EDITOR'S NOTE: Old Crow Medicine Show frontman Ketch Secor wrote this vivid essay for the Spring 2018 "Appalachia" issue of No Depression and we're resharing it in honor of his debut solo album Story The Crow Told Me, which came out July 11 on Equal Housing Records via Firebird Music. Visit the No Depression store to buy a copy and listen to Story The Crow Told Me, available now.
When I was 19, until I was 21, my driver’s license said I lived at 2316 Armitage Way in Elizabethton, Tennessee. This was not true. I lived in a town called Poga and it wasn’t even in the same county as Elizabethton, but my county had a wheel tax and Carter County did not, so I saved $50 by registering with an address I had pulled from the For Sale column in the Elizabethton Star.
Not that it mattered; my car didn’t run anymore.
I lived with a roommate in a Depression-era cabin 200 feet down in a holler, with no electricity or running water, which had been gifted to us by an old mountain woman named Pearl.
“Youn’s can stay there long as you like, just mind you don’t titch my pretties,” she’d told us. What she meant by “pretties,” I’ll never know. (Maybe it was the box of old stamps and knitting scraps I found in the bag full of empty Crisco bottles?)
My roommate, who was also my bandmate, was breaking up with his girlfriend and drinking Stroh’s as if to make up for our lack of running water. He was going crazy, which was driving me crazy, and I thought to myself, “What you need, Ketch, is a little road trip.”
