Stage Talk with Rick Koster
Where every show has something to say.
As Oppenheimer was to explosions, so is Old Crow Medicine Show to the idea of an old-timey barn dance fiddle band.
Which is to say that, in my 30 years writing about music and attending hundreds of performances, Old Crow Medicine Show puts on one of the best live concerts I’ve ever witnessed. Period. And the musical heart of those shows is a swirling wellspring of country-squared styles that’s truly visionary.
Old Crow played The Garde in September of 2022, and here’s what I wrote about that gig when I put it at the top of my annual year-end best-of list for The Day newspaper:
“Let’s say you hate – you REALLY hate – bluegrass and roots music. Let’s say you toe the line here on earth because you fear eternity in a hell in which Satan pipes bluegrass music nonstop and your cellmate is a 9-year-old practicing scales on an out of tune fiddle. Got that scenario?
“OK. If I’d forced you to go with me to see the concert by bluegrass-inspired Americana band Old Crow Medicine Show in the Garde, you might have walked out two hours later STILL hating that style of music. But you’d damned sure admit that you’d just seen one of the greatest concerts of your life. Because, as they do every night, Old Crow delivered in a huge way. They’re never NOT on – and as excellent as the performance spectacle was, the music and songs were just as stellar.”
This is particularly resonant since the band hits the Garde stage Thursday, Dec. 18 on their “Holiday Hootenanny Tour” supporting their first ever yule album, “OCMS XMAS.” The recording features several of their own seasonal tunes along with a few covers including a rendition of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Happy Xmas (War is Over).”
In anticipation of their Garde appearance, I asked five questions of the band’s eloquent, witty and thoughtful leader Ketch Secor. Here are his responses, edited for space and clarity.
The Garde: When you decided to make an album of predominantly original Christmas songs, how do you handle creative nuances like providing inspirational atmosphere? Did you wait until November or December last year to record in appropriate real time? Or did you just go to the rehearsal room in August and set up a snow machine and fake tree?
Ketch Secor: Typically, that the general rule of thumb for a country music Christmas album is that you make up in July, so we bucked that trend by making ours in December 2024 in the weeks leading up to Christmas. I wrote the songs about six weeks before that, between Halloween and Thanksgiving. It’s easier to imagine Santa coming down your chimney when trick-or-treaters are at your door than it might be when you’re wearing flip-flops down at the Kiawah Island.
Garde: Y’all chose to include a rendition of “Happy Xmas (War is Over).” Should we be sad Paul McCartney’s “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time” didn’t make the cut?
Ketch: The thing is, on the tour, we’ve been playing “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time” every night. We kick off the live set with this ribald vocalization of whatever synthesizer Paul uses at the beginning of the song — the thing that sounds like cats meowing.
So we start out a cappella, just going (vocal approximation of, well, yowling felines) “Meow meow meow meow meow meow” and instantly the whole audience knows what it is. It’s kind of fun and interesting the way just a simple sound and personality and a level of dissonance speak to me on a magical level.
These Christmas songs, these carols … we’ve all taken them into our hearts. They’re the soundtrack of Time probably more than any other music at any other time of year. There’s just nothing like the way we have a soundtrack to the month of December in America.
Garde: With that realization, was part of the reason for a mostly original Christmas album because it’s incredibly difficult to come up with distinctive and new versions of classic songs that haven’t been done a hundred times?
Ketch: (laughs) Well, you know, I think Michael Bublé’s got a lot of those classics covered by himself. Speaking as a country artist, albeit mostly out of the mainstream, I also think pop music also has an easier time of reinventing or making new Christmas classics because the idea is just to make it a little sexier every year. It’s all about the hook and the production.
Think about Mariah’s “All I Want for Christmas is You.” I think that’s one of the best Christmas carols ever and it was written in the 20th century. It goes right up there with the eternal classics because pop music has this ability to meet us exactly where we are. The same for the aforementioned Paul McCartney song and a lot more. The Wham!ification of Christmas, if you will.
So, to me, the question is more about what can we do about that dynamic with fiddles and banjos? The easy solution is the idea that acoustic instruments are just one glockenspiel-strike away from already being Christmas. You know, for me, give me a banjo and a fiddle I’m already Christmas adjacent. All you gotta do is add the roaring fire — and where I come from, my roaring fire comes from a potbelly stove.
Garde: You co-founded the Episcopal School of Nashville with the idea, as you once wrote, that it would be “filled with kids from all the diverse backgrounds. It would be a community school with a focus on service learning and bring families together from across Nashville.”
One of the many elements of the curriculum is the children’s Purple Martin Choir, who have been part of various Old Crow-centric projects and who sing on the new album. The big question: has anyone in the Purple Martin Choir inquired as to when they start to get royalty checks? Kidding. But seriously, talk about the idea of featuring these young singers from your school.
Ketch: Yes, I’ve been busy with my singers! As you say, it’s a school, so every year it’s a slightly different Purple Martin Choir, and the Christmas album is maybe the fourth project that we’ve done with this rotating cast. Sometimes my own children are on these records. We did one recording for a mass casualty event, and a song we put out after a subsequent protest that happened when school was the target of rampaging gun violence.
We also did a song with the choir after the tornadoes kicked in, so basically, if there’s a big thing going on in my life, I tend to turn to children to help validate it and amplify it.
Garde: Children are the future.
Ketch: Right. What’s the point of singing a lyric like “War is over if you want it” if you don’t evoke children? Because who are we saying “war is over” for? War is very much not over for anybody old enough to turn on the news.
But what about these youngsters who want to dream of a world in peace? You know, Yoko says that it’s not enough to say you want to pray for peace or you wanna even act for peace. You have to BE peace — and peace is something that you have to give away.
So, for me, like, by giving a song to impressionable youth is more than just voting or going to a protest or speaking out about what you think about the president or the last president or the guy before that. But, by instilling in children the belief that they can transform the world through their youth and idealism? That’s revolutionary stuff.
Garde: An Old Crow concert has a foundation in precise timing, choreography, segues, the way the set structured … So, when you break out a new show as for this holiday album, what does that entail in terms of preparation?
Ketch: It was really fun to put all this together. It’s definitely an Old Crow Christmas show, and it has mostly the songs on this record but also some medleys of other old Christmas standards. A lot of our live act came together as “The Heartland Hootenanny,” which was a variety live stream show we did all during Covid.
There was a lot of script writing and comedy and a lot of blocking. A lot of hilarity and gags. I’ve always loved that stuff because I like Garrison Keeler so much and Pee-Wee Herman’s Playhouse, so it’s all that with a backdrop of the Grand Ole Opry if it had a Christmas tree out front.
BONUS QUESTION
Garde: Did Santa ever bring you a fiddle?
Ketch: No, Santa brought me a drum and Santa brought me a Bob Dylan album. The drum was of no use to me; I’m a terrible drummer. Santa made a cruel mistake when he brought me that drum.
But you know what? I took that drum out to the garage and I called up all my friends and said, “Hey guys, I’m a drummer now! Let’s get together and start a band!” And that was the right idea except for the drummer part. It all worked out, so Santa did have some premonition, he just gave me the wrong reindeer to guide my sleigh.