Old Crow Medicine Show bring bluegrass grunge.

Ever since Old Crow Medicine Show released its loosely-based adaptation of Bob Dylan’s “Wagon Wheel” in 2004, it’s become a Southern staple that can be found on the jukebox of roadside honky tonks from Bakersfield, California, to Jupiter, Florida. It’s the definitive country anthem of an anonymous wanderer traveling the vast interstate, searching for simplicity in a world slathered in bullshit – and one of those tunes you start singing along even when you’re hearing it for the first time.

Old Crow co-founder/guitarist and banjo player Christopher “Critter” Fuqua refers to the song as a “slow burn over 15, 16 years that’s become bigger than [the band].”

In 2013, Darius Rucker, formerly of Hootie and the Blowfish fame, released a polished, mega-produced cover of the Old Crow hit. It went triple platinum, reached No. 1 on the Hot Country Songs Billboard charts and subsequently brought Old Crow a host of new fans.

“We’ve been able to cross over to a larger market in country music without having to be in that world,” Fuqua says.

“That world,” rife with overly-accommodating modern country that’s more pop than anything else, is a scene that Old Crow has flown clear of since its formation in the late ’90s. Old Crow migrates toward vintage, no-frills fiddle and banjo music delivered with punk rock energy and Kurt Cobain angst. Theirs is a collective of like-minded, bygone era troubadours, from names like Ketch (as in the group’s co-founder/fiddler extraordinaire) to plastic red cups at their feet (to keep dip spit off the stage floor). Their rough-around-the-edges brand of Americana inspires a romantic vision of train-hopping across the country with just a dirty bandana and a pint of whisky in a half-torn back pocket, a rusty old harmonica in the front.

OLD CROW’S ENCHANTMENT HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH THINGS LIKE OLD-SCHOOL HILLBILLY LIQUOR.

A few years after forming in 1998 in Ithaca, New York, Old Crow settled in Nashville and began getting attention from renowned industry people like David Rawlings, who volunteered to produce its killer 2004 full-length studio debut, O.C.M.S. (Rawlings also produced the band’s follow-up, Big Iron World, which peaked at No. 1 on the Billboard Top Bluegrass Albums chart.) Old Crow also had the famed Don Was knocking on its door to produce its 2008 Tennessee Pusher.

In addition to talent that can stand up to many of Nashville’s greatest session musicians, Old Crow’s enchantment has something to do with things like old-school hillbilly liquor.

“We’re college boys from upper-middle-class childhoods,” Secor recently told Rolling Stone. “But we chose to make corn whiskey.”

Old Crow also elected to stick to a strict diet of bare-bones traditional country and high-energy live shows that are entertaining furies of sweat, foot-stomping and broken fiddle strings.

“When we started the band you didn’t see anybody our age playing banjos or upright basses or fiddles, or playing this music,” Fuqua says. “Now you throw a stone in any direction, you’ll hit someone in a band who’s playing banjo or playing these old-time tunes.”

Old Crow’s made dusty Americana finger-picking relevant again and inspired an entire resurgence of like-minded acts, including The Avett Brothers, The Devil Makes Three and Mumford & Sons.

As Marcus Mumford said of Old Crow in the Grammy-winning 2011 tour documentary Big Easy Express, “They made me fall in love with country music.”

2014’s Remedy is a return to form for Old Crow: The record’s first single “Sweet Amarillo,” is a feel-good, fiddle-led slice of nostalgia – think dust storms swirling in arid summer afternoons, sweet tea and cowboy boots paired with denim skirts. Tunes like “Shit Creek” and “Brushy Mountain Conjugal Visit” are evidence that their infectious rowdiness and sense of humor are enthusiastically, and charismatically, intact.

The Weekly reached Fuqua while he was resting up at his Nashville home before Old Crow hit the road as part of a tour that reaches Golden State Theatre Friday. (Opening act, The Deslondes, follow a similar formula: raw and stripped down; along the lines of Alan Lomax field recordings. The quintet also brings some early R&B influence to its sound).

It’s been a long road, not without its bumps, but Old Crow has a lot to celebrate these days, like a recent induction into Nashville’s coveted Grand Ole Opry, in company with country music’s most elite, and the enormous amount of fame brought on by Rucker’s version of “Wagon Wheel.”

“It’s a good cropping of this modern country world that [Rucker’s] in and what we’re doing in Nashville,” Fuqua says. “We’re both members of the Grand Ole Opry so we were able to play ‘Wagon Wheel’ with him. It’s been a good thing for us.”

Fuqua and his bandmates – along with modern music fans finding a lot of fun in retro-current bluegrass – also get a kick out of hearing Old Crow’s music has inspired bands from far-off lands, like Mumford & Sons.

“It’s pretty cool that we’ve been around long enough to be the band these guys listened to when they were teenagers coming up in England,” he says.

OLD CROW MEDICINE SHOW and THE DESLONDES 8pm Friday, Sept. 19. Golden State Theatre, 417 Alvarado St., Monterey. $38-$50. 649-1070.