The long-running country-folk group Old Crow Medicine Show has released a second single for their upcoming album Jubilee, due out on Aug. 25th. A new track, “Belle Meade Cockfight,” was released this week alongside a music video featuring singer/songwriter Sierra Ferrell.
“25 years of making music makes this our silver jubilee year,” OCMS stated in an Instagram post. In honor of this milestone, a 12-track album titled Jubilee will be released, only one year after 2022’s Paint This Town. The new song “Belle Meade Cockfight” fully transports the band and listener into the Tennessee town of Belle Meade for a cockfight; an event focused around the battling of two “gamecocks,” or chickens bred to be strong and aggressive. Throughout the track, the singers cheer on their birds with goofy exclamations while explaining how they “found love at the Belle Meade Cockfight.”
Lead singer Ketch Secor stated in a press release that he is from Shenandoah Valley, Virginia, the “self-proclaimed poultry capital of the world.” With a deep connection to chickens, he found it fitting to incorporate the phenomenon of cockfighting into the band’s new music, which strives to showcase “dazzling musicality and poetic yet powerfully trenchant storytelling.” In 2007, Louisiana became the final state in the country to outlaw cockfighting. However, Secor states within the first few lines that the character’s “don’t give a damn what the Fed enforces.” The band has acknowledged the illegality of the sport on Instagram, so the choice to participate in such activities seems to be confined to the lyrics of the fictional characters within the song.
The album Jubilee will also feature Mavis Staples on the closing track, as well as OCMS co-founder Willie Watson on the lead single “Miles Away.” The band will appear as an opener for Luke Combs’s Philadelphia show on July 28th, followed by a headlining appearance at the XPoNential Music Festival in Camden, NJ on Sept. 22.
Pre-order or pre-save OCMS’s new album here. “Belle Meade Cockfight” is available now on all streaming services, and tickets to their upcoming shows can be found here.