Jonah certainly never had it so good.
Recently, my wife and I went to see Old Crow Medicine Show at Memorial Auditorium. While we awaited the downbeat by opener Marty Stuart, I entertained myself by pretending we were inside the cavernous body of a well-upholstered whale, an illusion made more believable thanks to the hall’s ceiling buttresses, which looked like nothing so much as titanic rib bones.
But unlike Jonah, who had to deal with three days of squishiness and foul stench, our evening in the belly of the beast was decidedly more fun than foul.
Opening act Marty Stuart was every bit the masterful musician and entertainer he was heralded as by Old Crow frontman Ketch Secor during an advance interview. Alongside his aptly named backing band, the Fabulous Superlatives, Stuart’s set returned some semblance of glory to country music that Nashville long since misplaced in its mad scramble to overproduce everything coming out of Music Row.
But it was Old Crow that really set the house on fire and buck-danced atop the ashes with a 90-minute set featuring guest appearances by Stuart and former Carolina Chocolate Drops co-founder Dom Flemons.
Throughout, Secor and company entertained with furious instrumentals, heartbreaking ballads – including a particularly good a cappella gospel number – and a trio of encores that concluded with perhaps the most authentic cover I’ve ever heard of The Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”
This was old-time music played on a scale and with the kind of all-encompassing exuberance that Memorial hasn’t known since the 1920s, when it played host to a string-band contest that was the Super Bowl of the genre.
During our advance interview, Secor told me that despite the national scale of Old Crow’s success, his greatest ambition was to fill halls in the backwaters, not metropolises.
“As a musician, I only wanted to get big in places like Ooltewah,” he said. “I got a ticket to go see the world, but all I wanted to do was to rattle through the corridor from about Ringgold on up.”
A few months ago, I wrote about my secret shame of never having attended a show at Memorial, despite living little more than a block away for four years. This concert filled that gaping hole in my musical resume, and if there’s another artist out there who can measure up to Old Crow’s showing, I’ll be first in line to follow in Jonah’s footsteps once again.
Contact Casey Phillips at cphillips@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6205. Follow him on Twitter at @PhillipsCTFP.