Crowing On

In a world where an entire music collection can be stored on a handheld device, Old Crow Medicine Show’s body of work still feels at home alongside old vinyls stuffed in some dusty attic somewhere.

In fact, the band’s chief songwriter, Ketch Secor, still digs through old collections looking for new sounds - or at least new to him.

Secor’s love affair with music started with his mother’s guitar and his uncle’s music stash, which he discovered in an attic. He subsequently fell in love with the music he found there, by the likes of Phil Ochs, The Freedom Singers and Bob Dylan.

After that introduction, he started listening to 78 rpm vinyl albums, especially from the 1920s, which he calls America’s proverbial music attic.

“(Songs from the 1920s) are wild. They defy category. They point to an America in a way that defies what we think of (American music). City folks were playing country. And it’ll really surprise you when you dive deep,” he says by phone from a lonely stretch of Interstate 40 in Oklahoma while traveling west, eventually ending up as a guest on the “Conan” show last Monday night.

The music of the 1920s didn’t have much in the way of genres or labels. Secor didn’t need them, either.

Secor and his friend Critter Fuqua started emulating those sounds in part because of his love of the era but also because they were easy to re-create. The duo started in a coffee shop and also served as buskers, which was wherethe late great guitarist Doc Watson first heard them.

Watson invited the group to his Merlefest event, and Old Crow Medicine Show’s stock rose overnight. Through many lineup changes, the band has continued touring, and a seven-piece version will come to Fayetteville this weekend for a show on Saturday at the Arkansas Music Pavilion.

Local string band 3 Penny Acre will serve as the opening act.

Important to Secor, the current incarnation of Old Crow Medicine Show includes an old friend. Fuqua, his bandmate from the group’s earliest days, left in 2004 butrejoined in early 2012. He’ll be among those who will visit Fayetteville this time around.

The group, without Fuqua, last performed here in January 2011. Old Crow Medicine Show actually went on hiatus later that fall, after spending the spring on a train-based tour with Mumford & Sons and Edward Sharpe and theMagnetic Zeros.

Before Fuqua returned, Secor was feeling the burdens of the road, which led to the hiatus.

“I kind of had to do some shoring up with myself. So I wasn’t much convinced of everything. I was really happy to have Critter come back.

That was a real validating feeling,” Secor says.

Until Fuqua’s return, Secor knew he’d make music, he just didn’t know if it would be under the Old Crow name or with any of its current band members. The reformed group released a new album, “Carry Me Back,” in July 2012. Touring resumed as the album earned several accolades from the press. The band also found its stock rising again when friend Darius Rucker, originally with Hootie & The Blowfish but now touring as a country artist, recorded the song “Wagon Wheel.”

Rucker’s version might be the first time an OCMS song has ever been featured on commercial radio. That fact won’t change the band. Old Crow Medicine Show played Dickson Street since “before you could buy a designer handbag on it,” Secor says, and the musicians have stayed true to their roots since those early days on street corners.

“It’s our 15th year of playing together. We show the listener we’re still very much rooted in traditions in American music,” Secor says.

There’s a batch of new songs on the way, he adds - perhaps like something hiding in a dusty attic.