“Wagon Wheel” by Old Crow Medicine Show

"Wagon Wheel" is half Bob Dylan, half Old Crow Medicine Show, stitched together across a quarter century. Dylan sketched out the chorus on a 1973 recording, and Ketch Secor wrote the verses around it 25 years later; the band cut it for their 2001 EP Troubles Up and Down the Road, and Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup shares the writing credit too.

The verses follow a hitchhiker thumbing south from New England down through Roanoke, Virginia, bound for Raleigh, North Carolina, and the girl waiting there, with a stretch riding along beside a trucker from Philadelphia who's headed west for the Cumberland Gap and Johnson City, Tennessee. Old Crow play it as a bouncing, rootsy stomp that sounds older than it is, and it has kept on spreading ever since: in 2023 their version went triple Platinum.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.