String band transforms album into loving homage to Dylan

Tight-lipped and elusive in public, Bob Dylan lets his thoughts tumble out in song.

The definitive lyric book of his first 31 albums wraps up after nearly 700 pages of verses protesting wars, celebrating old flames and delving into bleak folklore.

Clocking in at 72 minutes, “Blonde on Blonde,” the Nobel Prize-winner’s seventh album that was released in 1966, is one of the earliest rock-based double albums and among the most verbose in his canon.

Ketch Secor knows every word.

The frontman and fiddle player in the string band Old Crow Medicine Show — best known for “Wagon Wheel,” a jaunty tune that Darius Rucker turned into a hit in

2013 — is a self-proclaimed Dylan fanatic.

In May 2016, Old Crow Medicine Show members recorded the entirety of “Blonde on Blonde” during a performance at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville. (Dylan recorded the original album in the same city.)

Last month, the band released an album of the show via Columbia Records — the original label for “Blonde on Blonde.”

They’re currently on the road to promote their pet project, including a stop on Wednesday at Express Live.

Secor recalls digging around his attic as a child and unearthing a dusty copy of Dylan’s performance at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island.

“I thought it was new,” said Secor, 39. “I knew right away that Bob Dylan was singing to me.”

At age 12, his mom dropped the budding fan at the University of Virginia to watch his idol for the first time.

Secor recognized only “Mr. Tambourine Man,” but he soon tore through Dylan’s entire discography.

“The catalog was just so rich that you could listen to Bob Dylan and learn everything you needed to know about American music,” Secor said. “There’s only a handful of artists where you can do that. They leave a signpost at every turn.”

An essay Secor wrote to accompany the album expounded on the songwriter, calling him greater than Shakespeare. (True or not, his admiration is clear.)

Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde” lyrics — with their cadenced meter and clearcut rhyme scheme — do read more like poems than rock anthems.

To memorize the numerous and nuanced songs, Secor called on memorization skills honed during a school performance of the Neil Simon play “Brighton Beach Memoirs” at age 13.

“I’ve always had a good mind for memorization, so I knew I could do it, but it was

a hard one,” he said. “‘Blonde on Blonde’ in the Bob Dylan lyrics book represents 43 pages of songs, and as the principal vocalist I had to learn all of them.”

Secor sang “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” to his children at night and marked up every page of lyrics with notes about tempo, style and instrumentation: Leonard Cohen here, fiddle solo there.

Rearranging each piece was half the fun, Secor said.

The all-acoustic band took its inspiration from the style of the music rather than the

specifics. An uptempo R&B-influenced song took on a bluegrass influence, while easygoing ballads skewed toward old-time jug music.

“It’s the reinvention that’s really the most creative time,” Secor said, "whether it’s your own songs or someone else’s. For us, taking Bob Dylan’s music and making it our own was playing both God and Bob.”

Trusting staunch Old Crow fans to turn out for a night without the group’s original material is a bit of a risk, Secor admitted, but the band is thriving with the fresh music.

“Here in the 19th year of Old Crow, it’s really refreshing to have a different concert,” he said. “But the audiences who have seen the show will tell you, it’s so us. It doesn’t feel like a tribute night or it doesn’t feel like cover tunes; it feels like Old Crow playing their new record.”

Lest anyone think Secor is dragging his bandmates along with his enthusiasm, the remainder of Old Crow’s members — Chance McCoy, Kevin Hayes, Chris “Critter” Fuqua, Morgan Jahnig and Cory Younts — are in full support.

“We drank that KoolAid years ago,” Secor said. “It’s definitely Bob or bust.”