Why bother to read the review? If it's #1 in Nashville, you know it must be good! During the "folk music-scare" of the early 1960s, a bunch of white middle-class youths with names like the Greenbriar Boys and the Even Dozen Jug Band discovered the mountain music of the Stanley Brothers, Skillet Lickers, and Uncle Dave Macon and set about introducing it to the country's college kids. Four decades later, the members of OCMS fit the profile of those early revivalists, yet if anything they have tapped deeper into the primal elements of an American art form. As demonstrated on their debut, they have assimilated not just the sound -- banjos, harmonicas, acoustic guitar and bass -- but more importantly the haunting spirit of music that was made to keep hard times at bay. How else to explain their ability to take a well-worn chestnut like "CC Rider" and infuse it with an energy that reveals once again why it is a classic? All Music Guide says: There is so much enthusiasm here, so much willingness and fire, that it would be hard to do anything but want to sing along. Thoroughly enjoyable, wonderfully raw and sinewy, Old Crow Medicine Show may be evoking the sounds of the old string bands, but they do it with a crackling rock & roll energy. Old Crow Medicine Show |
