fiddle, though, is because so much of the music that makes you know all genres in America is dance music, wanting there to be a reason for people to get together through music. Yeah, and dancing is the next best thing to sex, which is the, you know, the, you know, the essential act. I think it's really about, you know, it's kind of a snake charm in here. You're just trying to get dance partners together so you can, you know, keep the species going.
You know, that you think of the parentage in this dance. It's a dance between largely the founders of America who come from Europe, and then the founders of America who come from Africa, these two founders who are not allowed to dance together in the United States, you know, really up until, you know, present day, 50 years ago, something this taboo dance of black and white on these shores. And the thing about the fiddle is that the fiddle is the melody and the banjo, it's the drum from West Africa. So, you know, the fiddle meets the banjo that happens here in North America, and then we're all the great-, great-grandkids running around.
DINGMAN: Wow, you know, Ketch, I don't think I've ever heard anybody talk about folk music as subversively as the way that you just did.
SEACOR: Most subversive format there. I mean, it's talking about some rabble rows and politics and stuff here. Man, like you could go to this stuff will get you hung.
DINGMAN: So you told Rolling Stone once, you said, I remember when I was a kid thinking I was born too late for the party, that all the cool stuff had happened. Can you tell me a little bit about that feeling? What was the party? What was the cool stuff? You felt like you were born too late?
SEACOR: Oh, the March on Washington in 1963 and Bob Dylan singing “The Times They Are a Changin’” and Martin Luther King Jr. arms with Julian Bond. And you know, when music was on the front lines of change and advocacy. One of the things that's really changed is that the power of song has been crazily diluted, you know, it barely has, you know, the cultural fluency that it once had and it, you know, it's just a lot less impactful.
DINGMAN: Kind of in that vein, I wanted to ask, have you ever spent any time reading the YouTube comments on “Wagon Wheel”?
SEACOR: Uh, no, I never have. Are they, are they any good, interesting?
DINGMAN: They're deeply, deeply reverent. And there's just comment after comment after comment of people saying “Wagon Wheel” was the favorite song of somebody they loved who died. And periodically, they get together with their friends and they play. It, and it feels like that person is there again. It seems like people come to this song to ask it to hold massive, massive feelings of longing and regret. I wonder what you make of that?
SEACOR: I feel really humbled by it and honored that I could have contributed something to the world that could, you know, carry away somebody's grief and or be a, you know, a long distance phone call to the beyond.
And country music is, is, is a unique body, and when I'm up there on the stage singing country music with my fiddle under my chins. I look out there in my audience, and I see people who have vehement disagreement with one another, and yet they bought a ticket to this show, right? And so I know what it looks like, what civility looks like, because I see it every night, in hands waving together.
And one of the things I think that really unites us, that we often fail to see, is that we all share pain. We all share in grief. You know, the people that died in the opioid crisis are the children of the left and right. The people who have died in the school shootings are the children of left and right.
DINGMAN: Well, this is all very interesting to me to hear you talk about, because in 2018 you told the Providence Journal, you said there's a role for certain songs and songwriters to spin a political narrative. And generally, I'm not one of them. I'm mostly here as an entertainer. Do you still feel that way? Or do you feel like your relationship to the politics that can be associated with this music has shifted?
SEACOR: Well, I think the only difference now is that in 2018 you know, I didn't have a smartphone. I was still on a flip phone in 2018 and so I didn't have even though the band had half a million Facebook followers, I didn't have any engagement with any of them, and I'd never used Instagram before, and I was still checking my email at the public library.
Man, anyhow, now that I decided, well, I guess I'm not going to be a Luddite anymore, and I'm going to get out here with everybody else on their smartphones, I just find it to be kind of vapid and disappointing. As a person who just hasn't had that much experience with social media, I'm just less convinced of any one artist's real role in saying, well, this is how the country should go on this topic, because social media doesn't really do much, but fan the flames.
DINGMAN: Sure. But if I'm hearing you right, it sounds like you do feel like something an artist can do is create a space like if, if we can all sing along to "Wagon Wheel” together, what else can we talk about?
SEACOR: Yeah, oh, man, these are really challenging times in our country to get along with each other. And when I just stay here with my instruments and songs, I feel like a tree standing by the waters, like they say in the old song, you know, I feel unmovable, like, like it says in the Bible, I shall not be moved.
DINGMAN: And that makes you feel hopeful?
SEACOR: Yeah, yeah. Because I mean the, you know, the times change man, and the water keeps on flowing.
