The Nashville-based string band Old Crow Medicine Show is coming to the Tennessee Theatre on Mar. 20 for their Back to the Roots Tour.
The Back to the Roots Tour will take place in Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, where the band’s first two albums, “O.C.M.S.” and “Big Iron World” were created. The band’s performances will be stripped down to the way the songs from these albums were originally played.
Bassist Morgan Jahnig believes this tour is special as the band reconnects with the people and places that they spent a lot of time with when they first started, including Old Crow Medicine Show founder Willow Watson.
“We’ve spent the last, you know, decade, fifteen years, really trying to put on a big show and always pushing ourselves. There’s a certain ease and relaxing time to go back and just play it the way we used to do it,” Jahnig said. “We can reconnect with the reasons we were doing it in the first place, and be able to carry forward through the next chapter in Old Crow’s history.”
Old Crow Medicine Show began making music in 1998 in New York, later moving to East Tennessee to soak up the roots of traditional Appalachian music. The band made their way to Nashville around 2000, when Jahnig joined them.
Jahnig came across Old Crow Medicine Show for the first time on a street corner in Nashville in 2000 while on his way to lunch at an Irish pub with his father and roommate.
“There was this crowd gathered in front of these, probably six semi-dirty dudes, just hanging out on the street corner, playing loud, fun music like I’d never heard before. I stood there long enough until my dad was like, ‘dude, we gotta go. We gotta go eat,’” Jahnig said.
Jahnig saw the band a couple of times after that, always going back to see them again. After sending them an email saying he plays bass, he received a call one day from Watson saying that they needed a bass player for a gig. Jahnig stayed on with Old Crow Medicine Show after that, having to decide between them and another band he also played in at the time.
“And I made the decision to go follow the band that was still playing street corners, and not the band who was going and playing bars around the country,” Jahnig said. “It worked out.”
From street corners to the Ryman Auditorium, Old Crow Medicine Show has played in front of many great artists, such as Del McCurry, Robert Earl Keane, Junior Brown, Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton. They are members of the Grand Ole Opry and won two Grammy Awards for Best Long Form Music Video and Best Folk Album in 2013 and 2015. They were also nominated for Best Folk Album in 2024 for their album “Jubilee.”
Their first two albums, “O.C.M.S.” and “Big Iron World,” are huge signatures for the band, with the first containing their classic hit “Wagon Wheel.” This year is the twentieth anniversary of “Big Iron World,” while “O.C.M.S.” celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 2024.
“They’re definitely the two records that propped up our career for so long, some of our most beloved songs that we like to play, that people like to hear,” Jahnig said. “So this (the upcoming tour) was an opportunity for us to go back and, you know, strip out all the electric guitars, all the excitement. We’re gonna keep the excitement. But, kind of go back to the way that we used to play these songs twenty years ago.”
The song “Wagon Wheel” has become the band’s most famous, with nearly two hundred million streams on Spotify. It received the RIAA’s Double-Platinum certification in 2019 after selling over two million copies. Bob Dylan originally recorded the chorus of the hit in 1973 from his demo “Rock Me, Mama.“ Frontman Ketch Secor later added the rest of the verses twenty five years later, creating “Wagon Wheel.” However, before the song became widely popular, it only existed at Old Crow’s shows, around campfires and in other’s communities as it wasn’t played on the radio or in movies.
“It just sort of grew out of people’s love for it rather than the market trying to dictate what a song, what a hit was going to be,” Jahnig said.
Old Crow Medicine Show’s music has always tried to educate audiences through their songs, either about the history of their music or how it is still important and thriving today. Along with their original songs, the band plays many fiddle tunes that are a hundred or two hundred years old. Their music focuses on topics surrounding Tennessee, the country and tradition with a folk, bluegrass style that feels old and new all at once.
The band does a beautiful job of exploring heavier topics in a light-hearted way. “Nashville Rising,” one of the Old Crow Medicine Show’s singles, written by Secor, released a few days after a destructive tornado went through Nashville in 2020 with the hopes of spreading positivity in the community’s dark times. Another 2020 single from Secor released shortly after titled “Quarantined,” a song about being separated from the people you love during Covid-19.
“I think that we were always trying to talk about the tough things in the world, but while you’re dancing,” Jahnig said. “The greatest songs out there by some of the greatest writers like Woody Guthrie was always just such a champion of being smart and speaking his mind, but doing it in a way that made you tap your toe. And if we can do even a little bit of that, then I think that we’re doing good work.”
Old Crow Medicine Show has been a band for twenty-eight years, carrying their mission of pushing tradition, sharing American roots music and connecting with others who believe in its message. While the music industry has changed during their time as a band, they are still creating music that they enjoy and love to share with people.
“At the same time, you get up there and for two hours, we’ll go and we’ll holler and we’ll dance and we’ll shake. And, you know, everybody else will do it along with us and that has never changed,” Jahnig said.
Old Crow Medicine Show will be performing here in Knoxville on Mar 20, 8 p.m., for their Back to the Roots Tour at the Tennessee Theatre.