Ketch Secor took the stage at the Rams Head in Annapolis, MD, on Monday night with his strapless acoustic, requisite cowboy hat, and a wire coat hanger jammed into the back pocket of his jeans. The paper-wrapped hanger, the audience soon found out, was the set list, and it travelled about the stage, hanging at various points from the mic stands of Secor and his two collaborators.
The co-founder and frontman of Old Crow Medicine Show is taking a bit of time away from the band, touring in support of his debut solo effort – the autobiographical Story the Crow Told Me, released this past summer. He is being supported on the tour by Old Crow multi-instrumentalist PJ George, now playing bass, and acclaimed slide guitar player Trevor Linden.
It may not be the full Old Crow experience, but Secor's raucous energy and stand-up comedian sense of presentation remain on full display. He packs an awful lot of story and song into two and a half hours on stage.
Even without his standard band, Ketch Secor puts on quite a show
Secor knows the Annapolis area. Though it has not been a frequent stop for OCMS, he grew up about 150 miles west, in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. There may be mountains in Harrisonburg and the Chesapeake Bay in Annapolis, but there’s a constant in the pace of life which Secor’s roots-based music taps into. He clearly felt very much at home telling stories – and making jokes – about the people and the places that make up the mid-Atlantic.
Story the Crow Told Me traces Secor’s early years, and he essentially played the entire album straight through, with plenty of stories tossed in to add context to the high-energy music.
From the opening “Busker’s Spell,” which sets the scene in those pre-Old Crow days, through the insistence of “Dickerson Road,” the bluegrass stomp of ”Junkin’” all the way to the gloriously nostalgic “What Nashville Was,” Secor maintains an infectious energy that has the crowd singing along even if they are hearing the song for the first time.
He dressed up the night with plenty of sweet touches. That final song featured accompaniment from both Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan, via their recording of “Girl From the North Country” from Dylan’s Nashville Skyline.
After finishing the entire solo album, Secor and his bandmates took a short break. They returned for a second set (this time with the set list written on a paper bag) that mixed together several Old Crow favorites like “Alabama High-test” and “Methamphetamine” along with a few glorious one-offs.
Linden, of Blackie and the Rodeo Kings fame, did a rocking version of “Remedy,” a song he co-wrote with Jim Weider for the Band’s 1993 album Jericho. Secor told a long, wildly entertaining story about a chance encounter with John Prine early in his career before launching into a heartfelt version of Prine’s classic “Paradise.”
At the beginning of that second set, Secor noticed a family sitting just off stage right with a sign telling them that their son was also named Ketch. Secor brough the smiling boy onstage for photos and asked him if he was also a musician. The boy said he plays the trumpet, to which Secor asked if he had his horn with hm.
You definitely get the feeling that had young Ketch indeed produced a trumpet, he would have been invited onstage to blow the thing on the next song. As it was, Secor merely envisioned the day when the two Ketches would play together – “and the prophecy would be fulfilled.”
Secor, who played his guitar most of the night but picked up his fiddle and harmonica from time to time, does know how to engage an audience. So when he picked up that fiddle at the end of the night and launched into Old Crow’s massive hit “Wagon Wheel,” he soon had everyone singing.
Ketch Secor has that rare ability to craft music that becomes instantly recognizable. If there actually was someone at the Rams Head who had never heard “Wagon Wheel,” it’s not hard to imagine they were also singing right along by the second verse.
Secor finishes up the current tour with one show in New York and several in North Carolina and Tennessee. Then, after a few weeks off, he’ll be back on the road with OCMS. The songs might be a little different, but it doesn’t really matter. With his trio or with his full band, you get the entirely vibrant and wildly entertaining Ketch Secor experience whenever he takes the stage.