Watch Old Crow Medicine Show perform a socially distant "U.N. Medicine Man"

By Marah Eakin | July 8, 2020 | 11:25pm

Music Video Old Crow Medicine Show

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There’s a grand tradition in country music: You take what’s topical—heartbreak, disease, booze, love, whatever—and you make a song about it. Woody Guthrie sang about the dust bowl and The Depression. Jimmie Rogers sang about Tuberculosis. Tammy Wynette sang about her “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.” And now, Old Crow Medicine Show is singing about COVID-19.

In this week’s show, OCMS let us in to its Nashville studio—remotely, of course. Over the course of a mini-set, the group take on everything from the current pandemic to the plight of its city after a tornado struck earlier this year. The track above, “U.N. Medicine Man,” is about the former, told from the titular narrator. As OCMS frontman Ketch Secor sings in the track, the medicine man’s “got a job to do, got a mountain to move / but it’s an uphill climb.”