Songfacts®:

• "Wagon Wheel," that song played by every bluegrass-adjacent band at every county fair and hootenanny in the land, sounds like it dates back decades, and it does... sort of.
  
  It started off as some noodling Bob Dylan did in the studio back in 1973 when he was working on music for the movie Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Had it been anyone else, that noodling would have been taped over and never heard again, but just about everything Dylan ever recorded was circulated as a bootleg of some kind, and it ended up on a very unofficial tape called Peco's Blues, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid Outtakes, under the name "Rock Me Mama." Dylan sings the chorus but just kind of mumbles the verses as if they were placeholders.
  
  When he was in ninth grade, Critter Fuqua, who later formed the string band Old Crow Medicine show with his classmate Ketch Secor, was visiting London and picked up a copy of the bootleg. Secor later listened to it and decided to flesh out "Rock Me Mama," turning it into a song with lyrics about a guy who rambles down the East Coast. Old Crow Medicine Show played the song live for about five years before recording it for their debut album in 2004. Before releasing it, they came to an agreement with Dylan and Secor splitting the songwriting credits.
  
  Gradually the song found an audience and it kind of entered the ether as bands added it to their setlists. By 2011 it was a Gold Record.
  
  Darius Rucker heard the song but didn't pay much attention to it until he went to his daughter's high school talent show, where a band of school faculty played it. As they were playing the song, Darius decided he had to record it.
  
  Old Crow were on an indie label, but when Rucker released the song in 2013, it had the marketing might of Capitol Records behind it and quickly became the best-known version of the song. It went to #1 on the Country chart and also landed at #15 on the Hot 100. It's his most popular song as a solo artist.
• Backing vocals are by the trio Lady A (known at the time as Lady Antebellum), who were also on Capitol Records. They had a hit around this time with "Downtown."
• Rucker sang "Wagon Wheel" on July 6, 2012 at the Grand Ole Opry with Old Crow Medicine Show, then released his own version on January 7, 2013, nine years after the Old Crow version was issued.
• At the Grammy Awards in 2014, Rucker's "Wagon Wheel" won for Best Country Solo Performance. It was his third Grammy - his first two came with his group Hootie and the Blowfish.
• Darius Rucker acts out the song in the music video, where we see him hitchhiking his way to his lady. Hillary Scott and Charles Kelley of Lady A shows up, as does much of the cast from the reality show Duck Dynasty.
• Rucker was already well established as a country singer when he released "Wagon Wheel" in 2013. It was his sixth #1 on the Country chart; by this time most people figured out that his name wasn't "Hootie."
• Rucker has some musical history with Bob Dylan, who's a co-writer on "Wagon Wheel." the Hootie & the Blowfish song "Only Wanna Be With You" is an homage to Dylan, but he thought it borrowed too heavily from his work and took legal action against the band, reportedly resulting in a large settlement.