They have made frequent guest appearances on A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor, and have had numerous performances at the iconic Red Rocks as well as a New Year's Eve Residency at The Ryman.

Jackson, VA to the bluegrass Saturday night in the summer, going up to Davis and Elkins College to participate in the Old-Time Music week there, and meeting guys like Richie Stearns.

[n 1] Their brand of electric/old-time was heavily influenced by the old-time music scene prominent in Tompkins and Schuyler County, New York, including The Horse Flies and The Highwoods Stringband.

Circling back east in Spring 1999, they moved into a farmhouse on Beech Mountain, near Boone, North Carolina, where they were embraced by the Appalachian community.

"[19] Fuqua first brought home a Bob Dylan bootleg from a family trip to London containing a rough outtake called "Rock Me, Mama",[n 3] passing it to Secor.

[i 3] Not "so much a song as a sketch," Secor would later say, "crudely recorded featuring most prominently a stomping boot, the candy-coated chorus and a mumbled verse that was hard to make out".

A few months later, while attending Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, and "feeling homesick for the South," he added verses about "hitchhiking his way home full of romantic notions put in his head by the Beat poets and, most of all, Dylan.

"[19] Doc invited the band to participate in his annual MerleFest music festival[n 7] in Wilkesboro, North Carolina[i 4][w 2]: 2000 "That gig changed our lives and we look to it as a pivotal turning point as Old Crow Medicine Show," says Secor.

"[i 6] Guitjo player Kevin Hayes — originally from Haverhill, Massachusetts — was in Bar Harbor, Maine raking blueberries when he encountered Secor "on the street in front of a jewelry store playing the banjo.

"[26] In Nashville they were "embraced and mentored" by Marty Stuart, the president of the Grand Ole Opry, who first spied the group at the Nashville-area Uncle Dave Macon Days festival and added them to his "Electric Barnyard old-fashioned country variety package show bus tour" with acts like Merle Haggard, Connie Smith, and BR5-49.

Given just four minutes on stage, they played "Tear It Down" — a "singing jug-band romp about punishing infidelity"[19] — and received a "rare first-time-out standing ovation, and a call for an encore.

The Rolling Stone commented: "Ketch Secor dazzled the Ryman Auditorium audience with his vaudeville banter, fiddle playing, and some harmonica magic."

[28] In August 2013, Stuart unexpectedly appeared onstage at the Ohio Theatre in Cleveland, where the group was performing, to invite them to become official members of the Opry.

[1] In 2020, the group released three tracks that all referenced contemporary events: "Nashville Rising," written after Nashville's Super Tuesday tornadoes and directly benefiting relief efforts;[30] "Quarantined", a tongue-in-cheek, classic country-inspired number about not being able to kiss your lover while quarantined;[31] and "Pray For America," which was commissioned by NPR as an inspirational piece for listeners coming out of COVID.

[32] They appeared on a duet with Keb' Mo' titled "The Medicine Man"[33] as well as teaming up with filmmaker Julia Golonka to create a video for the 2008 track "Motel In Memphis" raising funds for Nashville's community-based grassroots organization Gideon's Army.

Recorded at Sound Emporium Studios in Nashville, produced by Ted Hutt,[w 7] the name derives from "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny", former official state song of Virginia.

The album features a collaboration with Bob Dylan, "Sweet Amarillo", and ballads "Dearly Departed Friend" and "Firewater", the latter written by Fuqua.

Also nominated in 2015 were Mike Auldridge, Jerry Douglas and Rob Ickes for Three Bells, Alice Gerrard for Follow the Music, Eliza Gilkyson for The Nocturne Diaries, and Jesse Winchester (1944–2014) for A Reasonable Amount of Trouble.

[39]Old Crow Medicine Show released their sixth studio album, Volunteer, through Columbia Nashville on April 20, 2018—coinciding with their 20th anniversary as a group.

The album was recorded at Nashville's "historic" RCA Studio A with Americana "super-producer" Dave Cobb, known for his work with Jason Isbell and Chris Stapleton.

[7] Variously described as old-time, Americana, bluegrass, alternative country, and "folk-country", the group started out infusing old Appalachian sounds with new punk energy.

[i 10] Starting from old-time music in the Appalachian hills, the group found themselves "making a foray into electric instruments and 'really knocking up the rock 'n' roll tree' on their 2008 release 'Tennessee Pusher'."

On the documentary "Big Easy Express" about the Railroad Revival Tour with Mumford & Sons and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros they "practice(d) a complimentary variation of folk" bringing "a pleasingly smoky amalgam of country, bluegrass, and blues.

I think bands like us, Mumford and Sons, and Gillian Welch and David Rawlings are sort of doing what he has done before, in that we take our own experiences and observations and put them into songs made of traditional, American roots form.

... among the gateway artists who helped Mumford and bandmates Ben Lovett, Ted Dwane and Winston Marshall discover their love for American roots music.

"[48] Mumford acknowledges in "Big Easy Express", Emmett Malloy's "moving documentary" about the vintage train tour they'd invited Old Crow to join them on, that "the band inspired them to pick up the banjo and start their now famous country nights in London."

Secor admits to developing "the habit of writing what he calls 'stolen melody songs'"—in much the same way he'd created "Wagon Wheel", carrying on in the folk tradition—"like when he penned fresh, war tax-themed lyrics to a tune that had already passed through other wholesale re-writes during its descent from old-time Scots-Irish balladry.

"[48] Dave Rawlings states: "I've always thought that a really important thing that the Old Crow Medicine Show brought to the table was new songs—some reinterpreted old ones, some really nicely written and brand new—with the old flavor, but also with that vitality.

"[r 4] Original member Willie Watson[19] left in Fall of 2011, a couple months before Chris "Critter" Fuqua rejoined the group in January 2012.

[62][n 10] Drummer Jerry Pentecost left in 2023 to join Bob Dylan's European tour, replacing "fabulous Charley Drayton" starting in Japan.