Old Crow Medicine Show

00:00:15 Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey everyone, today we're featuring a chat with two members of the Nashville based string band Old Crow Medicine Show. We've got lead singer Catch scor and drummer Jerry Pentecost. Since Foreman in nineteen ninety eight, Old Crow has helped to preserve folk and blues songs that often pre date even World War Two. Of course, in the best of the folk tradition, they put their own spin on those songs and also have written a number of their own tunes. Old Crow's most successful song to date, the platinum certified wagon Wheel, was written around a Bob Dylan course catch Herd on an Old Dylan bootleg. In twenty thirteen, Darius Rucker of Hooting the Blowfish covered that song, making it a contemporary country music hit and even earned a Grammy. On today's episode, Bruce Sellem talks to Catch Scorps and Jerry Pentecost about Old Crow's latest album, Paint This Town. They share how the raising awareness around the major contributions black musicians like Ray Charles and d Ford Bailey have made to country music, and then Ketch recalls Old Crow's early days when they went through what he calls hill Billy Bootcamp learning how to make whiskey farm tobacco and also shoot groundhogs. This is broken record liner notes for the digital Age. I'm justin Richmond. Here's Bruce Adlam with Ketch C Corps and Jerry Pentecost of Old Crow Medicine Show. So we're welcoming one third of the Old Crow Medicine Show, catch S Corp and Jerry Pentecost. Welcome, Thank you so much for doing this, Thanks for having us. It's wonderful to be here. You have a new album out on Ato Records, Is that right? That's right, and it's called Paint This Town and it is a very ambitious, sprawling album with a lot of different styles. And I'm much heavier sound even than your last album, which people said had a very heavy sound. Can you tell me just a little bit about making this record, how it all came together? Well, sure, thanks for that introduction of it. I like anything that sounds ambitious sounds cool to me, especially here in New York City. Well, so, yeah, we're just trying to keep up with the times. Man. There's a lot to sing about and talk about in times like these, and this was the record that we made in face masks from a six foot distance in an unvaccinated space because they weren't available yet, just waiting for the final green light to go down to the Walmart and Franklin and get our first shot. I said before, it is very ambitious. It's a very rocking record for you guys, more electric guitar. It sort of reminds me that there's more rock and roll in country right now than there is on the pop charts. I think it has to do with the Americano music scene being such a wide open platform to know that spectrum of sound. Ever since that term was coined, it was I've thought of it as sort of the lint trap in the spin cycle of the country music dryer. You know, everything that isn't keeping up on the charts gets collected, and that includes Loretta Lynn, you know, some of the you know, mainstay performers, anybody who hasn't had a hit since nineteen nineties suddenly Americana and then also a lot of you know, new fresh faces or folks like us that have been around since before Americana, or like Gillian Welch who predates some Americana by ten years when it was called old country and you know, like Gillian and David, we always wanted to rock, even though we set a course with acoustic instruments, and that's the pathway Old Crow picked, was to be an acoustic rock band. But that doesn't prohibit us from plugging in every now and then. Well you do on this album. Can you tell me a little bit about Reasons to Run? I just thought it was such a beautiful song. Sure. Well. I started this band with my best friend and boy we had We've had a long road together. We met in the seventh grade in the Shennanoah Valley of Virginia and both found this calling to go to Nashville. Really, we wanted to go to Nashville when we were in the eighth grade. What we really wanted to do was to get somebody to go into the corner store and buy us some beer and some cigarettes, and then we'd go to Nashville. We wanted to hitchhike the whole way. We were writing songs together. This is my pal Critter few Quay and Critter has spent in and out, you know, fifteen twenty years in this twenty three year old band, but was always a little bit in, a little bit out because of the things that Kritter needed to do to you know, find stability and you know, solid ground on his own, which he's found beautifully but has found largely outside of this professional workscape. So what I mean the truth is that's a song about saying goodbye to your you know, your collaborator, your your sidekick. M It's also is it from his point of view? Because of course the lines are you know, running out of reasons to run, which is great great line. Is that something that comes from you as well that you were wondering how long can I keep doing this? Yeah? For me, I had this one chance encounter with Merrell Haggard and we did We did a tour together. You know. It was some most amazing tour. It kicked off in Sierra Vista, Arizona, which I had never been to before and probably won't ever go back to because it's hard to sell tickets without the hag In Sierra Vista, it's way down south, it's right by No Gallus, it's a military base. And when we we've opened up for him and the governor came out and he had this like sixty or one hundred pound bag onions which he presented to Merle Haggard and said, this is the new crop of the season, you know, and just that confluence of ag, the hag and the military, the proximity to Mexico, everything about it was just beautiful and so country music. You know. We'd met that night and he whispered in my ear it was so beautiful. And a couple of years later I heard a quote in which they asked him about, you know, reflecting on his career, and he said, the part I didn't realize was that I was signing up for a fifty year bus ride. And there's something about it that just gave me chills and hurt. You know, it hurts to think about that, because a fifty year bus ride sounds real lonesome. I know, it's what she gotta do to live this way and make shows and make the make the date and put on the gig and make everybody dance and cavort and clap and applaud and maybe make love afterwards. But the toll it takes on you, It hurts, and it'll run you down. What was it like being around Merle Haggard. Did he talk about his writing or songs or or was it all business? He's he gets the bag of onion, sings and songs and keeps going. A very soulful person, just like a mother Teresa kind of vibe, seemed to float, had a like a ben Kenobi kind of vibe. I just wanted to be close to him. The one time that we actually talked, I could feel he can't really close up to my ears, and I could feel his whiskers touch me so great and he whispered sounds good son, that's fabulous. I do want to talk mainly about the new album because it's a great album, but for people who don't know your whole history, there are some pretty amazing twists and turns along the way. But first of all, for both of you, did you grow up with music in your house? How did you come to this? I told a story the other day about how it is hitch hiking in Tallahassee and the bus picked me up and that's how I joined the band. And Mason Steele thinks that's how I got in the band, But ultimately I my real dad, which I didn't really grow up with. He was a drummer and so I remember him having this big red drum set around the house. So from early ages. I always wanted to play drums, couldn't afford one until I was fifteen, started gigging as soon as I graduated. Became a drummer for hire in my mid twenties, and randomly met Ketch backstage at the Rheman after one of the fabulous New Year's Eve shows, so a few years ago, and I thought, who is that drummer? I'd always wanted to have a real drummer in the band. We always kind of flirted with drummers, and there were enough percussionists in Old Crow because we're always been a multi instrumentalist band. Critter could play drums. Corey was a good drummer. But I didn't actually get together with Jerry because I thought we would he would join Old Crow. We got together talk about Ray Charles, Yeah, and about working on a project together, celebrating Charles and kind of unpacking the story and legacy and looking through the closet as we talked about the story of black country music in Nashville, kind of its wayward path and maybe that record will come out. One of the things that's happened since this conversation, which was four years ago, and ongoing conversations as we talked and met, you know, several times labels. One of the things that's come about is that finally the Country Music Hall of Fame has made Ray Charles a member. He wasn't a member. No, he wasn't, shocking right, yeah. Yeah. The the woman that accepted the award, she said that the modern sounds and country and Western was it's still to this day, the biggest crossover country record of all time. More people who didn't listen to country started to listen to the country because of that record than ever. I think it's amazing to think about and here we are, you know, like I don't know, fifty semi years later after that record, even more that you know, like now it was sixty sixty one, sixty one, Yeah, and your dad would what was he a jazz drummer? Was he a rock drum now? I honestly, I'm gonna venture to say r and b um, you know, like we've had some some contact over the years, but like we're you know, it's it's not what you would expect slash hope for so um. I grew up in a in a household. I grew up in a typical low income nineties household, you know, like I kind of listened everything. My friends played rock music and so they needed a drummer. When I got my drum set, couldn't wait. So I started off playing rock and punk rock and you know, anything that I could get my hands on at that time. And it wasn't until I think, um, I got in my like early twenties that I discovered led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and all of that stuff. And then the early twenties was country because those were the gigs that were happening around Nashville. I decided that, like, if I wanted to be being blessed and privileged to be from Nashville and like wanted to be a member of this scene, I probably should learn how to play country. And actually the way that happened, I got a gig that I was forced to have to learn how to play country. Shuffles, trade beat, straight eights, you know, all the stuff that will require you to play, and it's deceptively difficult. It requires a lot of patients and listening. So your ears, I think, become your biggest assets. So I just dove in. I went into the history and in this past Sunday also Eddie Bears was inducted, who probably will go down as the greatest country drummer of all time. So you know, you have recordings from all these greats that you listen to, you do the homework, and but like whether you stay in the scene, you know, because I have a lot of friends that kind of jump in and out. So so I feel very fortunate to be in this band playing real country music. I don't know Eddie Bears, who did he play with, what was his style? So he's currently the drummer, one of the house drummers for the but he's a descendant of Larry London was the main guy, which was another major session drummer. I think it was like a third of the songs that were in the top forty one country and ninety he played drums on Wow, everything from Brooks and Done to Nce. I mean, you name it, any new or and by new I mean nineties you know, like country artist Garth, like all those guys, Like he's played on a track with just about everybody. So it would probably go down as the most recorded country drummer ball time. And I loved all that nineties country stuff too growing up in the Chendel Valley because that's all I heard. Yeah, country radio was the only thing. It was. Out of that or pop radio. There wasn't any anything else to listen to. And I love that kind of music, but it wasn't doing that much. It didn't make me want to go out and play those songs. Yeah, And for me, it was the discovery of the folk music of the nineteen sixties that just pulled me in. It was like a magnet to my soul man. And what was that? What was the first song you've heard that you can remember? It happened for me that my uncle went away to the Philippines to teach, and he left us all of the stuff. And among all of this stuff all these records. And I heard all these records when I was twelve, and I remember saying to my mom, Okay, it's time to take all my toys out. I found the records. Now I don't need toys anymore, and my mom cried like boxing them all up. The records were so great. It was a lot of motown, mostly motown. I heard so many great songs. Its twelve years old. But then I heard this record called Live at Newport Broadside, and that's when I learned to play my first song. I was twelve years old. I want to sing a little bit of it for you. In the state of Mississippi, many years ago, a boy of fourteen years got a taste of Southern law. He saw his friend of hanging. His color was his crime. The blood upon his jacket left a brand upon his mind. Too many martyrs and too many dead, too many lies, too many empty words were said, too many times for too many angry men. Oh let it never be again. It's called the ballot of Medgar Evers by phil Oakes. And I didn't know who Medgar Evers was, but I knew that he was worth marching for. Was it? That? Was it? The militancy of the song that you loved. It was a feeling that, like that civil rights mattered, and that for some reason it spoke to me. My first job was working in a barber shop. I shine shoes, and I would hear all the old men talk. They were all biggots, like really bigoted dudes, old men. You know. I lived in this in a town that had a sidewalk preacher. You know. It was nineteen eighty six and I was, you know, nine or something, and I'd walk to work and carry my little box, and I got a dollar a shine, and the big at Barber's would just talk all we had a We had the first African American governor of any state. His name was Douglas Wilder, great, great leader. And I felt like, well, that's what phil Oakes is singing about. Phil Oakes is making sure everybody knows that we have to stand up and make sure that equality gets hammered out, and you can only do it with a hammer. And that's when I heard Pete Seeger sing about having a hammer, and heard Pete sing about getting waist deep in the big muddy, and all of these songs all got me ready to hear Bob Dylan. I was primed. I had heard the other sounds, but then when I heard Bob, it was like finding, you know, Ecclesiastes for the first time. We'll dig into Bob Dylan's influence on catch C Corps, but first let's take a quick break and then we'll be back with more from bruce Headlam, Catch C Corp and Jerry Pentecost of Old Crow Medicine Show. We're back with more from bruce Headlam, Catch C Corps and Jerry Pentecost of Old Crow Medicine Show. Was your first instrument of the guitar or were you already playing the violin by then? No. I learned the fiddle last I learned. My first instrument was the juice harp. I learned it in the fourth grade for a school play, and I could do it right away. It was so I felt like kind of called into folk music. And then I learned the harmonica and then the guitar. I learned to play the banjo and I was fifteen, and that was a really important turn. That's when I was up at Exeter and I got a banjo teacher because I wanted to play like this guy, Happy Tround, as a New York banjo picker, played with Bob Dylan on the song call You Win o Nowhere. I thought that song was so great. Who we ride High Tomorrow us the day that my Bride's gonna come? Oo? Are you gonna fly down into the easy chair? Well, Happy Tromp plays it like a bluegrass player with a nice gentle role. And I petitioned the student affairs counsel to get me a banje teacher because they didn't have one at the world's most elite preparatory school in New England didn't have a banjo teacher. We got three Latin teachers. Oh yeah, I gonna learned Aramaic. But I had to petition to get me a damn banjet teacher. Well I did and they accepted it. But then they found me a teacher who played clawhammer. And that was the big fork in the road for me, was learning this primitive ultra American of the style that came from Africa. The part of the of the African instrument that is the American band show that is most from West Africa is when you play it like a drum, because that's what it is. It's the same thing as what Jerry's got over here, except instead of beating on it with stich, you play it with your finger. And the revolutionary thing about this is that it's both rhythm and melody. It's all about this drone string. Drone is always singing, no matter what, and it just it fills everything out. When I play the fiddle, it's the same way I always like to keep a drone string running. It's the same principle behind the bagpipes. A lot of folk musics use it. The hammer dulcimer, the ood. It's all about the drone. That's when you know that you're like calling in the herd. It's like out on the step kind of feelings. Now you were also when you were a teenager, you wrote your first big hit. We should just tell the story of Wagonwheel, because I think for a lot of people it's like, well the circle be unbroken or something. They didn't even know one person wrote it. It's got this great history, So just tell me a bit about that song. Well. Sure, So following my little chronology here, Once I was ready to discover Bob, I was ready to go deep, and I was like a Bob scholar in high school. I mean, my math teacher was flunking me. They were calling home to say, what's wrong with catch? If they busted me smoking pot. I was the only kid in the history of this high school that didn't get thrown out for burning grass, and thankfully I got caught with the kid with the highest GPA in the grade. But by the time I was about seventeen, I'd listened to every Bob Dylan record ever made, and then I was on the bootlegs, So that means I was about nineteen ninety four that fall, So Dylan had put out Probably World Gone Wrong at that point, which was the second of his nineties back to folk music albums which were just phenomenal. And it was maybe the year before Time out of Mind, which was a Grammy Award winning fabulous album that gave him a hit to make You Feel My Love, which Garth Brooks took to number one, and just a side story here, Wagon Wheel when Darius took it to number one, was the second time that Bob Dylan had a number one country hit as a songwriter and not as a vocalist. So tell me more. How did the song come about? Well, the aforementioned critter was over at the Virgin Megastore in London, England with his mom and dad, and you know, he had twenty pound note and he bought this bootleg off out in front of the Virgin Megastore where you could buy all the good shit. So he bought this thing called like the genuine Columbia bootleg series, not made by Columbia, and it had some really good stuff on it. Nineteen seventy two, I think Sam Peck and Paul directs this film called Pat Garrett and Billy the kid. I'm convinced that after he wrote rock Me Mama, he's like, nah, this is a very good And then he wrote Knocking on Heaven's Store. To me, the songs are sort of brother and sister. I think that Knocking on Heaven's Door is, of course a far superior tune. But he left this scrap. It's about you know, thirty six seconds or forty five seconds. And I heard it on this tape that critter sent me because he dubbed it, and he's sent it up to me in New Hampshire at my high school, and I Scott, I couldn't get that song out of my head. Rock Me Mama, like the wind and the rain. Oh. I loved it so much. And then, you know, one afternoon. This was like the third or fourth time I tried to rewrite a Bob Dylan's song. I remember when I was a kid, I rewrote The Lord's Prayer into a song. I was always taking something and turning it into a song or wiggling it around. I'd take leaves of grass. I mean, that thing is full of songs or anyway. So I got to Rock Me Mama. I wrote penn some quick autobiographical verses about getting out of New Hampshire and going down south where I felt I belonged. Now, I was gonna move to North Carolina. I was gonna join an old time string band, be a picker man. I was gonna hitchhike the whole way. And I put in every place name I could think of, even ones that I'd never been to and just imagined. And it's funny because I feel like I wrote myself a bus ticket back to merle in that fifty year bus ride. Like I was, you know, seventeen and just dreaming about all the places I want to go. I didn't dream that far. It took me not much longer to start dreaming about Manitoba. You know. That's when Old Crow started. Old Crow was the seed of a dream about the Canadian prairie provinces. I was like, what is it gonna take to get way out there? Man? But anyway, I wrote this song real quick, and then I sang it for my friends. I was like, Wow, that thing is good, and we called it rock Me Mama, and I played it everywhere I went. Was that on your first album? Then? Well? Then then Old Crows started and we moved to Nashville, and we had then we had a manager, and it was time to select our tunes and we played you know what we still called rock Me Mama. When we were living up in East Tennessee, not far from Johnson City, we had this kind of pill popping friend that was a Vietnam Vet who had the tobacco allotment behind the house we were squatting in. It didn't have running water or electric or anything. And he came down. He's like, what are Ian's doing here? He's sort of befriended us, and you know, I was sort of looking for a party himself. One day, we were doing a show in Hickory, North Carolina, and we played rock Me Mama like we all like we often did, and afterwards he came up to me. He's real high in the parking lot and he said, you need to play that wagon we about every where you go. And it's the first time I'd ever heard it called that, and I was like, wow, that's got a ring to it. But at first I was like it felt a little weird. It was like two, it felt like corny, or really, would anybody like a song called wagon Wheel? It's called rock Me Mama? But anyway, by the time we got to Nashville, this old Hillbilly had definitely renamed it. So we played it for the label, and you know, they wanted to cut it. But then we had to get it published. So we got really lucky because we had this publishing administrator who knew how to get a hold of Bob's manager, and Bob's manager said wrote back to us a few weeks later saying, Okay, Bob approves it. He's going to call it a fifty fifty s corp Dylan split. Oh, but he wants you to know that Dylan didn't write it, and we're like what, and then he says, Dylan says that he got it from Arthur crowd Up. Well, I read in the liner notes of this song that Bob said he got rock Me Mama from called rock Me Baby, which is like rock man Baby. There really there's nothing about the wind and the rain or a southbound train, but that's what Bob said, so I took it for his word. But in the liner notes it says, oh, and Arthur Crudup wishes to attribute his recording rock Me Baby to the late great Big Bill Brunci, So that would have been Chicago in the twenties, Big Boy would have been Memphis in the fifties. So if you believe the story that Bob spun from Big Bill to Big Boy to Bob to me an Old Crow to Darius, then in that year long century gestation, the song sees the shared authorship of all five of us to become this big hit. I want to ask you about two more people who are very important in your career, and the first is Doc Watson. Can you tell that story? Sure? We were on the street corner. It was the fifth of July because on the fourth of July we made whiskey. We made it with a water distiller that we got from the old Lynnville Hospital because me and Gritter were cutting rebar stakes there for manpower job. We did a lot of odd jobs back then, and it got us a lot of the kind of color that we used to write songs later. It was all this period of time that I thought of as like a hillbilly boot camp for Old Crow, because you know, I mean, I learned how to play, and I was from the South, but like I went to prep school and I learned to play the banjo, I learned to play Southern music in New Hampshire. I learned to play Southern music in New Hampshire from a guy from New Hampshire who went south to learn to play Southern music and then went back to New Hampshire and then taught it to me, and I went back down south, and he learned all the good ship from the seventies, back when the Truvon was still intact, when you could find players who didn't play bluegrass. They only played old time, and it had for generations, but that died out in the seventies by the time that I came around, So we were a new crop, and I thought about us like a kind of new last city ramblers. We were like the college kids, you know with the beards who were like, gonna not go to Vietnam. We We're gonna like grow turn ups and ship woodstock or like nitty gritty or like nitty gritty out in Colorado. Was Yeah, just like that, only you know, in the nineties instead of in the seventies, which honestly probably wasn't as nearly as much fun up in northwest North Carolina in the nineties, where we found ourselves living on a six hundred acre thing that we were renting and working tobacco and cutting rebar and making whiskey and planting by the lunar signs and doing all the zany stuff that we were doing out of the box buyer book to try and authenticate country music and sort of like baptize ourselves and make ourselves worthy to sing songs about like pig meat and you know, groundhogs and shooting ground hogs and skinning them and making banjos. All the crazy stuff that we did that felt like a kind of important spiritual ceremony, got us in touch with the great Shaman of all these things. And we're busting on the street corner. We made whiskey and we were all hungover. But on the fifth of j we knew we wanted to go out and make a buck because all the tourists were in from Charlotte. So we walked down to the big corner store and boone the drug store there, and we said we bust there before, and this lady said, my daddy loves this kind of music. He and it's going to be here for a while. And we said, well, I don't know, just come back or tip usa, don't we're all hungover. She came back. About an hour later, she walked her dad, Doc Watson, across the street, and I just remember being dumb struck seeing him walk out of a red jeep Cherokee and Jay walk across the street. You know, he's blind and as his daughter's leading him, as Nancy Watson later became a great friend, and then Doc comes up and he just annoints us right there on the corner. Man was so beautiful. I can't believe it happens. I still can't believe it happened. And as it was happening, I thought, oh my god, it's happening. All of the things that me and Chritter thought were gonna happen are gonna happen. And what did he say when you were were playing? When he came playing, we were right in the middle of a tune called oh My Little Darlin that goes like Jimmy holds the wagon, Jimmy holds Little Darlin, you know, like a real old time rake and rude and rambling kind of number. He says, I was on that's some of the most authentic old time music I've heard in a long time. He gave like a radio quote. Nice and then and then he said I'd like you boys to play my festival that I have an honor on my son Merrel and he brought us to the moral Fest. Wow. So the other person I want to ask about is Marty Stewart. Well, after Doc found us at them and brought us to morral Fest, the next thing that happened was that the Grand Old Opry found us at morral Fest. Like we always knew to do, we busked, We did a stage show. Doc got us a slot and Alice Girard hosted brought us on at the traditional stage. But we sucked. We weren't used to playing a microphones, we were all out of tune. Everybody was kind of edgy, and we put on a terrible set and also nobody was there. And so afterwards we licked our wounds and we said, well, let's just open up a case right here by this fountain. We'll call this a stage of our own, and we just started busking. All the people came over us. We were the talk of the festival. And afterwards we got a phone call from Sally Williams at the Opery said, you know, I saw your festival sat at Merlefest at the fake stage you made up, I want you to come to Nashville and do the same thing out in front of the Grand Old Opry. So the summer of two thousand, we all came down to Nashville on the weekends and we'd stay in a like a twenty six dollar crack motel and we'd bust in front of the Grand Old Opry and then our shift would end about nine o'clock, we'd go downtown. We'd bust on Lower Broadway. God, we were making like eight hundred dollars on a Friday night, and we'd come back to that crack motel and we'd buy two cases of beer and a cart and smokes, and we would just just feel like kings and we were the high rollers in those motels. And it was a different Nashville. Like people weren't clamoring and moved to Nashville. There was like the country music thing, and there was healthcare. But you know, you could have bought those houses for nothing. Well, it was around that time that we stumbled into Marty Stewart. When we found that the Uncle Dave making Day's Festival had had a five hundred dollar prize. We thought, well, let's go down there and win it. And we went down to Murfresboro and we were busking there making a big hoot, and Marty Stewart walked in. He was the grand mason of the festival that year, and he brought us into his fold right away and made sure that we played the Oprey. He hosted our first Oprey debut at the Rhyman, you know, which which came just three months after that, and then you know, had us open for him, had us out to the house, made us know that his Nashville was a place that we were welcome, and he what was your first performance like in the Opry? It was in January when the Opry would traditionally move from its home at the Opry House down to its old home at the Rhyman Auditorium. And we all got dressed up in suits and we were all so nervous. Critter was so nervous he threw up in the trash can right there in the wings before we walked on, and we were all just sweat and bullets. And we came out there and Marty had given us each little gee gauze to where it was really helpful honestly to Kevin, our get Joe player. He gave a pair of glasses that had belonged to some old Hollywood movie star, and to me he gave a funny kind of vel vid bow tie that had belonged to Slim Whitman. And everybody had one little thing to like borrow for the set, because Marty's a collector, He's got all this crazy memorabilia. And we did some old time Holcomb songs that brought the house down, and when they asked for an encore, we didn't know what to do, so we just played the same song again and then they wanted another encore. Honestly, it felt the closest that I've ever felt to feeling like Hank Williams must have felt that time that he made his opery debut, or just to be Hank Williams. It was like there was no nothing digital about the world. It was like an analog moment. We were on AM radio, we were not on the internet. It was the year two thousand. I didn't have a cell phone. I was still carrying a spiral notebook in my back pocket. And the crowd in a hundred and twenty year old gospel union tabernacle all rose to its feet because we were playing one hundred year old music that made him feel joy. We have to take one last quick break, but after that we'll be back with more from Bruce Headlam, Catch S Corps, and Jerry Pentecost. We're back with the rest of Bruce's interview with Catching Jerry of All the Chrome Medicine Show. There's a song on your record I do want to talk about, which is de Ford Bailey Rides Again. Well, it's de Ford Rides Again, but it's about this incredible character to Ford Bailey. Can you talk a bit about that. When we were working on songs for the record, Ketch reached out to me and he was like, you know, like I've been working on this idea of writing a song about DeFord Bailey, and so like we got together and we just kind of started talking about it, you know, like talking about him as an individual, you know, like what he stood for, and it kind of actually I never told you this, but it made me think back to like in my early days of you know, like being this drummer for hire, you know, like and when I was starting to play country music, people would ask me, you know, like like do you want to be in country music? And I was like why there's no black people in country music, and every so often somebody would say, what about Depot Bailey? And I never knew who he was. And you know, like we played the Opery for years now, they've been members since what twenty twelve, twenty thirteen. Uh, there's not a really strong presence of him at the Opery. So like, as a African American individual, when I'm there, you know, like I I'm sensing for you know, like a feeling of belonging, you know, and uh and so like if you don't see representation, you know, like then it's kind of hard to figure. So so yeah, so like I was really excited about resurrecting this, this legacy, this you know, like this wrong doing because that's kind of you know, like how how I look at it, this fallen soldier or pioneer of the Oprey. You know, everybody knows about Roy Cuff and Mini Pearl, but people seldom now about Defort Bailey. And he is a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame. It only took them what twenty some ode years after he died for them to do it. And you know, him being on the show when the term or the name Grand Old Opry was introduced for the first time, being the first African American member. You know, like there's just um, there's a lot dismissing. So you know, like we wanted to tell this this song about the legacy and the life of Defour Bailey, and it's it's actually, you know, kind of kind of sad. He was the first performer, wasn't he on the radio show? Yeah, the Grand Old Opry opened with an African American performer. He was a harmonica player, a harmonica wizard. They called him the Harmonica Wizard. And he would open up the show is on WSM by playing the sound of the freight train called the Pan American that would blow. That would blow as it went by the broadcast tower. And then he would sing his songs and he did fox chases in all this mimicry. And you know, he was the grandchild of slaves. Born in Smith County, Tennessee, eighteen ninety nine. He had polio when he was a kid. As an adult, he was about four foot nine, and he became the very first African American recording artist in Nashville. And he did that in the twenties. His albums were released to both a white and black audience. His acclaim from the opry. He was so popular. He was a national touring act. And he would go out on the road with Bill Monroe and they would have to put him in a suitcase to bring him into some of these hotels where he wasn't welcome as a black man in the South. He was so small he could ride in a steamer trunk. It kind of makes me want to cry when I think about that. Did he perform on stage with white performers? Oh? Yeah. And so when the Opery would go out on the tour is during the weeks, because you know, the Opery was a weekend show, but all through the weeks, opera members could play anywhere that they could get a booking, and that's where they could really make money because the opera didn't pay. So he would tour with Uncle Dave Machan, who was the biggest star of this era in which hillbilly music and vaudeville were sort of thick as thieves, and before anybody even called it country and Western, it was just called hillbilly music. DeFord Bailey was a hillbilly star and the first black recording artist in Nashville. So we knew we wanted to resurrect the story in the nineteen eighties, the early eighties, after DeFord had been kicked off the opry, had his name dragged through the mud, became a shoeshine operator. Okay, let's back up. Why did he get kicked off the opera? Well, the story is that in nineteen forty one that BMI and a couple other songwriting performance royalty bear agencies determined that you could make more money if you did their catalog on the radio because of new broadcast a copyright laws that would were royalty bearing. And the opera says that they said to d Ford, if you're going to stay on the opera, you have to do a new catalog of songs, and d Ford said, well, I only play the songs I play. And then after he was then dismissed, they said that he was sullen in his work ethic as attributed to men of his color. That was the quote from the Honorable Judge D. Hay, who was the longtime radio voice of the Grand ol Opry. So they basically, you know, they blackballed him and he lived another forty years and eventually moved into federal housing he ran a successful shoeshine business, and then in the late seventies they started bringing him back to the Opry and kind of token rolls, old timers show and yeah, there was a folklorist who discovered him who's since become a friend of mine named David Morton who was working for HUD And he was, you know, a college grad, white kid, maybe at Vanderbilt or something, new employee that summer for HOOD. And he's going around in the housing projects checking in with residents, and somebody said he liked music, and some old lady said to him, well, if you like music, you need to go up to the eighth floor. Well, de Ford Bailey lives there. And he comes back home and to his dad in Alabama. His dad was born, you know, in the teens or something, and he said, oh, yeah, I just met this old black gentleman plays a harmonica. Allats his name, d Ford Bailey. You met Dvord Bailey. He's still alive because this guy, David Morton's father had listened to the Opry in the twenties and knew that Dvord was a legend. And so d Ford told David that he felt that God had called them together so that Dford's story could finally be retold and and Dford could finally say his piece. And so he wrote a book, he made a record. All of these things happen in the nineteen in the year nineteen eighty. I think he died in about nineteen eighty two. But I think the most moving thing for the whole story about me was I wanted to write a song about d Ford ever since I came to Nashville, but I never felt like it'd be appropriate for me, as a white country guy, to sing that song. And when Jerry and I got together, I mean, Jerry can write any song Jerry wants to write, but I thought that this might be a good song, and Jerry helped me finish it and then tell him about our trip after we both got COVID over Christmas. Oh yeah, So we got COVID three days before Christmas, and you know, we were just constantly checking in on each other because we both had to be isolated. And U and I say, you know, it's kind of nice the day you want to go for a walk, And he was like, yeah, let's go to a cemetery. And I had a cousin that had just passed three days before we had COVID, So I was like, I wanted to go out there. And my mom's buried. Greenwood Cemetery's second oldest African American cemetery in Nashville. So I've got a lot of family out there, and yeah, you know, I said, how about Greenwood? And he was like perfect. So we met at Greenwood and I said, I, you know, I looked up you can do grape Finder found out where d Ford Bailey's grave was. And first we went to d Ford Bailey Junior and saw his grave, which is actually really close to one of my uncles. But then d Ford's it's right kind of in the front, which is really like two feet over from an aunt of mine. It's across away from my mom and my granddad. You know. Like so there was just all this there was this energy there that you know, like all of a sudden, It's like even though we had to get COVID to experience it, you know, like we were we were right there, like we were in the presence of country music, African American history, like a legend, you know, like right there in such close proximity to you know, like to my family, and like potentially. I haven't decided if I wanted to be buried, but like if I did, that's where I would go, you know. So so yeah, like it just it seemed like we were on the right track for what we were trying to do, like I said, resurrecting this um the story and the life of this fallen soldier and in the early scapes of country music. So and we go out and we play the song, and you know, like a lot of people don't really know about Defour Bailey and and I feel like now it's become up to us to to educate crowds and anybody who wants to, you know, like either one of us can can talk about it for days, because like it's just it's important and what you would hope the opera is fighting for, like this all inclusive diversity. You know, like you when you ever you're out and you see something happen, you're like there's so much stick could be done, or like you're in a situation and you just don't know what to do and you're just thinking in your head like there's so much, like there's just so much work to do. That's how I feel about DeFord Bailey. There's so much work to do to bring the righteousness back to restore. You know. It's very symbolic of what's happened in the Nashville music story, which has operated in by an apartheid like playbook, and addressing the issues in country music in general. You know, like that people blindly, you know, like way through I have no choice but to acknowledge it. But for some other people, you know, like they can acknowledge it except when, you know, like when it's not beneficial to them, you know, So like I kind of feel like we're we're stuck where we have to be on the side fighting for it, and then other people can fight for it when it's convenient and then pull back, you know, like I only got the fight, that's all I got. Well, we're fighting to make sure that everybody understands what happened to d Ford and that it it never happen again, and it's just important to recognize it. You know. There's a kind of reckoning that's on in all all of the institutions of the of our country right now, and Nashville is also one and that and the reckoning is on and that in the music business in Nashville and it needs to be. Recently, the Nayam, the National African American Music Museum opened up. It's three three blocks across the street from the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, and that it suggests to me that and I love Naymeam, and I love the Country Music Hall of Fame. But country music is black music, and black music is country music. That's what Ray Charles s. Yeah. Can I talk about a couple other songs? Sure? A lot of politics in this record. We just talked a bit about racial politics. Can you tell me a bit about Glory Land? Sure that that feels like a kind of pandemic song. You know. I talked about my love of Bob Dylan. One of my favorite periods of Bob's artistic expression is in the seventies with the Rolling Thunder Review. I loved that big band and Scarlet Riviera on the fiddle and Joan Bayez singing and Roger McGuinn back there beating on a tom tom or something and ringo somewhere nearby, you know, just the kaleidoscope and the party. So that was sort of sonically what we were going after the way we recorded it. And it's a song that Critter and I wrote early, you know, before the pandemic. It's an older song that always felt a little too rock and roll for any of the old Crow records that it would have been around for. But has the seems to have predicted the global shut down pretty well. I think we wrote that song and oh maybe twenty fifteen or something. I was just waiting for twenty twenty to hit home. A very different song is the New Mississippi Flag. It's a very beautiful song. Tell me about that. During the pan EMC, you know, there was a lot of things to get down about, you know, and when George Floyd got murdered, me and Jerry were together anyway there it just felt like everything was coming apart. But I heard one story I really liked, and it was a story I'd been hoping for, and that the flag of the rebel flag was coming down finally in Mississippi. You know, there has to be an alpha and omega in all of this, and Virginia might have been the first place to have a black governor in the South or anywhere in the United States, but somebody had to be the last one to lower the rebel flag. And it's Mississippi and it's long overdue, and so I got so excited about it that I was shouting and my kids said, hush, what are you so excited about? And they were watching TV and they came and I said, put it on pause. You have to hear this, and they all, what's going on. They're bringing down the rebel flag in Mississippi. And here's why it matters. And then as talking to my kid in the bed, and he said, out of the blue, what's gonna be on the new? One said what the new flag? What is it gonna look like? And I thought it was the most wonderful question. And so I thought with a song, I could explain what will the new Mississippi flag look like? And I just want to bring a new Mississippi flag up everywhere. I want to bring one up in country music in Nashville, Tennessee. I want to bring one up in Virginia and New Hampshire and over the grave of John Brown. Let's stitch something new states Hallelujah. You've got great lyrics in that song. Oh, I just dreamed them all up. I put Elvis in there for big Boy Crudup. I would have liked to put Arthur in there, but he was from Memphis. Eudora Wealth, he's in there. Yeah, I went to her house. I'm a big fan, especially of Delta wedding. Yeah, I put and I put Charlie Pride in there, who died of COVID and was always our biggest champion at the Grand Old Opry, him and little Jimmy, you know, the winner before COVID. He was on the Opry. And we got together and he held my children and we talked about baseball, and you know, we were friends. It was so such a happy, happy memory, like having more Old Haggard whisper in your ear when Charlie Pride puts his arms around your kid. Yeah. What kind of guy was he? Oh? A wonderful guy, an amazing performer. His voice was so good. He was very kind, very willing to talk, loved history and had a kind of numerological sensibility. I remember when we joined the Opry. He came up to us a month later and he said, I understand you guys. You fellows joined the Grand Old Opry on September twelfth, two and twelve. That means And then he like brought it back to something that happened in the seventies. He was so attuned to the numbers. His legacy will be felt at the Grand lit Opry and in Nashville country music eternally. Well, let's play one for him. Then you want to do paint this town? Yeah, that'd be great. Hey, how about we start to like we do it regularly. Yeah, so everybody comes out on the stage, you know, and fans all there. Just imagine a six piece like the Clash with more bancho. Ever since I was a young boy, I had a wonderus. So I walked and crawled across six eight lines by the time as in years old, and landed in some corn field. They caught a town on the groove, so I climbed up on that watertown. Man, But the city was a dope show. And that's when I spied you. And we didn't mind on that chuck stop driving stives. We were teenage troop of dolls hopping down box cars for a hell level one week round it's death to whipple hass you by my friends are scattered round. One of these days you would be babe, We're gonna spell the whole bucket and paint this town. Paint this time painted red white of glory, painted blue for the cops tailing your old man Ford shimmy, A found power lines and frinks from an archy signs that's what you do when you're fifteen years old were painted yellow for a warning they'll never take us a lie? Are we given our hearts to? This is part break City where far kids go to break. I all die well, he's dustin wife has you by? My friends are scattered a round one of the east days you would be bad. We're gonna smell the whole bucket and pain't this time? Pain't this sign? Now? The strain don't stop like it used to in the same rist by more than a mild still all these train upocket kids that grow up thinking riss the place by will soon by? And you and me, babe, we feed it away like the yive book page butt and now all I god lift its not heard under my finger? Day? Wouldn't we went digging for gold? Oh well, it's just a why be hashed you by cry by just fitting around turn One of these days they just might flat your way baking fill the hole, damn booking this time? Hey this hey, this catch scar Jerry Pentecost, thank you so much, thanks for having us. Thanks to Old Crows, Catch Sport and Jerry Pentecost for playing the title track off their new album Paint This Town, and for sharing their inspiration and stories of us. You're our favorite Old Crow Medicine show songs. Check out the playlist at broken Record podcast dot com. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash Broken Record Podcast, where you can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced help from the a Rose, Jason Gambrel, Ben Holiday, Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez, with engineering help from Nick Chafee. Our executive producer is Mia Leve. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription and that offers bonus content an uninterrupted ad free listening for four ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcasts subscriptions, and if you'd like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app or The musics by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond.