April 2024 Edition

Howdy, Friend!

Springtime has finally brought its burst of green (and pink and purple!) to Nashville. For all the years I've called the southland home it has always been spring that feels like our best regional idiosyncrasy. There are the blooming dogwoods and the purple shocks of blossoming redbud trees. There also are kids itching for school to end and outdoor seating areas packed to the gills. But spring in Nashville has another important meaning: bands are just starting to hit the road…yup it’s tour time again! 

Concerts put on in the spring are kind of like the first couple weeks of baseball. Our cases don’t swing open as often in the winter months. Perhaps we grow a bit soft: going to bed a little earlier, sleeping a little later. For a ball player, no amount of Spring Training can really prepare the body for a 120-game baseball season. Similarly, a few sporadic tour dates in January and February can’t get the Old Crows properly warmed up for the tens of thousands of miles we’ll have traveled by summer’s end. Home all winter, leave in the spring, gone all summer and fall. That’s our tradition 25 years into what Merle Haggard called “the 50-year bus ride” when referring to the entertainer’s life (I’m halfway there, Merle…lookout, l’m catching up to you)!

After the first few weeks of spring, those MLB ball clubs begin to hit their stride. And the same thing goes for Old Crow when it comes to another Merle, this one with the surname Watson. You see, one of the first festivals of the touring season for any act with a banjo is Merlefest. 

Back in the spring of 1988 North Carolinians kicked off a new music gathering. Out in rural Wilkes County on a small community college campus, the Eddy Merle Watson Memorial Festival was born, planting the seed that would grow into Merlefest, one of the nation's top draws for traditional music. There were contemporary artists like New Grass Revival and David Holt as well as quite a few legends who are now pickin’ in heavenly pastures such as Chet Atkins, John Hartford, George Hamilton IV, and of course the late great Doc Watson himself. That first festival in 1988 was no frills and just barely came to fruition. But after just 10 years, Merlefest was booming. 
 

It was 1999 when Doc Watson chanced upon a young OCMS busking in front of Boone Drug and offered us a spot on the stage of his beloved hometown festival. I was 19 years old, scrappy as an ally cat. I remember we were playing “Oh My Darling” when he stopped by. Back to the baseball metaphor, the equivalent of this invitation would be Casey Stengel asking a local high school pitcher with a promising curveball to come try out for the Yankees. There was no realm of quantum understanding where we could have predicted that we’d even meet Doc, much less impress him and get this incredibly important gig at the region’s biggest music festival. We’d lived in the area only 4 months, 30 miles west of Boone. Doc lived 30 miles east. We hardly knew Doc lived in Northwestern NC when we were throwing darts at a map of the Carolinas back in the winter of ’99. Most of us assumed we’d move to Asheville, a hotbed for Old Time music back then. But the gods were smiling on us the day we found a listing in the tri-county shopper for a 4 bedroom farmhouse in Avery County for $650/month. Those smiles were even bigger when, through divine twist of fate, Doc’s daughter Nancy happened upon us busking in front of the drug store that held her father’s favorite lunch counter and said to herself something like, “I wonder if daddy’d like to get some lunch and hear these boys.” We’re eternally grateful she did.

In the spring of 2000, we rushed out 1,000 copies of our new CD Greetings From Wawa in anticipation of performing a killer set at Merlefest. We arrived the first day of the festival, everyone carrying an armload of CDs and, with help from area Boy Scouts, climbed off a school bus to set up our campsite. No one brought a sleeping bag because no one planned on sleeping. Music was throbbing everywhere, and we were all elated to be there. Without Doc’s intervention we would have been sitting at home. Instead, we were the newest band at Merlefest, hungry and ready to spring into action. With showtime approaching, morale was high. We warmed up (rare for us even now) and hit the stage with gusto. Unfortunately, though, we did not have the killer set we had anticipated at the Traditional Dance Stage hosted by Alice Gerard that opening day of the festival. In fact, it was pretty rough. As a busking troupe we were inexperienced with microphones and what little audience had gathered to see us on Merlfest’s smallest stage at 2pm winced though piercing feedback as we muddled through our 45-minute set. After it was over Alice handed us a check for $250 and that was it. No big splash. Not even an encore. Up at the CD tent it was crickets. We hadn’t sold a one. Deflation settled over all our faces. Then irritability kicked in. We regrouped after a lunch of Bonanza chicken biscuits and contemplated heading back home to Avery County. Thankfully, we didn’t. 

That’s when the second part of Doc’s divine intervention kicked in. See, I'm convinced luck comes in two parts. There’s the part you receive from the great beyond, and then the part you make yourself. Casey Stengel might call you up, but you better deliver if he does. And so, we hatched a plan to deliver, and we called it the Fountain Stage. Merlefest has a half dozen stages, the Main Stage and Cabin Stage being the most recognizable. But in the spring of 2000, the festival named in honor of Doc’s son boasted one additional stage, the one Old Crow made up. Being buskers, we figured we’d just claim a spot and start playing, maybe we could unload a few of those CDs. Well, we did that and a whole lot more. We stayed all three days, playing all day long, and playing hard. We taped a couple cardboard signs to the front of a barrel beside a dried-up fountain behind the dance tent and, calling it the Fountain Stage, carnival barked a crowd to our feet, then played set after set to a fever pitch. Songs like “Good Bye Mary Dear” and “Train On The Island” and “Wild Bill Jones.” The CDs flew off the rack. We must have sold 300 the first day. By night two we were past 500. On another encounter with the gods, I met Merlefest’s headliner, Willie Nelson, outside his tourbus and gave him a copy of Greetings From Wawa. By day three we’d sold out of CDs. A photographer came from the Wilkes Journal-Patriot. That Sunday as the festival came to a close our picture was on the cover. “Old Crow plays Fountain Stage at Merlefest” read the headline. We didn’t stop. We played while tents and awnings came down and rooftop carriers were packed for long drives home. Someone brought us a milk jug of white corn whiskey. We got sloppy and kept playing until around 2pm that Sunday when an officer of the Wilkes County Sheriff’s Department asked us to kindly pack up and leave. A month or so after Merlefest 2000 we got a call from the Grand Ole Opry’s Sally Williams who had created a summer concert series, the Opry Plaza Parties, which would take place on a stage just outside the famous Opry House. She’d seen us at the Fountain Stage and wondered if we’d like to come to Nashville to play every weekend between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Yes, absolutely. The gift Doc Watson gave us was still paying off. By the end of that summer, we left North Carolina and never looked back. In many ways that spring encounter continues to deliver.

I hope you’ll find, as I have through many seasons of life, that spring has a special gift waiting for you too. Spring, after all, is the calendar’s great time of renewal. This year when Old Crow takes the stage at Merlefest, I’ll be reminded of that beautiful newness of spring, the ripeness of possibilities. We’ll be surrounded by the very people we’ve shared so much of life’s journey with. Willie Watson will be there, and so will Nancy Watson. The spirit of Doc and Merle Watson certainly will be as well. Who knows just what evergreen sprig has taken root and is growing in your life right now? Tend it with hope and watch it blossom.

May spring bloom in your heart all season long!

Fondly,

Ketch

Photo Credits:
Above: Boone Drug 1999 📸 John St Ours
Below: Merlefest 2022 📸 Brook Stevens