The evolution of music is a cycle of extremes. En vogue becomes boring, and underground becomes the mainstream. It’s the same with fashion. One decade the cool kids wear pants that are too tight to slide on without greasing them first. In another, you’re walking around with what are essentially two separate dresses, one for each leg. Then one day, punk-rockers wake up sporting cowboy boots and lassos.
So when people say that North American folk music is dead, popular only amongst historians rehearsing Civil War reenactments and those stuck in the ’60s, I’d say it’s more dormant. However, it’s starting to wake up again, and it’s much more genuine than the watered-down mainstream’s futile country’s-cool-again campaign.

Old Crow Medicine Show brings an energetic rocker attitude to the traditional knee-slapping, head-bobbing, hoot’n and holler’n of the South. They’ll have you know that folk is anything but a dated, finished product.
From Nashville, Tenn., the young, goofy five-piece string band plays pre-World War II blues, folk, jug, bluegrass and Americana. Whatever it is, the music is nonetheless as all-American as the band’s name.
Old Crow (a brand of Kentucky bourbon whiskey) Medicine Show (traveling entertainment acts of 19th-century America that sold miracle drugs in between the flea circus, magic tricks and storytelling) keeps true to its roots. Just like in the olden days, the medicine show is primarily a live act. The band is constantly on the road, and even its success spurs from “relentless touring” at bars, venues and festivals like Bonnaroo, MerleFest and Cambridge Folk Festival.
Rolling out West (probably with their horse and buggy), OCMS is armed with a fiddle, harmonica, banjos, resonator guitar, stand up bass and rough Appalachian accents with the occasional country squeal.
Performing alongside artists like Dolly Parton and Merle Haggard, OCMS has appeared on NPR’s “A Prairie Home Companion” and “Late Night with Conan O’Brien.” The band’s self-titled 2004 album was one of Country Music Television’s top 10 bluegrass albums of the year.
American youth is, of course, much more into Mohawks, gold-plated teeth and sweaty 140 beat-per-minute dancing. OCMS is something else. They don’t try to be cool – they just are. Kind of like the Blues Brothers just are. They are the enigma of poor, touring street musicians who like to party.
In the “Wagon Wheel” music video, OCMS performs on the sad-looking stage of an empty country fair sitting between flat grazing land and a big blue sky. “I was born to be a fiddler in an old-time string band,” sings vocalist Ketch Secor. A Ferris wheel can be seen in the background and a large, oddly-dressed woman sits in the middle of the performers swaying with purpose to the slightly solemn melody. The only spectator is a long-haired cowboy who counts his profit at the ticket booth. Then, exotic dancers skip across the stage and draw a large country crowd as a young boy stares up in awe at the women. What is the message being sent here? I don’t know, but they all seem to be having a lot of fun.
“I Hear Them All” begins with a Dylanesque harmonica and voice. The song gives a voice to the “hungry” and the “wandering” America. As the vocalist sings “And the prophets from Elijah, to the old Paiute Wovoka,” the music video observes decaying Southern towns and skyscrapers representing “the crooked wits of tyrants.” The video ends with a call for hurricane relief in New Orleans.
The sounds of OCMS originate from the forgotten, but still-very-real rural landscape and lifestyle. Once limited to the South and the countryside, the folk genre’s most recent revival and appeal to the young crowd shows that the American roots culture is still a developing and organic phenomenon.
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