“Wagon Wheel” is a song that was started by Bob Dylan back in 1973. Almost 30 years later, it was completed by someone named Ketch Secor who played in a band called the Old Crow Medicine Show. They recorded the song after finishing off the Bob Dylan throwaway and that’s the version I first heard and loved.

When someone once suggested we play the song, I said, “Hell yeah! I like that song. It’s a bluegrass-country type of thing thing. I’ll even sing it!”

I don’t know if it was suggested that we play it because of the Darius Rucker version, but I can tell you this much: I was playing the song and enjoying the hell out of it for years before I even learned that Rucker had covered it. I never had heard his version because I often live in a musical vacuum—in a cocoon of stuff that I seek out myself—and I often miss popular contemporary songs that you might think I should certainly have heard of. I’m not saying this in an attempt to sound cool, like to imply I’m too hip to follow mainstream stuff… (I mean, I did (co-)write a book on the most mainstream band in history, pretty much, in the Eagles, right?) And, in fact, while I think some people might indeed find it cool, others I sense also might think it is pathetic, so… I offer up that nugget not as a “good thing” or a “bad thing,” but as an observation of fact.

Anyway, after playing it for a good while and enjoying it–and I still enjoy playing it—I started hearing rumblings a while back that the song was lame because it was so overplayed and typical and trendy and that kind of thing. I used to think, “Really? The Old Crow Medicine Show song? People play that? I would never have thought so…” (See above re: living under a musical rock at times.)

Now, that was then, and this is now, and of course I’ve since learned that, for sure, everybody thinks it’s a Darius Rucker song when they hear it. Last week I met someone from “Johnson City, Tennessee” and I said, “Yes, I know about that place! It’s… there’s a popular song mentions that place….” as my mind immediately recognized the phrase before I had a moment to connect the dots on which song it was I knew I had heard (and, indeed, sung) that line in many times.

“Yes!” my new Tennessee conversant said. “It’s Darius Rucker.”

So there you go…

I have to admit, it bugs me that people associate it with Darius Rucker, and it makes me understand why some musicians hate the song. Not, mind you, because I have anything against Darius Rucker; because I really, honestly don’t.

And it’s not because I always support the concept of giving props to the composer of a song, not the person who did an interpretive cover… Which I always do.

The real reason is because—rightly or wrongly—in my mind, it just reeks of that ultra-trendy, ultra-populist sort of thing that I associate with tunes like “Tennessee Whiskey” or anything by the Zac Brown band… songs that are like the new versions of “Margaritaville” or “Sweet Caroline.” The ultra-hackneyed, made-for-the-summer drinking party on the beach vibe.

Now, that may or may not be an accurate thing to think about “Wagon Wheel” and Darius Rucker, because, frankly, I really don’t know. You’ll have to tell me if that’s a dumb way to be thinking.

But what I do know is that when I play the song, I’m thinking “Bob Dylan” and freaky bluegrass band. And I know that is definitely not what other people are thinking.

Like, if I am doing one of those other songs I mentioned that are overplayed, at least I know that we—the performer and the listener—are on the same page. Everyone knows what you’re signing up for when you do “Mustang Sally.” But the brochure I bought for “Wagon Wheel” said “Dylan” in my mind, and the audience took it as “Hootie.”

And that’s, really, totally fine, I know. Enjoy the performance as you wish, as long as you enjoy it. No, these hang-ups are entirely my own, and I don’t for a minute want to delude anyone that I think otherwise.