February 2025 Edition
Hello there friend!
Ketch here from Old Crow. Sitting in front of a fireplace with a steaming mug of orange pekoe. In front of me on the coffee table is a rosin dusted fiddle with the head of John the Baptist carved on the scroll, a well worn paperback edition of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, and a bunch of empties and ashtrays from the raging jam session we had last night. Like Willie Nelson sings, “Its a Bloody Mary morning…” One thing you might have guessed about me is that I like playing music late into the night. Yet I am naturally a morning person, so it's a bit of a dichotomy. I also wake up a lot in the night restless with thoughts and ideas. I keep a notepad on the nightstand and sometimes when I finally get out of bed I’ll be surprised to see just how much I jotted down in the wee hours. Also there’s a big teetering stack of books beside my bed if I need coaxing back to sleep. Here's a few titles I’m reaching for lately:
Cahokia: America’s Great City on the Mississippi
Ernest Hemingway’s To Have And Have Not
John Fahey’s How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life
And while we’re at it here’s a few songs that i've been reaching for lately:
Louis Prima "Enjoy Yourself (It’s Later Than You Think)” —I love how this song deals with the heavy topic of mortality in such a joyous way. The opposite approach to a humorous telling of shaking the mortal coil is perhaps best evidenced by Carl Sandburg "The Hearse Song”. I grew up reading the poetry of Carl Sandburg (my favorite is his lovesong poem to Chicago entitled City of The Big Shoulders). When I discovered his music, recorded in his home in Bat Cave North Carolina, I recognized a fellow folkie who, like me, felt that whether it's poetry, a tune, a quilt, folktale or folk toy, the artistic expressions of our American elders are equally inspiring. That said, you probably wouldn’t be impressed to see what I’d do with a quilt square any more than you would with Carl Sandburg's singing. But if it stirs something in you like it does in me you may also like to listen to another of my favorite weird-voiced singer/scholars, Kentucky’s John Jacob Niles. One of America’s premier collector of ballads, Niles was also a composer and prolific recording artist. Have a listen to Who Killed Cock Robin, accompanied on his handmade Appalachian dulcimer. For fans of the new Bob Dylan movie you may be interested to know that the opening lines from Bob’s classic It AIn’t Me Babe come from a composition of Niles’ called “Go Way From My Window”.
I think if I had been born 100 years before my birthdate I would have loved to have been a songcatcher, following the music of the British Isles into the hills and hollers, scouting among African-American railroad camps in the coalfields of West Virginian for those sounds that would first be the spark of Country music; locating Native American strains from the Shawnee and Cherokee, Creek and Choctaw; finding the Swiss, German, and French Huguenot voices in the choir, and the Creole and Tejano origins of this our uniquely autochthonous North American music. When Old Crow first got to Northwestern-most North Carolina in the winter of 1999, before our chance encounter that led us to singing Let The Church Roll On with the great Doc Watson, we learned the legend of an ethnomusicologist whose work in Watauga and Avery Counties NC was still being unpacked 50 years later. Richard Chase left Antioch College in the late 40’s armed with a crude field recording device, bound for the rich mountainous region of the Southern Highlands. In photographs of Old Crow in its Watagua County years you can usually spot a dogeared copy of Richard Chase's collection The Jack Tales: Folktales From The Southern Appalachians somewhere in the frame, this book being so important to my understanding of the traditional landscape of our newly adopted home. Another huge influence on me in this regard was of course, John Cohen. A writer, field recordist, and recording artist; you can scratch the surface of his virtuosity in recordings such as the New Lost City Ramblers’ "Al Smith For President” or as an ethnomusicologist and recordist on record such as Roscoe Holcomb’s Swanno Mountain. Imagine my delight at meeting John Cohen at Pete Seeger’s Clearwater Festival and learning he was a fan of Old Crow Medicine Show!
Well, as soon as I arrived in those Appalachian hills with a young hell-for-leather tribe we called Old Crow, I knew I wanted to try my hand at being a musician/ scholar too. So I began visiting with elder mountaineers, in the footsteps of Richard Chase and so many other songcatchers, asking them to recall songs, stories, and traditions they experienced growing up. From these encounters I learned everything from ghost stories and farming techniques, to recipes for squirrel gravy. I also learned a lot of songs. One of my proudest moments in the pursuit of folk music came when, at age 19, I coaxed a 90 year-old named Arlee Presnell to sing into my handheld dictaphone. I had heard that a curious old mountain man lived off the Kellersville Road, that he was blind, that he might know some old ballads. So, in low gear in my blue Chevy S-10, I bounced up a winding one lane, more trail than road, looking for him. Deep in a forest of laurel fronds I found Arlie's homestead, a sprawling collection of out buildings connected by ropes. Blind from birth, Mr. Presnell used these ropes to find his way along the property, from his toolshed to his outhouse to the roadway that led four miles down to the little mountain grocerette, the epitome of self-sufficiency. I called out to him and he appeared with a bundled armload of sticks, a slight man, bent low, with a tuft of long white hair. He seemed almost to have expected me the way he quickly offered to show me inside and turned grabbing a rope above him like a monkey and beckoned me to follow. I followed him down the stretch of rope into the threadbare wood frame hut he called home. We talked for a short while. We drank some corn whiskey. And then he said he had to get back to his chores. It might have been the liquor but that's when my courage kicked in. “Hey Arlie, before you go would mind singing one of those songs you learned when you were young.” It was a big ask. I kind of blurted it out and his face wrinkled. Songs are so revealing. Last night in the jam session I mentioned at the beginning of this letter I was asked by Molly Tuttle to sing one of my new original songs and I bet I made a similar face to the one Arlie Presnell made when I asked him to recount something so personal from his childhood. But soon Arlie’s grimace melted to a smile and he began to sing in such a quiet voice I leaned in almost until his mouth was touching my ear. It was an immediately familiar tune. He was singing Little Moses, in a rendition similar to The Carter Family "Little Moses”. I felt like John Lomax when Ledbelly sang The Midnight Special. Or like Ralph Peer when Jimmie Rogers first stepped up to a microphone in Bristol Tennessee and sang Sleep Baby Sleep. It’s one of my proudest accomplishments. I’ve long since lost the recording I made that day, but I’ll never forget the feeling of joining my heroes as a true participant in that uniquely American mystery-science where history and culture collide into song, which we call: folklore.
Well here’s hoping whatever your goal are you meet ‘em with gusto. Thanks for being a fan of Old Crow! We’ve got a lot of fun shows coming up this Spring we want to invite you out to. If our Circle The Wagons Tour is coming through your town be sure and come out, flag us down, and say howdy!
And like Woodrow Wilson Guthrie famously said, “So Long it’s been good to know ya.”
And, "Take it easy, but take it!
Ketch
