| A chance meeting at Ralph’s Donut Shop in Cookeville comes full circle for Grammy winner Ketch Secor and Tennessee Crossroads |
In September 2025, a new voice—something between a Southerner’s drawl and fiddle’s whine—welcomed viewers to an episode of Tennessee Crossroads on Nashville Public Television. That’s when Ketch Secor, two-time Grammy-winning frontman for Old Crow Medicine Show, stepped into the shoes of Joe Elmore, who hosted the program for its first 37 years.
“I feel a kinship and alignment with Joe Elmore and his vision for what this show is and what it does,” Secor says. His mission? Illuminating the idiosyncrasies and innovations that define life in Tennessee. And Secor knows a lot of them. “I’ve been criss-crossing the state since I was very young,” says the Grand Ole Opry member, a former street busker whose automobile once had Johnson City tags. As a singer-songwriter-instrumentalist, he has built his career by exploring music traditions from Memphis to Mountain City, with influences including Bessie Smith from Chattanooga, W.C. Handy from Memphis and Dolly Parton from Sevier County.
Born in New Jersey and raised in Virginia by parents who were educators, Secor attended high school at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. In boarding school, he learned to play banjo and explored music by Bob Dylan, including a 1973 bootleg recording with the lyrical fragment “Rock Me Momma.” Teenage Secor riffed on Dylan’s chorus, adding homesick verses about southbound hitchhiking. The result, “Wagon Wheel,” became an Americana earworm, and Secor’s sing-song itinerary “from the Cumberland Gap to Johnson City, Tennessee” became an anthem of Southern travel. So, it follows poetically that melodic storyteller Secor now takes the wheel to narrate Tennessee’s beloved televised travelogue in its 39th season.
Like the best Tennessee Crossroads feature, Secor’s path to the show starts in a low-profile landmark mom-and-pop eatery. As an advisor on Ken Burns’ 16-hour Country Music documentary, Secor was traveling on the Cumberland Plateau in 2016 when he met up with public television executive Becky Magura at Ralph’s Donut Shop in Cookeville. Ralph’s would later appear on a 2018 Crossroads episode; Magura would later become chief executive officer of Nashville PBS and offer Secor the Crossroads position.
“Joe was a hero to so many people in Tennessee, I thought, ‘I can’t do Joe’s show,’” Secor says of his legendary predecessor, who died in 2024. “But they convinced me that I could do it.”
Since that early hesitation, things have come naturally to the new host, who can comfortably extemporize on set about minutiae of Tennessee geography. Sometimes, Secor’s musical journeys and his Crossroads gig even overlap, like when he traveled to play a show in The Caverns in Grundy County and ended up producing a segment about the subterranean performance hall, which, he said, “could be the coolest music venue in the state,” due to its constant 59-degree temperature. “We killed two birds with one cave,” he says.
When he’s not narrating highways and byways of Tennessee or sawing a fiddle on the Opry stage, the father of two works actively on the board of Episcopal School of Nashville, which he co-founded in 2016—like his educator father, the founding head of Episcopal School of Knoxville.
Upon accepting the Tennessee Crossroads role, Secor immediately drafted a list of 135 subjects he wanted to explore, from bald eagles at Reelfoot Lake in Obion County to hurricane-ravaged hollows of East Tennessee. Some people and places on the list Secor already knew, such as Silver Sands restaurant in Nashville, where he ate meatloaf with the late singer-songwriter John Prine, and the woodturning artisans Secor encountered as honorary chair of Tennessee Craft Week in 2020.
“People who work with the lathe and people who work in kitchens—these are all expressions of passions from deep within. Whether you are a painter or a poet or a banjo picker, we all have something that calls us to a greater act. Those expressions tell us a lot about us and about the world we inhabit,” Secor says, with an audible passion for educating audiences about the talent, tastes and traditions in his state.
Meanwhile, some of the items on his 135-strong bucket list will be new to Secor, and he’s looking forward to exploring them and shining a light on what it means to be a Tennessean. He says, “I really want to have that Tennessee Crossroads van show up to remind people in rural outposts that people in Nashville care about you and are interested in what you’re doing.”
Find Secor and Tennessee Crossroads on NPT
