Old Crow Band Members

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Old Crow Medicine Show have spent more than a quarter century blending the vernacular traditions of old-school America — including mountain music, bluegrass, old-time, and folk — into modern songs for country dwellers and city slickers alike. Their music is a cultural bridge, connecting the past with the present. Nowhere is that more apparent than on Union Made, an album that finds the Grammy-winning string band reflecting upon the people, places, and stories of a country on the brink of its 250th birthday. 

"I was born in 1978, and I was keenly aware there had been a big party a couple of years before I was born," says founder, frontman, and ringmaster Ketch Secor. "When I started going to junk stores and antique stores, I'd see all the stuff that was made in 1976 to celebrate the bicentennial. It was everywhere — cups, coins, jugs, shirts, ashtrays — and it made an indelible mark on me. Now, 48 years later, it's finally time to get my invite to the party of the century."

Few people have explored the American landscape as rigorously as Ketch and his bandmates. Before they were members of the Grand Ole Opry, they were buskers: playing for pocket change on street corners, thumbing rides to the next town, carrying the torch of an entire lineage of American wanderers and storytellers. They've seen the country's highways and hollers, its clean-swept streets and dirty back alleys, and their catalog feels like a map where famous landmarks and overlooked corners carry equal weight.  

"Merle Haggard said the big secret about the music business is you're actually signing up for a 50-year bus ride," Ketch says. "What he left out was, the bus ride goes through 50 states that you're going to get to know better than anyone else: better than any titan of industry, better than any politician, better than our most brilliant American minds. We've seen more than all of them put together, because for 27 years now, we've gone to sleep in one state and woken up in another."

That well-traveled vision of America springs to life on Union Made's 12 songs. It's the band's most collaborative project yet, recorded in their East Nashville clubhouse and featuring appearances from nearly a dozen guests. There are road-ready rave-ups like "Lincoln Highway," a tribute to transcontinental travel with Asleep at the Wheel's Ray Benson riding shotgun. There are generation-spanning collaborations like "My Side of the Mountain," written with Molly Tuttle and Luke Combs (who, like Old Crow, came to Nashville after cutting his teeth in the mountain town of Boone, North Carolina) and featuring bluegrass legends Del McCoury and Ronnie McCoury. On "Revolution Now," Ketch shares songwriting credit with Lee Oskar — a Danish immigrant who moved to America in the 1940s, reshaped the sound of 1970s funk as a member of War, and became one of America's premier instrument makers during the decades that followed — and splits vocal duties with Turnpike Troubadours frontman Evan Felker. "Beautiful Land" is a southern ballad featuring soul singer Maggie Rose, "Howdy Do America" is a tongue-twisting barn-burner with Jesse Wells, and "Last American Waltz" offers up another gorgeous collaboration with Ketch's life partner (and fellow bluegrass icon) Molly Tuttle. Rounding out the all-star guest list are John Carter Cash and Ana Cristina Cash, who appear on the album's southwestern-flavored call to unity, "Y'all All Come." 

For an album about union — about the rich tapestry of exuberance, sorrow, victory, and failure that forms the American experience — it feels appropriate to hear so many different voices joining together. Even so, this is unmistakably the work of Old Crow Medicine Show. Morgan Jahnig, the group's upright bassist since 2000, produced the record, handing off bass duties to bandmate PJ George instead. ("We're like a minor league baseball team where the pitcher is also a really good shortstop, and the third baseman can play first," Ketch jokes. "We all play so many instruments, so we switched it up in a way that allowed Morgan to orchestrate and manage the band in a production role.") With former members Joe Andrews and Chance McCoy back in the lineup, the band worked quickly, capturing each song in a handful of live-in-the-studio performances. In the same spirit that once prompted Ketch to turn a fragmented Bob Dylan chorus into the era-defining hit "Wagon Wheel," the guys also chose to revisit Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth," recontextualizing the 1960s staple into a folk anthem for the modern era. Now serving as the album's final track, it's a reminder of the band's passion for blurring the traditional with the timely, highlighting just how potently our shared history informs the current moment.

There's plenty of shared history in Old Crow Medicine Show's own ranks. Formed before "Americana" was a widely-recognized genre, the guys spent years piloting a cross-pollinated sound — one that pulled the traditions and textures of old-time music into the 21st century — that would soon spark a generation-wide folk revival. When their self-titled debut album arrived in 2003, it rocketed to Number 1 on the Bluegrass Albums chart, a feat matched by all nine of their follow-up releases. By the mid-2010s, they'd won two Grammy Awards and inspired countless bands to pick up the banjo, including self-professed fans like Mumford & Sons. Band members came and went, but Old Crow Medicine Show endured, forever dedicated to keeping the feedback loop of folk music alive. Years later, the guys continue to reshape and reenergize what they've inherited before handing it off again — a little rowdier, a little quicker, a little more alive than before.

This 27-year trek from the street corners of Western North Carolina to the nation's most celebrated stages — a journey that embodies the American Dream — now has a new soundtrack. With Union Made, Old Crow Medicine Show have penned a love letter to the America that was, the America that is, and the America that could be. There's plenty of humor, heart, history, and honesty here, tucked between the sweep of Ketch's fiddle and the crash of Cory Younts' percussion. It's the sound Old Crow Medicine Show have always made, but it's rarely sounded this focused. 

"This is a fascinating time in our short history as a nation," Ketch adds. "We wanted to meet that moment by collecting a bunch of songs that speak to the joys and potentials, the rights and the wrongs of where we are today, where we're going, and what can embolden us to have a more perfect union in the future. There are wonderful, ghostly American sounds that only bands steeped in folk music traditions know how to conjure, and it seems like an important time for those voices to be heard." 

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