Old Crow Medicine Show with Gillian Welch and David Rawlings

I came across this fabulous video clip on a political blog. It's from a concert session broadcast by the BBC on April 27. The story of Old Crow Medicine Show is not unlike that of a true old-time string band: they were discovered by country-folk godfather Doc Watson performing on the street in front of a Boone, North Carolina pharmacy!

The boys from Old Crow Medicine Show don't seem like they're performing for a paying audience so much as they do for a barbecue in their backyard down in Nashville. Although they are probably better versed in Jack Kerouac than the Farmer's Almanac, they have the look of plow hands fresh from the thrift store, all dressed up for some city dancin'.

They've revived the old-time string band and infused it with a vigor not seen since the Pogues took traditional Irish music down the dirty road to rock and roll.

Traveling through this Big Iron World can ask a lot of you. The soot and grit, the grime and dust of decay, the dark wilderness of the deep hollers, the basements of factories, the long lightless hallways and corridors and tunnels, the highways, the pumping oil wells and spinning turbines, the sound of hammers striking steel, all of it blasting at once, all of it ready to beat you down and into shape. It takes a certain alchemy, like ore into gold, water into wine, to turn the incessant noise into music that rises above, throwing light on it all – tunes like torches to carry into the darkness.