Wagon Wheel

Wagon Wheel” is a song co-written by Bob Dylan and Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show. Dylan recorded the chorus in 1973; Secor added verses 25 years later. Old Crow Medicine Show’s final version was certified Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America in April 2013. The song has been covered numerous times, including charting versions by Nathan Carter in 2012 and Darius Rucker in 2013. The song describes a hitchhiking journey south along the eastern coast of the United States from New England in the northeast through Roanoke, Virginia, with the intended destination of Raleigh, North Carolina, where the narrator hopes to see his lover. As the narrator is walking south of Roanoke, he meets a trucker who is traveling from Philadelphia through Virginia westward toward the Cumberland Gap and Johnson City, Tennessee.
Old Crow Medicine Show’s version of the song is in swing 2/4 time signature, with an approximate tempo of 76 half notes per minute. It uses the I–V–vi–IV pattern in the key of A major, with the main chord pattern of A–E–F♯m–D.
I’d gotten a (Bob) Dylan bootleg in like ninth grade and I let (band co-founder) Ketch (Secor) listen to it, and he wrote the verses because Bob kind of mumbles them and that was it. We’ve been playing that song since we were like 17, and it’s funny because we’ve never met Dylan, but the song is technically co-written by Bob Dylan. What’s great about “Wagon Wheel” is that it has grown organically. The popularity of it was all based on word of mouth. There was no radio airplay for it. We made a music video for it, but it wasn’t “November Rain” or anything. No one was like, ‘Oh my God, what’s this video about?’ And 16 years later, it went gold, then Darius Rucker cut it. “Wagon Wheel” is composed of two different parts. The chorus and melody for the song comes from a demo recorded by Bob Dylan during the Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid sessions in February 1973.[5][6] Although never officially released, the Dylan song was released on a bootleg recording, usually named after the chorus and its refrain, “Rock Me Mama”. Dylan left the song an unfinished sketch Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show wrote verses for the song around Dylan’s original chorus and melody. Chris “Critter” Fuqua, Secor’s school friend and future bandmate, first brought home a Bob Dylan bootleg from a family trip to London containing the rough outtake called “Rock Me, Mama”.[9] Not “so much a song as a sketch, crudely recorded featuring most prominently a stomping boot, the candy-coated chorus and a mumbled verse that was hard to make out”,[10] the tune kept going through Secor’s mind. A few months later, while attending Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and “feeling homesick for the South,” he added verses about “hitchhiking his way home full of romantic notions put in his head by the Beat poets and, most of all, Dylan.” Secor’s verses tell “the story of a man who travels from New England, through Philadelphia, and Roanoke, down the eastern coast of the United States, ending up in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he hopes to see his lover.” The Secor lyrics contain a geographic impossibility: the trucker is said to be heading “west from the Cumberland Gap” to Johnson City, Tennessee, but Johnson City is actually east of the Cumberland Gap. As Secor explains, “I got some geography wrong, but I still sing it that way. I just wanted the word ‘west’ in there. ‘West’ has got more power than ‘east.