A stray comment from Jayne yesterday reminded me of this wonderful band, classified by Wikipedia as folk, alt-country, bluegrass, Americana, and old-time. For a 2006 NPR interview/profile, on the other hand, they were dubbed “punk Americana.” (If you play together for ten or fifteen years, you’ve got lots of opportunities to stretch the walls of the pigeonholes everybody wants to put you in.)
They’re one of those groups with no apparent ambition to superstardom. But like many such groups, they always seem to crop up somewhere: on the concert and festival circuit, Prairie Home Companion, Austin City Limits… When Emmylou Harris was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2008, Old Crow Medicine Show was on hand to sing her in.
Here’s “Down Home Girl,” originally released in 2006 on an EP of the same name and included a month later on their Big Iron World album. When I first saw it, I thought the video had been shot in New York City; more likely — and more, duh, obviously if so — it’s New Orleans.
Lyrics:
Down Home Girl
(Old Crow Medicine Show)Well I swear your perfume, baby, is made out of turnip greens
Every time I kiss you girl, it tastes like pork and beansEven though you’re wearing those uptown high heels
I can tell from your giant step you’ve been
walking through the cotton fieldsOhhhhhh you’re so down home girl
Every time you monkey, child, it takes my breath away
Well, every time you move like that, girl,
I got to get down and pray
Girl, you know that dress you’re wearin’ made out of fiber glass
Every time you move like that, girl, I got to go to Sunday massOhhhhhh you’re so down home girl
I’m going to take you to the muddy river and push you in
So I can watch the water roll on down your velvet skin
I’m gonna take you down to New Orleans, down in Dixie land
So I can watch you do the second line with
an umbrella in your handOhhhhhh you’re so down home girl…
(Ha! to the old fellow’s comment which follows the song.)
Froog says
Doesn’t look like NO to me. I don’t think they have that sort of concentration of really tall buildings to produce the ‘canyon’ effect. Also, I’ve never seen a hotdog cart down there. And the cop didn’t have a southern accent!
Jayne says
I can’t tell you how much I love the old time music of this group of troubadours. They were my very first FNF post and I didn’t even have the words for them. Just wanted to get them out there! (Perhaps that’s because I have a little crush on the young Ketch Secor.)
Great video choice, here, John. Glad you posted the lyrics, too.
John says
Froog: Ha! Well, I went back and forth about a dozen times on what city it might have been. My knee-jerk sense whenever I see the canyon effect you mention is that I’m looking NYC. (I’m thus a complete sucker for films supposedly shot in Manhattan but actually shot in Toronto or Vancouver.) I searched around some for a reference to where this video in particular might’ve been filmed, but found nothing. I do know that OCMS has shot some videos in New Orleans, so I posed the question to myself: Could this in fact be New Orleans???
On our annual trip to N.O. for The Missus’s conference, we stay at a hotel in the Central Business District of the city. While she’s in meetings and such, I just go out and walk around… to The Quarter and such, sure, but also around the CBD itself. It seemed to me that this video might’ve been shot at any of numerous generic locations there. (Here’s a Google Maps “street view” which places you in the neighborhood to walk around some… if you can get to it given your Internet connection!)
The cop’s accent I could dismiss as just an anomaly. But you’re right, the mobile hot dog stand is VERY suspicious. :)
John says
Jayne: They are great — very hard not to enjoy, I think. Their demeanor while playing radiates complete comfort with what they’re doing. And I really appreciate that they don’t work overmuch to convince the listener, relying instead on the force of their own personalities — magnetism — to do that for them.
Lyrics: a couple of years ago, when I was still fiddling with the format of the Friday whiskey river posts, I did a longish sort of riff on the word “sublime.” At the end of that post is an ooooold song (“Rivers of Babylon”) performed by the “ska-punk/dub-reggae” band Sublime. I mentioned there how infectious Sublime’s own music had been, for me, when I first heard it… right up to the moment I read the lyrics.
I have a milder response of that sort to OCMS’s music. Some of it is more, y’know, in-your-face about recreational drugs than the rest of it. In the case of “Down Home Girl,” that ending — about watching while she does a second line — to me stands right on the edge: challenging a listener to put aside a visceral response to what’s being depicted, because of the utterly disarming and enjoyable way it’s being depicted. Sublime stood on the wrong side of that line, I believe — at least for their hits. They felt to me more like they were giving me the finger. I get no sense of that from OCMS, and I could easily listen to their music for a couple hours at a stretch.
Thanks so much for reminding me about them!
ellen says
Loved the clip – and another thanks from me for the lyrics.
John says
ellen: Glad you liked it!
Froog says
It had never occurred to me that – in that context – anyone would think that last line was a drugs reference.
Is it possible you don’t know what a New Orleans
second line is, JES? Surely not?!
John says
Froog: brace for disillusion… I had NO idea what a “New Orleans second line” might be. Certainly makes sense, doesn’t it???
In my defense, OCMS’s oeuvre does lend itself to this sort of misinterpretation — with some song titles like “Cocaine Habit,” “Tennessee Pusher,” and “Methamphetamine.”
Thank you for the trivia!
Froog says
Well, I have the advantage on you, JES, of having visited New Orleans quite a few times, and have second lined with the Krewe de Craps, part of the Krewe du Vieux parade (it’s really more of a jaunty walk, and hence even a stiff-limbed Englishman like myself can overcome his usual paralysing self-consciousness about ‘dancing’).
By the by, I don’t know if you’re having ‘issues’ with RAMH this weekend, but since this is the annual peak of censorship efforts here in China Internet functionality for me, even via a VPN, has become extremely marginal – and you are the most conspicuous victim. I was lucky to be able to reload this page on Old Crow Music Show at the umpteenth attempt; everything else on your blog is repeatedly getting timed out, so I haven’t been able to catch up on this week’s whiskey river assortment yet. Galling!