Marcus Yam | The Roanoke Times

From left, Old Crow Medicine Show's Ketch Secor, Morgan Jahnig and Willie Watson onstage Saturday night at Roanoke Performing Arts Theatre

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Old Crow Medicine Show frontman Ketch Secor had plenty to crow about Saturday night.

Secor told the crowd that the band had the No. 1 record on the Billboard bluegrass chart. The disc, "Tennessee Pusher," is different musically from past records but still carries the same topical mix of murder ballads, hoboing anthems and odes to mayhem that have built the act a wild fan base.

And at the Roanoke Performing Arts Theatre, this part of the base — 2,112 in a sold-out room — was almost too rowdy for the room. It was obvious even before the show started, as people whooped while Hank Williams Jr.'s, "A Country Boy Can Survive" played over the house speakers. By the end of the night, three security people stood shoulder-to-shoulder a third of the way up the orchestra seats, stern looks on their faces, keeping random folk from bum-rushing the stage.

For Secor, the principal songwriter and cocksure stage commander, it was a "hometown crowd." He's from Harrisonburg. And the lyrics, as fans know, contain plenty of references to the Interstate 81 corridor. The crowd sang the songs along with the band, screamed and hollered and bounced balloons around the room. Old Crow brings out a crowd's collective inner hell-raiser.

With Willie Watson's nasally tenor, multiple-part harmonies, fiddles sawing, banjos claw-hammering and harps wailing, the band ran through several songs from "Tennessee Pusher." Secor sang "Methamphetamine" and "Crazy Eyes," songs about different kinds of addiction.

Then there was the Kevin Hayes song "Humdinger," which the writer sang in an "aw-shucks" yet hedonistic drawl. There was only one security guard in the center aisle then, and he was tested several times.

But the older tunes were the ones that really got the crowd rolling. The crowd sang along to "Tell It To Me" — with the lyrics "Drink the corn liquor, let the cocaine be, cocaine's gonna kill my honey dead. And "Wagon Wheel" with its now ubiquitous reference to Roanoke, was a big singalong. But the Roanoke line wasn't the big applause line of the night. It was "And if I die in Raleigh, at least I will die free."

They were living free on this night.