Old Crow Medicine Show
Remedy

The Old Crow Medicine Show are based in Nashville, Tennessee, and play typical Nashville music, country, the most traditional tradition when it comes to American music. With the exception of Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, and a few others that don't come to mind right now, I don't like country music.

They have a decent following, certainly increased following a Grammy win in 2014 for the best folk album of the year, «Remedy». I don't consider the Grammys as a synonym of quality, quite the opposite.

Searching on any engine, from Google and Yahoo all the way down to the most improvisational ones, they are found ninety times out of a hundred in the company of Mumford And Sons and the Lumineers. I like the Lumineers a little bit, Mumford And Sons not at all.

On the contrary, I consider the Old Crow Medicine Show to be a remarkable band.

I discovered them through their participation in a celebratory concert for the centenary of Woody Guthrie's birth and then, precisely thanks to «Remedy», their eighth studio work, released in 2014, sixteen years after their debut only on cassette «Transmission». In other words, I got to know them quite late.

However, I did a little research and learned that they cite influences ranging from Bob Dylan and John Hartford to AC/DC and Guns And Roses. Apart from the Gunners, I approve.

Though indirectly, they owe their first, unexpected encounter with fame to Dylan, when they reworked a decidedly minor song by the bard par excellence, «Wagon Wheel» composed for the soundtrack of «Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid», earning them a platinum record in 2013.

In 2014, «Remedy» was announced, and expectations were high.

Also because the usual well-informed sources assured that Dylan had gifted them with a song, composed especially for the occasion. That song is «Sweet Amarillo», an acoustic ballad with a good impact, easy to memorize and quite pleasant. Dylan's touch is evident, the sentiments are those that permeate «John Wesley Harding» and «The Nashville Skyline» and even more the frequent sessions of those years with Johnny Cash. Be that as it may, Dylan is credited among the authors of the song and sincerely thanked in the album's liner notes.

Perhaps that thanks is also because it is again Dylan who turns a blind eye to the blatant semi-plagiarism of «Highway 61» that results in «Brushy Mountain Conjugal Trailer» and opens «Remedy» in the best possible way.

The album continues just as well with forays into the territories of bluegrass and shuffle and more folk ballads at a lively pace; and when the pace slackens, the old crows deliver a truly beautiful track like «Dearly Departed Friend», which is not harmed at all by the otherwise unbearable Yankee rhetoric.

Now, evidently, the Old Crow Medicine Show do not invent anything new in their attempt to revitalize a frequently abused tradition with an impassioned approach; but what they do, they do very well, and that's not saying little.