Old Crow Medicine Show founder talks music, hurricane relief and this weekend's big benefit show

Though he grew up in Virginia and now lives in Tennessee, Ketch Secor says his heart is in North Carolina.

“I look to those mountains for my inspiration and my heart really,” the  founder and frontman of Old Crow Medicine Show told WRAL Thursday “If your heart is really for the western mountains in North Carolina, it’s broken now.”

Old Crow Medicine Show started playing together more than 25 years ago and got it’s first break on the streets of Boone.

“Old Crow Medicine Show met Doc Watson, the granddaddy of all pickers on the street corner right out in front of Boone drug on King Street in Watauga County,” Secor said. “So that was sort of my encounter with the roots, with the traditional music makers of North Carolina.” 

Perhaps most well-known for the song “Wagon Wheel,” Secor wrote along with Bob Dylan’s lyrics, Old Crow garnered much inspiration from the mountains.

“The southern highlands are really the region that that that, you know, without without them, there’d be no rock and roll, there’d be no country music,” Secor said. “It’s really quite sacred to us. You know, if you love song, American song is really at at its peak, up in those jagged peaks.”

Many places that have meant so much to Secor and his bandmates were forever changed by Hurricane Helene.

“The little town of Beach Creek that we lived in in Avery County North Carolina has had terrible, irrevocable damage, the place where we’re supposed to play this weekend, Spruce Pine in Mitchell County, North Carolina. I mean, Mitchell County has just been devastated,” Secor said.

Secor has been on the ground in the mountains, helping deliver supplies and seeing the damage for himself. He says the recovery is just beginning.

“We need to remind folks that that the the hard work really is what’s ahead,” he said. 

He also wants you to know you can support Western North Carolina on Sunday, and have fun doing it by checking out the band on stage at Red Hat Amphitheater during the Music for the Mountains benefit concert. WRAL is a proud sponsor for this event.

 “I want you guys to come out there bring bring your dancing shoes and your wallets,” Secor said.