Darius Rucker rides ‘Wagon Wheel’ to top of charts via Rickey.org A song with a story: Darius Rucker rides ‘Wagon Wheel’ to top of country music charts
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Darius Rucker is a fan of Old Crow Me...
Darius Rucker rides ‘Wagon Wheel’ to top of charts via Rickey.org A song with a story: Darius Rucker rides ‘Wagon Wheel’ to top of country music charts
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Darius Rucker is a fan of Old Crow Medicine Show, but says he didn’t really get what was so infectious about the string band’s signature hit “Wagon Wheel” at first.
Then he heard the faculty band at his daughter’s school play the song and it all started to open up for him.
“I’m sitting there listening to it and I say to myself what I always say to myself, ‘I want to cut this song,’” Rucker said. “I say it all the time but I never end up cutting anything. But with this song it was, ‘All right, let’s try it.’ I didn’t know how big it was until after I cut it, until after it was a single. I didn’t know that every college student south of the Mason-Dixon Line in the last eight years knows this song. I had no idea. I thought it was just another Old Crow song until I recorded it and realized it wasn’t just another Old Crow song.”
So far, Rucker’s version of “Wagon Wheel” is the most successful song of his country career. The cut from his third Nashville-recorded album, “True Believers,” out this week, has sold nearly 1.2 million copies and sat atop the country charts for three consecutive weeks earlier this year.
It’s another interesting chapter in the history of a song that’s slowly working its way toward American classic status. Like “House of the Rising Sun” or “Good Night, Irene,” it’s now a pop song with a long back story that tantalizingly trickles out before you reach the wellspring.
Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show first encountered the song when his friend and future bandmate Chris “Critter” Fuqua brought home a Bob Dylan bootleg from a trip to London that contained an outtake from the singer’s “Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid” soundtrack sessions called “Rock Me, Mama.” It wasn’t so much a song as a sketch, crudely recorded featuring most prominently a stomping boot, the candy-coated chorus and a mumbled verse that was hard to make out.
Dylan didn’t claim authorship of the song. He cited Arthur Crudup’s “Rock Me, Mama,” but Crudup said he got the song from Big Bill Broonzy, who recorded it as “Rock Me Baby.” Broonzy didn’t claim ownership either and the trail dissolves there, lost to history.
A few months after first hearing “Rock Me, Mama,” Secor was away from his native Virginia attending school in New Hampshire and feeling homesick for the South. He sat down and wrote a song about hitchhiking his way home full of romantic notions put in his head by the Beat poets and, most of all, Dylan.
“I listened to Bob Dylan and nothing else,” Secor said. “Nothin’ but Bob for four years. It was like schooling. Every album and every outtake of every album and every live record I could get my hands on and every show I could go see live. I was a teenager who was really turned on to Bob.”
The song was an early entry in the group’s catalog when it formed a few years later and was officially released twice, on an early EP and on its second album, 2004′s “O.C.M.S.” The song’s popularity grew with each live show as fans enthusiastically sang along with that catchy chorus and with each fan video posted on the Internet. In the-little-engine-that-could style it attained gold status in November 2011, seven years after it became available digitally.
The story gets better. Over the next 13 months the song would go platinum as the band gained more popularity, thanks to years of hard work on the road, championed by Mumford & Sons and Rucker’s decision to cover “Wagon Wheel,” and has now up to 1.2
