Alabama High-Test

Well now, Zoo Freaks, the Zoo Crew's got the needle down on a real root-stompin' number, "Alabama High-Test" by Old Crow Medicine Show from the album Tennessee Pusher. This one's a high-speed tale of a fellow tearing down I-65 southbound with a half-pound tucked away, blue lights spinning in the rearview, better put the hammer down on those Tennessee dirt roads trying to make the short run to the state line before the wolf pack catches up. Higher than a wild cat, running from the law, and by the end he's standing there in a jumpsuit and chain gang shackles, wishing he was still rolling by with that Alabama high-test. The lyrics spin through huff paint, cocaine, playing chicken with a train, smack dab meth lab, then settle on the real prize: some down home Dixie fried homegrown. It's the opening track, and it sets the whole record on fire with that old-time string band energy mixed up with a rock and roll kick that grabs you by the collar.

Ketch Secor, the fiddle-playing frontman who co-founded the band, has talked plenty about this song over the years. He insisted it wasn't autobiographical, quipping "I never got caught." But he did admit that he'd been writing about run-ins with the law ever since he first started running from them, which happened when he was probably seven or eight and first played ding-dong ditch. He was the kind of kid who would steal out of old ladies' gardens and shoot bottle rockets at cars, stuff he hoped his own children would never do. He started smoking and chewing tobacco before he was even a teenager, and he remembers being fourteen when he first smoked weed, thinking he was a little late to the party. "It's been 30 years since I started walking down the wrong side of the tracks," he said in one interview, "and maybe nowadays kids are a little more obedient. Maybe it was the '80s, but we just always wanted to get in trouble. The trouble was more fun than not, and getting close to the edge was kind of the ultimate feeling." He likes writing rebel songs that capture that rebelliousness, and he figures it's the Irish in him.

In a chat with American Songwriter around the time Tennessee Pusher came out, Secor explained how the song sits in a bigger American tradition. "I enjoy writing songs that could have been written before my time," he said. "When I feel like I’m tapping into a deep vein in the body of American music, it gives me strength as a writer, like I’m dipping my pen into a deep ink well." He pointed out that it takes songs like Chuck Berry’s "Too Much Monkey Business" to make something like this possible, and he noted the echo of that classic in "Alabama High-Test," another bootlegger number about a man carrying a half pound of dope up I-65 until the spinning blue lights chase him down a Tennessee dirt road. "If ‘Alabama High-Test’ can wed Gid Tanner and Chuck Berry, that’s a good couple," Secor said. "That’s a couple I want to meet in a song. Tanner’s musical upbringing wasn’t all that different from Berry’s." The band had grown up a bit by then and wanted to cop from everywhere and from the best, realizing that the old string band leaders in the twenties were borrowing from everywhere too, especially from black jazz.

There's a fine story from Rolling Stone where Secor talks about the characters on the record. "When you stop at a truck stop in Bowling Green at 4 a.m.," he said, "you’re going to meet half the people on this record standing in line in front of you. If you don’t see them, you’ve got your eyes shut." The song fits that world perfectly, the kind of place where a high-test run might start or end. Secor has also said the band loves playing in Alabama. "I can't imagine where we fit in better." It all lines up with the spirit of the track, that mix of mountain music and highway speed.

Tennessee Pusher was the band's third album, produced by Don Was, and it marked a stretch where they were looking wider at the full swath of American music instead of sticking so strictly to old-time. They had already been touring with the Dave Matthews Band, playing Australia, and recording a live DVD by then. The opening cut sets the tone for a record full of those real-life characters you meet out on the road.

Old Crow Medicine Show got started the old-fashioned way, as a bunch of young pickers busking on street corners. Ketch Secor and Critter Fuqua had met back in the seventh grade in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and began playing music together. By the late nineties they were up in Ithaca, New York, and in September of 1998 a monkey-wrench gang of old-time string musicians, most of them still in their teens, left in a black '82 Volvo station wagon with flames painted on the side. They crossed into Canada, playing their way west, hitting farmers markets in Manitoba and Indian reservations in South Dakota, then turned around and headed back east. They settled near Boone, North Carolina, living in a cabin with no running water, making whiskey and selling weed, immersing themselves in the Appalachian sound they loved.

The big break came when they were busking outside the Boone Drug pharmacy on King Street, the same corner where Doc Watson used to play back in the fifties. Doc's daughter heard them and brought her father over. After they finished a tune, Watson told them it was some of the most authentic old-time music he'd heard in a long while, and he invited them to play MerleFest. That gig changed their lives. From there they moved to Nashville, got hired to entertain crowds between shows at the Grand Ole Opry, and eventually became members themselves. They built a following with that boundless energy, blending mountain music, bluegrass, old-time, and folk into modern songs that work for country dwellers and city slickers alike. Their debut album hit number one on the bluegrass charts, and they've kept that streak going ever since, picking up Grammy Awards along the way and inspiring plenty of other bands to pick up the banjo.

You can dig deeper into all their music and tour dates over at the official Old Crow Medicine Show website. Follow along with the crew on their official Facebook, Instagram, and X accounts. And of course, the Zoo Crew keeps spinning the deep cuts and the high-test numbers for all the Zoo Freaks listening in on THE ZOO. This one's a keeper, that Alabama high-test got us all in a big mess in the best way possible.