Ketch Secor

Plate No. 006
8 × 10 tintype · September 2026

Ketch Secor is a singer, songwriter, fiddler and co-founder of Old Crow Medicine Show. He also hosts Tennessee Crossroads on Nashville PBS, which is ultimately how this One Take sitting came together.

When Tennessee Crossroads planned to re-air the segment they had previously filmed with me, I suggested that Ketch would be a perfect person to include in One Take. He took the idea a step further and invited me to bring the process to the studio, where I could photograph both him and Molly Tuttle.

Ketch had been photographed on tintype before, so he knew the look and feel of the process and came into his portrait with a pretty clear idea of what he wanted. He grabbed an old metal-bodied resonator guitar, sat down and seemed to know exactly how he wanted to pose.

I used an old Petzval-style lens for his portrait, which added to the vintage character of the plate and felt especially right for the way Ketch had composed himself.

By the time we made his individual plate, Molly’s tour bus had arrived and she had already left for the road. What started as a conversation around an old Tennessee Crossroads segment ended up becoming three new plates for One Take, and one of the first times I took the project outside my own studio.