It’s laborious to consider Ketch Secor hasn’t launched multiple solo album within the 27 years since forming Grammy-winning roots stalwarts Previous Crow Drugs Present. However right here we’re. And Story The Crow Informed Me (Equal Housing/Firebird) was well worth the wait. Impressed by his early years busking on the streets of Nashville, the album is an intimate, wildly imaginative hodgepodge of playfully theatrical spoken-word vignettes, conventional bluegrass bounce and straight-up nation delivered with piles of character.
And that character, after all, is Secor’s: bigger than life, but at all times genuine and approachable. Except for his signature fiddle, banjo and harmonica, he performs practically a dozen devices on these 12 tracks, together with organ, bass, guitar and even spoons. Initially conceived as a prose-heavy track cycle, the album took a extra standard flip when Secor introduced in co-writer/producer Jody Stevens (Luke Bryan). It additionally options visitor appearances from Marty Stuart and Molly Tuttle, together with sampled tributes to Johnny Money and Bob Dylan. And whereas it is likely to be grossly untimely to position Secor among the many ranks of the latter two, there’s no denying he carries Story The Crow Informed Me like a grasp raconteur.
Right here’s extra on every track from Secor.
—Hobart Rowland
1) “Busker’s Spell”
“Considered one of my early reminiscences was watching children even youthful than me faucet dancing for change within the French Quarter. I might hardly wait to discover a piece of curb for my very personal. Years later, as an angsty teenager with a banjo, I lastly acquired my likelihood. I don’t know what sort of musical profession I’d have had if it wasn’t for that sidewalk calling me. Opening my case, I’d at all times attempt somewhat black magic and forged the busker’s spell. Fill ’er up!”
2) “Talkin’ Doc Blues”
“One other fortunate break got here when a mattress got here out there on the homeless shelter on King Avenue in Boone, N.C. I wanted a spot to crash for just a few days whereas I discovered the place to get a home on a budget for the remainder of the band. Strolling these downtown streets of Boone with the Every day Dealer newspaper underneath my arm, calling farmers from payphones, didn’t seem on the time to be a music-business energy transfer. However securing a house within the hills for Previous Crow to determine find out how to authenticate what we have been singing about after we sang about mules, tobacco and corn whiskey proved to be a reasonably scorching hand. After which, lo and behold, Doc Watson himself goes dropping that third ace in my fiddle case.”
3) “Ghost Practice”
“About two years in, we began getting severe about music. And what do severe musicians do within the Excessive Nation? Audition for Tweetsie Railroad Theme Park, the place the place enterprising pickers go to placed on bowlers and checkered shirts to play hillbilly for the vacationers from Charlotte. Effectively, it didn’t take lengthy earlier than Tweetsie’s high brass realized their hiring mistake and despatched us packing. However we discovered a railroad line of our personal—meaner and greasier, stoked up and racing one thing livid, hellbent and Nashville sure or bust.”
4) “Dickerson Highway”
“The Grand Ole Opry has stars, the Corridor of Fame has plaques, and within the yr 2000, there was one premier vacation spot for Nashville’s castoffs, rejects, ne’er-do-wells, petty thieves, lowlifes, losers and customers. So, like a barfly to a bottle, I went to the place I felt I belonged—straight up Dickerson Highway. These days, you possibly can solely catch a fleeting glimpse of the misfit glory that after teemed down this boulevard of damaged goals. However infrequently, I’ll see some stray canine licking at some grease entice and know they’re nonetheless clawing their approach to the highest of trash pile down on the Dick.”
5) “Previous Man River”
“Whereas the jib cranes went whirling and the dynamite blasts shook the earth, I leaned towards the motel billboard that sprouted up in my yard, chewed a wad of Mail Pouch and watched as a Mid-South metropolis turned a nationwide boomtown. Everybody needed in. Bus benches marketed singers. Public-access TV held sq. dances. Bands, venues, festivals, complete genres have been born and died earlier than they ever discovered to stroll. The place was the breadcrumb path the nice ones left behind for us to comply with? If I’d been born in Athens, I might’ve taken my worries to Aristotle’s Lyceum or Plato’s Academy. However I used to be from the Athens of the South, so I took my troubles to the river and left ’em there.”
6) “Catch Me If You Can”
“Twenty-seven years in the past, once I began Previous Crow, I couldn’t have imagined how the folks I cherished might ever flip into folks I as soon as cherished—however so are the highs and lows of life on the highway in a band. The circumstances are proper for just a few issues to thrive and some extra to falter and finally fail. Friendships, allegiances, marriages—these are sometimes the casualties of a life just like the one I selected. But I can’t return and make it any totally different, nor would I.
Ever since I used to be younger, folks have made a pun with my identify. From Catcher In The Rye to Heinz vs. Hunt’s, life ain’t simple for a boy named Ketcham. One phrase I at all times heard was, ‘Catch me for those who can.’ Effectively, final spring, once I was going by means of this catharsis of enjoying again the fingers of time within the proverbial rearview mirror, I sat down with Jody Stevens and wrote this track in a brief, bittersweet burst. I needed to discover the sensation of sacrifice that it takes to like somebody like me. Somebody who’s most likely going to overlook your party as a result of he’ll be enjoying a present in Newfoundland, Newark, New Orleans or Newport Information. I hope it was price it.”
7) “Highland Rim”
“Generally I see faces within the woods at nightfall. There are events the place I feel I hear voices in roiling rivers or hear waves crashing over historical island seas. However at all times do I really feel nearer to the heavens when at greater elevation. We don’t have mountains to talk of in Nashville. Raggedy hills of spindly bushes and scraggly undergrowth aren’t a lot solace to me. I used to be raised in a inexperienced valley the place the mountains are stunningly blue. However what it lacks in magnificence, the Highland Rim greater than makes up for in spirit. It is a track a few climb, a few lengthy attain from life’s frail depths, about needing an almighty hand up.”
8) “Junkin’”
“What if the songs you’re keen on—essentially the most scrumptious ones, the ripest of all—aren’t on the radio or within the file retailer, however as a substitute lay moldering in dusty milk crates in junk shops, thrift barns and flea markets strewn throughout the Southland? Sounds such as you’re on the hunt like me, hoping the following platter you flip previous gained’t be one other Stan Kenton however a uncommon discover certainly. It is a track about repertoire—and the lengths to which I needed to go to construct one.”
9) “On The Wall”
“The Chinese language pioneered the block press within the yr 868. In 1450, Johannes Gutenberg invented the fashionable printing press in Germany. And in 1879, Charles and Herbert Hatch opened Hatch Present Print in Nashville. Moveable kind could have constructed empires, however extra essential to me, it helped me persuade my mom I wasn’t going to starve. ‘Look Mother. I’m on this poster … the identical poster Hank Williams was on—and Johnny and June, Dolly and Loretta.’ It is a track about making it large in print.”
10) “Thanks Once more”
“This is able to’ve had 50 verses or extra if I included all of the folks I’d wish to name out in gratitude. Each one that tossed a toonie in my case in Ottawa or Winnipeg. Each cop who regarded the opposite manner and each fan who didn’t. The proprietor of each home I flopped in and each hash home I didn’t go hungry in. Level is, I’m grateful. I’m the kind of one that thinks a butterfly encounter is a go to from a long-lost good friend, so I really feel I’ve already gotten to precise my due to quite a lot of you. However right here’s a track for anybody I’ll have missed.”
11) “Holes In The Wall”
“Dives, haunts, joints. My life has been a love affair with music as a lot because the locations the place music is carried out. Taking part in as continuously, aggressively and doggedly decided as I’ve implies that if I’d written my identify on each rest room stall I simply rocked out in, I’d have 10 thousand or extra sobriquets scribbled. I’ll be damned if I keep in mind all of them, however these are only a few of my favourite holes within the wall.”
12) “What Nashville Was”
“I’m at a loss for what to inform you about this track. Isn’t it each child’s dream to run the bases on the ball diamond of life, batting and fielding with their heroes? Perhaps it’s a easy as that—I simply needed to sing one with Bob and Johnny, and so I jotted my identify in ball level underneath theirs in gold. However this track can also be a few metropolis the place goals take flight or flounder, the place brilliance is rewarded or disregarded. It’s concerning the hope that anybody strumming on the foot of this ever-changing skyline will accomplish that with a spirit deserving of a spot as soulful as this one is. It was the Queen of England who topped it Music Metropolis. Now it’s as much as us to ensure it stays that manner.”
