Cover Story
Old Crow Medicine Show
Troubling Traditions
By Geoffrey Himes
In 2009, Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor was half-listening to a National Public Radio story on Levi Barnard, an American soldier who had died in Baghdad’s Dora Market. But when the narrator noted that Barnard was from Ararat, Va., Secor’s ears perked up, because that’s not far from the Shenandoah Valley where he grew up—and even closer to Boone, North Carolina, where the band had spent several years before moving to Nashville.
Near the end of the broadcast, several of the late lieutenant’s friends got together to remember him, and they broke into Barnard’s favorite song: the Old Crow Medicine Show’s “Wagon...