Ketch Secor of the Old Crow Medicine Show Dishes on the Overlap of Food and Music in the South

By Stratton Lawrence

When the Old Crow Medicine Show played at Spoleto Festival USA last May, band leader Ketch Secor didn’t take advantage of Husk, 82 Queen, or any other restaurant near his Queen Street hotel. Instead, he noshed on free hors d’oeuvres in the hotel club and stuffed his pockets with crackers when he headed to the gig, where he scored a tub of pimento cheese for a late-night snack.

“When you spend so much time like I did on the road, broke, you’re deliberately on the scrounge,” says Secor. “One thing I don’t do is go out to eat $100 dinners associated with my work. But once you’re suc- cessful to a point, people start to give you fancy food anyways.” Ketch may still instinctively head to the sales rack of dented soup cans when he walks into a Piggly Wiggly, but he’s also keenly aware of the culinary culture wherever he’s scoring discounts. Raised in New Orleans, St. Louis, Aiken, and Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, Secor grew to appreciate the nuanc- es of sounds and flavors in his childhood homes.

That translates to the stage with Old Crow—Secor endears himself to crowds by referencing local lore, legends, and even the rival town next door. He’s not a performer to mistakenly thank Charlotte when he steps onto the stage in Charleston. On a recent autumn after- noon, Southern Flavor caught up with Ketch to hear his take on Southern foodways and their role in his music.

Southern Flavor: What are your first memories around food?
Ketch Secor: We moved to Louisiana in 1980 when
I was two. New Orleans is a good town to start eating solids. I remember gun shots and fried oysters and Dixie beer and snowballs and king cake. Good living.

My father did all the cooking and cleaning, so I saw it modeled that what men do best is iron, fold, boil, shuck, and bake. I think the scope of your tea parties is an indi- cator of how into the domestic arts a person may grow up to be. We had a white chef’s hat in our kitchen, and the Swedish Chef (from the Muppets) made it seem like anybody could become a great culinary scientist simply by donning that hat. I grew up thinking that being a chef was as cool as being a baseball player or a G.I. Joe.

SF: What’s the first meal you ever made for other people?
KS: It was beef stew from a Julia Child’s recipe. I was so excited that I got to coat the beef with flour—it was two things that I really wanted. And then you add burgundy wine from a great big jug of Carlo Rossi, and I loved seeing my dad sample the wine while we used it to flavor the soup.

SF: Did you keep cooking as you grew up?
KS: I went away to a prep school in New England, which kind of killed my culinary dreams. But as soon as I busted out, I moved to North Carolina and got a job at a place called Tex and Shirley’s making pancakes. I worked in four different restaurants, cooking short order. When I was 14, I tried to get a job at Long John Silver’s, but they had just passed a child labor law specifically about fryers, so I spent that summer volunteering at a soup kitchen. The compensation was the first pick at open mic night, all-you-can-drink coffee, and cigarettes. That experience helped me to see food as an agent of community, which is some- thing that still fires me up.

SF: When did you first come to appreciate Southern or regional cuisine? KS: I worked as an au pair on a farm in Rockingham, North Carolina, where I learned how to make things with grits—a grits souffle, how to add spinach to grits, and how to make dips. We were growing our own food so I got to cook with those ingredients.

By the time we started Old Crow, I was living in Ithaca, New York, and my new bandmates had never had a good Southern breakfast. I would make biscuits and gravy and they would flip out. That’s when I realized that the food I grew up with was famous in other parts of the country. It brought a smile to people.

SF: What was communal eating like in the early days of the band?
KS: We grew our own food and distilled our own alcohol. We had a garden

and chickens and rabbits and goats and a pig. I remember when I made squirrel gravy for the first time. But on the road, it was sardines and crackers on the hood of whatever jalopy we were riding in. If we were playing on the street
in New Orleans, we might get a po’boy sandwich and a six-pack of Abita and feel like kings. There’s something about playing music and eating on the cheap and living by your wits. I wrote this poem called “Doorknob Soup” because on our first tour we’d hang a Winn-Dixie bag from a doorknob and fill it with hot water and dry soup mix and whatever else and make ourselves a passable meal. When you’re waiting for a bag of soup to steam it gives you a chance to think about what you’re doing in the world. The anticipation of food can open the heart to wondering.

SF: How did those eating experiences affect your music?
KS: When you’re playing a fiddle on a street corner, it can remind people
of someone they knew, like a grandparent or ancestor. The banjo does the
same thing, and so do foods like okra or a big gumbo. I think about red hash and burgoo and Brunswick stew that all sound like lines in an old fiddle tune. When I sing a song like “Oh, Shenandoah” that’s been sung for 200 years, it’s magical. Or foods like succotash—they’re holy words. When I serve succotash, I feel like I’m part of a 10,000-year-old history on this continent, even as a new arrival. Food has the power to transport us in ways that only music is so equally equipped.

SF: Is the backstory of regional food something that you’re thinking about when you travel or play music today?
KS: I live in Nashville. Hot chicken has only been a thing that people associate with Nashville for about 12 years. We take the foods of poverty and elevate them to become an easier rose to sniff than what lies behind them. People come to Nashville and the Lowcountry to experience the food of slavery that’s been elevated to meet them in an upper-middle-class position. Why can we
eat this way, and yet it’s really difficult to talk to our neighbors that we’re different from? It’s similar to music, where the biggest songs are the ones
that cry the hardest. A lot of songs point back to bondage and servitude. The stories of enslaved Africans brought here in chains, and the stories of Scotch/ Irish descendants lacking upward mobility—much of Southern music and food are offshoots of that. Those foods and songs end up being celebrated. But if cuisine is built on the backs of somebody who is not invited to the table, there’s a glaring omission. So yes, the intersection of music and region and food are a trifecta for me. It’s a three-course offering that I want to serve again and again.

The Old Crow Medicine Show celebrates the 25th anniversary of their debut self-titled record this winter with a high-fidelity, first-ever vinyl release mas- tered by David Rawlings and released by Acony Records.