Article Contributed by Gabriel David Barkin
Published on 2026-05-03
Ketch Secor and Molly Tuttle | Sweetwater Music Hall | Mill Valley, CA | May 1st, 2026 - photos by Gabriel David Barkin
Molly Tuttle is on tour across the U.S. this year with her full band. Old Crow Medicine Show (OCMS) also has a ton of dates scheduled throughout the summer. But that didn’t stop Tuttle and OCMS frontman Ketch Secor from finding time to play a string of five intimate shows throughout northern California this week.
Bonus points if you already know Tuttle and Secor are engaged. At Mill Valley’s Sweetwater Music Hall on Friday night, the love was palpable. So was the musical magic.
Tuttle, in conversation a few weeks ago, said she was excited for these shows. “We've been talking about doing for a little while. It's hard for us to carve out time apart from both of our bands because we're both so busy.” She promised, “something a little different … it's gonna be a special show because we've written so many songs together.”
Among the cowritten songs the happy couple played at the Sweetwater were a number of tracks from Tuttle’s two Grammy-winning albums with Golden Highway (Crooked Tree and City of Gold), and two cuts from 2025’s critical fave, So Long Little Miss Sunshine. The duo also tossed in several covers that meshed well with their own tunes, including the Rolling Stones’ “She’s a Rainbow” and John Denver’s “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.”
It’s hard not to notice that many of the songs Tuttle and Secor wrote together have fun with themes revolving around recreational enhancements on the periphery of legality. They kicked off the evening with the spirited bluegrass jam “Down Home Dispensary.” (Guess what kind of dispensary they’re talking about?) They played “Dooley’s Farm,” a song about bootlegging moonshine in the family barn. Later, in the second of two sets, “Alice in the Bluegrass” segued into a cover of the Jefferson Airplane’s metaphoric “White Rabbit” (clearly the inspiration for the former song).
Tuttle played guitar throughout the evening, flatpicking exceptional leads without breaking a sweat. (She occasionally switched to banjo.) Secor, as he does with OCMS, played guitar, banjo, fiddle, and harmonica. His solo on “White Rabbit,” switching back and forth between two harmonicas to follow the chord progression, was a highlight. Suffice to say, the pickin’ and grinnin’ was exceptional.
At one point, Tuttle informed the crowd that, “Our wedding planners are in the house tonight.” Secor, a quick wit, added, “We’re raising funds for the wedding upgrade right now.” He told of his first encounter with Tuttle too: “I was home alone doing laundry and listening to a.m. radio – which tells you something about my state of affairs. [When I heard Tuttle sing] was instantly transfixed, like a beacon that went from the radio straight to my heart.” The audience said, “Awwww!”
Their vocals were what you’d expect from two gifted musicians whose lives are entwined in so many ways. It was hard not to notice their loving glances during the harmonies. That was even true during “Yosemite,” another cowritten song from Tuttle’s Golden Highway oeuvre. “We took a place that’s very beautiful and – in the bluegrass tradition – wrote a song about it that’s very sad.” Sure, the lyrics are melancholy, but y’all look like you’re having a ton of fun singing it!
An extra mic stand on the stage hinted at a special guest, and indeed Mill Valley resident Peter Rowan stopped by for a few songs. (Ramblin’ Jack Elliott had joined the duo on stage the previous night in Menlo Park.) At the end of the first set, Rowan sang “Walls of Time,” which he cowrote with bluegrass legend Bill Monroe during his stint in the latter’s Blue Grass Boys. That was followed by the set-ending “From My Mountain (Calling You).”
Your humble reporter is going to take partial credit for a fun moment in the second set. When I interviewed Tuttle a few weeks ago, I told her that the Sweetwater often has a noisy crowd – and that Bob Weir (who was at one point a co-owner and somewhat frequent performer in the early-to-mid 2010s) famously told one crowd to “Shut the fuck up!” The venue even sells “STFU” shirts with a picture of Bobby shushing the crowd on the front. Tuttle appreciated the information, telling me, “We'll be ready to shush if we need to.”
She seems to have remembered my alert and informed her partner. Secor told the audience that, “We were warned the crowd here might be noisy.” (Which, to be fair, they were not on this night.) “So let’s all do the Bobby Weir shush.” The local crowd gleefully shouted, “Shut the fuck up!” Thus, the circle remained unbroken.
When Secor played his hit “Wagon Wheel,” the audience sang along. It’s worth a digression here to tell the tale of this seminal campfire song credited to both Secor and some guy named Bob Dylan. Dylan played around with the song during his studio sessions for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and outtakes of the recording were included on some unauthorized bootlegs that circulated widely among Dylanheads. Another 25 years passed before Secor heard the cut and wrote a full set of lyrics. He reached out to Dylan to secure co-authoring rights, which Dylan granted – but the bard disavowed his contribution even so. According to Secor, “Dylan said ‘I didn’t write that; Arthur Crudup did.’ Arthur Crudup said, ‘I didn’t write that; Bill Broonzy wrote that.’” Given that Broonzy’s version was recorded in the 1920s, the song took over 80 years to write!
The first song of the evening’s encore was “Old Me (New Wig)” from So Long Little Miss Sunshine, yet another cowritten Tuttle/Secor tune. Given that Tuttle is open and vocal about her alopecia, “Wig” is a song that craftily combines wit and wisdom. When we spoke in April, she was forthright this topic:
“Awareness is key … people are gonna put these assumptions on me based on my appearance, and I think that goes for a lot of people, no matter what you're dealing with or whatever it is that makes you stand out or be different. I like to educate people about it because I think it makes everyone's lives easier who are going through hair loss – or anything – if people can just have a little more understanding and be curious instead of just putting their own assumptions on it.”
Earlier in the show, Tuttle had introduced her song “Crooked Tree” by explaining its roots. Along with cowriter Melody Walker (another bluegrass and Americana icon, and also a member of the all-drag Grateful Dead cover band Bertha), Tuttle said, “We wanted to write an anthem for anyone who felt a little crooked and different.” This was perhaps inspired by her alopecia and other aspects of her own uniqueness.
Rowan returned to the stage after “Wig” to sing “Midnight Moonlight,” noting the appropriateness of that song on a full moon evening. He stayed on stage to harmonize with Secor and Tuttle on the Grateful Dead’s “Ripple.” The audience sang along too. Love lingered in the air.
What’s next for the happy couple? Well, Secor assured us he was not running for the governorship of California – but he praised Mill Valley so often that there was reasonable suspicion in the air he might be running for mayor of the Marin County enclave.
As for Tuttle, she has a lot of balls in the air. “You're planning stuff very far out, so I feel like I'm always talking about things for like next year or the year after.” Another album with her current band, following up on the success of So Long Little Miss Sunshine, is likely, with possible studio time later this year. She’d also like to record with her brother and father, both bluegrass musicians of note. “I love the [Garcia, Grisman, and Rice] Pizza Tapes album,” she said. “It would be so fun to do a laid-back record like that, just friends and family hanging out and picking tunes.”
Fans of Golden Highway can take heart too. The band that earned Tuttle her Grammys may not be gone forever. “Everyone has so much going on, like solo projects, and it felt like [we were at] a good point for us to all focus on other things for a minute. But yeah, certainly we left the door open for reuniting in the future because it was a really special project. None of us ever said this is the end.”
For Tuttle and Secor, there is no end in sight. Just the beginning each day of a beautiful future. Here’s to the happy couple!
Set 1:
Down Home Dispensary
I Hear Them All
This Land Is Your Land
She's a Rainbow
Over the Line
Yosemite
Thank God I'm a Country Boy
Sally Goodin
Caroline
Dooley's Farm
Walls of Time (with Peter Rowan)
From My Mountain (Calling You) (with Peter Rowan)
Set 2:
She'll Change
Crooked Tree
Tell It to Me
Alice in the Bluegrass
White Rabbit
Jeff Sturgeon
8 Dogs 8 Banjos
Rosalee
Big Backyard
Wagon Wheel
San Joaquin
Encore:
Old Me (New Wig)
Midnight Moonlight (with Peter Rowan)
Ripple (with Peter Rowan)
