The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast

People began to think Bessie Smith must be some kind of witchy woman. After all, they said, how else could she have recorded a song about the devastating Great Mississippi River Flood weeks before it even started?The lyrics of Smith's 1927 “Backwater Blues” certainly described perfectly the kind of misery that was being reported in the newspapers across the country that spring: It rained five days and the sky turned dark as night Then trouble's takin' place in the lowlands at night… When it thunders and lightnin', and the wind begins to blow There's thousands of people, ain't got no place to go… Backwater blues done called me to pack my things and go 'Cause my house fell down and I can't live there no more…To listeners, those words evoked pictures of what they were reading about. What then, other than hoodoo-y powers, could enable Smith to write and record a song about the flood and get the disc out before the rains even began to fall.To this day, Smith's Columbia record — with Bessie's vocal over James P. Johnson's stride piano — is often associated with the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927. Some teachers even use the song in classrooms as an audio introduction to the topic of one of America's greatest 20th century natural disasters.But….The fact is, though, the Columbia release of “Blackwater Blues” is one of the great coincidences in blues history. That's because historians now know that Bessie actually wrote “Backwater Blues” about a different flood on an entirely different river.Ninety years after the disc's release, writer David Evans made the case in the British journal called Popular Music that Smith found inspiration for her composition on Christmas of 1926 when the Cumberland River flooded during her stay in Nashville. “With her show cancelled, she found herself in a boarding house above an undertaker's, crowded together with people who'd been displaced,” Evans wrote. Angela Davis, in her 1990 book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, also reported that story, recounting these words of Smith's sister-in-law, Maud Smith: “There was a lot of other people there, and they were trying to get her to stay, so they started hollerin' ‘Miss Bessie, please sing the ‘Back Water Blues,' please sing the ‘Back Water Blues.'” Well, Bessie didn't know anything about any ‘Back Water Blues,' but after we came back home … [she] came into the kitchen one day, and she had a pencil and paper, and she started singing and writing.”The RecordingOn Smith's next visit to Columbia's studio on Feb. 17, 1927, she recorded the new song, which the record company released in March, which just happened to be the same time the Mississippi was starting to flood, reaching record depth upriver around Cairo, Illinois. In the weeks to come, the great river's levees were starting to fail downstream, from Greenville down to the Gulf of Mexico. Ultimately, the swollen river would inundate an area nearly the size of Scotland across seven states. A thousand people lost their lives. Almost half a million homes were destroyed. A million people became homeless. Entire neighborhoods were wiped out. Despite its actual origin story, Bessie Smith's composition has become the anthem of the 1927 flood and, by extension, of other devastating natural disasters. For instance, when Katrina flooded New Orleans in 2005, many were recalling Bessie's words: I went and stood up on some high old lonesome hill And looked down on the house where I used to live…More Blues?If this song has you hankering for a second helping, drop by the free Radio Floodango music streaming service and click into the Blues Channel. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Summer is wonderful, of course — and much appreciated after that seeming endless winter — but it brings a bit of blues to the band room. That's because when the temperature's rising and the livin' is easy, Floodsters tend to scurry away in many different directions. New Orleans, Orlando, even France have been among the far-away places that lately temporarily scattered the old gang.In fact, the last time the Bowen House had a full boat for the band's weekly rehearsal was more than three weeks ago. One of the last tunes of that night was this cautionary tale. Think of this bon voyage as a quirky little trip advisory.About the Song“Deep Ellum Blues” isn't really a blues, not structurally, anyway; rather, it is more of a rollicking roadhouse song from deep in the heart of Texas.As reported here earlier, the tune celebrates — advertises? frets over? — a section of Dallas with a sketchy, colorful history. Back to the 1920s, it was down on Deep Ellum where you could rub shoulders with Blind Lemon Jefferson and Huddie Ledbetter, with Robert Johnson and Bessie Smith.Pigeon droppers, reefer men, crap shooters, card sharks and various purveyors of cocaine and bootleg whisky also populated those parts, not to mention the odd gangster (think Bonnie and Clyde and Pretty Boy Floyd).“It was the only place recorded on earth where business, religion, hoodooism, gambling and stealing go on at the same time without friction,” said Darwin Payne in his 1982 book Dallas, an Illustrated History.For more about the song's curious history, click here.Finding More Flood SongsIf there are other Flood songs you're in the mood for this morning, the best place to find them is in the free Flood Watch newsletter. The Song Stories department — click here to reach it — offers an alphabetized list of tunes featured in recent weekly podcasts.Once there, just scroll the page and click on a song title to reach an article that includes a recent performance along with a little of composition's history.Or are you in the mood for tunes from a particular time period? Got a 1920s jag going on or are you hankering for a bit of the ‘50s or ‘60s? Check out the “Tunes on a Timeline” section, which re-jiggers all those song links, sorting them into specific decades from pre-1910s up to the present.Click here to reach it. It's ideal for tuning up your time machine. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

If you were ever lucky enough to catch one of the late Dave Van Ronk's shows, you almost certainly heard “Green Rocky Road,” which became sort of his theme song over the years.He'd perform it in a variety of ways, sometimes at a lively clip, a tribute to its roots as a children's play party tune. Other times it would be slow and meditative, making you wonder if you were missing some secret tucked away in those seemingly simple lyrics.Dave's tune inspired an eclectic slew of followers, ranging from Peter, Paul and Mary (as “Rocky Road” in 1963), Tim Hardin (1966) and Fred Neil (1967) to Ricky Nelson (as “Promenade in Green” in 1967), Wendy Waldman (1975) and Van Morrison (2023).The Song's StoryVan Ronk remembered first hearing the song from beat poet Bob Kaufman who was hanging out in Greenwich Village's Gaslight Cafe in the early 1960s. Kaufman learned it as a child when he was growing up in New Orleans. It was a popular African American children's game song throughout the South, Kaufman said. In fact, the song is among those featured on a 1950 Folkways album called Ring Games: Line Games and Play Party Songs of Alabama, collected from the children of Lilly's Chapel School in York, Alabama, recorded by Harold Courlander.Of the game associated with the song, the album notes said, “The children form a circle with the leader in the center. The group sings ‘Green, green' and the leader answers, ‘Rocky road,' skipping around the ring. As the chorus is sung the leader is deciding which person to choose. As he picks one, the group sings the first line of the verse, naming the child selected. The leader brings his choice to the center and kisses her…” (Hence, “Tell me who you love, tell me who you love.”)Enter Len ChandlerBut the song as we know it today was largely composed by Len Chandler, who was, as writer Elijah Wald notes, “one of the most musically sophisticated writers on the Village folk scene. Chandler had been a classical oboe player in Akron, Ohio, and Dave recalled Variety referring to him as ‘musician turned folksinger.'”As Chandler always told it, Van Ronk was the first person to bring him down to Washington Square and introduce him around, and he shortly became the house musician at the Gaslight Cafe. Chandler came up with a new melody for the tune, Dave learned it from him, recorded it in 1963 and, for the rest of his life, it became one of the most enduring and requested songs in Dave's repertoire.Remembering KaufmanBut the real hero of this tale is Bob Kaufman, the poet who played a key role in preserving the song.As composer/singer Richard A. Séguin recently commented in an online article, “Bob (Robert Garnell) Kaufman (1925-1986) once famously said ‘I want to be anonymous. My ambition is to be completely forgotten.' I hope he will forgive me for disregarding his wishes, but he is too important an artist to forget.”Choosing San Francisco for his home, Kaufman founded and edited Beatitude poetry magazine and many argue that it was he — rather than the often-credited newspaper columnist Herb Caen — who actually coined the term “beatnik.”Wikipedia quotes writer Raymond Foye (from an introduction to a Kaufman poetry volume) as observing that Kaufman's life was filled with a great deal of suffering. In San Francisco, for instance, he was the target of beatings and harassment by the city police, while his years living in New York were filled with poverty, addiction and imprisonment. Kaufman often incurred the wrath of police simply for reciting his poetry aloud in public; it is said that in 1959 alone, he was arrested 39 times by the San Francisco cops on disorderly charges.In 1963, he was arrested for walking on the grass of Washington Square Park. He was incarcerated on Rikers Island, then sent as a “behavioral problem” to Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital.At Bellevue, Séguin notes, he “underwent electro-shock treatments that greatly affected his already bleak outlook on society.” After John F. Kennedy's assassination, Kaufman, a Buddhist, took a vow of silence that lasted 10 years.“Even though Bob Kaufman's life was filled with a great deal of suffering,” Séguin concludes, “many will remember him for his wonderful idea that became the musical butterfly we know as ‘Green Rocky Road.'” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

The mood can change very quickly in The Flood band room, often depending on whatever is the next song that crosses Charlie Bowen's rattlin' brain.For instance, in the first few seconds of this week's podcast, you'll hear the guys still laughing from the inside jokes and joys of the previous tune, while Bowen is ready to conjure up a more somber mood with some opening chords.Almost at once, Danny Cox and Randy Hamilton recognize the lead-in and join in on the 1950s torch song, “Cry Me a River.” Seconds later, Jack Nuckols is slapping a rhythm and Sam St. Clair is offering moody accents.Anything But PlebeianThe story of this song's troubled childhood — rejected in its first bid for movie stardom, initially passed over by the queen of jazz ballad, etc. — in an earlier post, but let's take another swing at it, this time focusing on a single word in its otherwise rather pedestrian lyrics.The bridge of “Cry Me a River” contains what writer Molly Leikin, in her book How to Write a Hit Song called “the best multisyllabic internal rhyme I've heard.” Specifically, the song rhymes: You told me love was too plebeian with Told me you were through with me'n'…“‘Too plebeian' and ‘through with me'n',” Leikin wrote, “are just as delicious now as when they were first written. This quadruple rhyme isn't just four syllables that rhyme, but four unique syllables.”But Jack Said No, And So Said MitchCool enough, but it was not everybody's cup of tea. In fact, plebeian (which, of course, is a snooty way of saying “commoner”) was just too highfalutin for many show biz folks.For instance, director Jack Webb originally wanted the song for his 1955 movie Pete Kelly's Blues, but he hated the use of the word and when songwriter Arthur Hamilton refused to change it, Webb yanked the song from the film.The lyric had no better luck at Columbia Records where the A&R chief — one Mitch Miller (of early TV's “Sing Along with Mitch” fame) — joined the plebeian haters and blocked it from being recorded there by Peggy King.The Stubborn SongwriterStill the songwriter stood his ground and refused to change his lyric. Wonder why, given the riches promised to Hamilton by having his song included in a Hollywood film? Well, writer John E. Simpson in his online newsletter “Running After My Hat,” has an intriguing theory.As noted in the earlier Flood Watch article, 27-year-old singer and aspiring actress Julie London, who would ultimately record “Cry Me a River” and have a monster hit with it, was married to Jack Webb at the time he would working on Pete Kelly's Blues.When Webb thought it would be a great idea to have some original songs, not just old standards, wife Julie remembered Arthur Hamilton. He was a young guy she'd graduated from high school with; in fact, he'd taken her to the senior prom.She and Arthur had drifted out of touch since their school days in the mid-1940s, but Julie remembered he'd wanted to be a songwriter. She gave him a call, asked if he was still writing music.“I was,” Hamilton recalled years later, “but I was writing them on the backs of prescription blanks, working as a delivery boy for a prominent drugstore chain.”When got the call from Hollywood, Hamilton cranked out three tunes — “He Needs Me,” “Sing a Rainbow” and (ta-duh!) “Cry Me a River” — the first two of which Webb used in the picture, but then Webb blocked the winner of the bunch because of Hamilton's refusal to change that problematic rhyme. Was It Code?So, again, why?“I've got my own pet theory about this,” Simpson writes in his newsletter, “completely unsupported by anything except speculation and a taste for intrigue: I wonder if the word ‘plebeian' was an in-joke of some kind between Hamilton and London? Lord only knows what sort of in-joke it would be. But it's a fun idea, isn't it?”Indeed. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Whenever The Flood appears in public — as it did at Bahnhof WVrsthaus & Biergarten earlier this month — it positions itself the way most bands do at gigs: in a simple straight line politely facing the audience.Nothing novel in that, of course, just the time-honored way of letting players and listeners make eye contact, feeding off each other's reactions as the music rolls along.However, an entirely different geometry — a circle, not a line — frames the music that has always been featured in The Flood's weekly podcasts.A Table at the Center of the SongsA table in the middle of the Bowen House's library has been the center of the Floodisphere's weekly rehearsal for more than three decades now. Almost all of the nearly 800 episodes of the podcast have been recorded in that room, with a recorder happily stationed at the center of the table and all the players and visitors gathered around it.More than one visitor to The Flood band room, imagining the years of music those walls have heard, has commented on the space's “vibe,” as if its years of music are somehow preserved in the walls and between the very pages of the books on the shelves.Honestly, that's a little too new-age-y for some of us. Still, there's no doubt that as much fun as the guys have at gigs, it never compares to the joy in the music made around that table each week. Here's a sample from last week's gathering.About the SongAs reported here earlier, “All of Me” — the featured song in this week's podcast — was an original “bad boy song” from the 1930s. "I peddled my song up and down the street,” composer Gerald Marks once noted, “and every single publisher turned it down.”The problem was Seymour Simons' lyric. Oh, its moaning over lonely lips and empty arms was pretty standard fare, but it was that follow-up line — "Why not take all of me?" — that publishers found, well, downright dirty by 1930s standards. It was not until a superstar of the day — songstress Belle Baker — embraced it that the song showed promise. Baker first incorporated “All of Me” it into her act in Detroit, where it received seven encores. A few days later, she introduced it on the radio in New York.After that, the song took off. In 1931, Mildred Bailey recorded it with Paul Whiteman's orchestra; it went to the top of the US pop charts. Within weeks, two more versions also were charting, including Louis Armstrong's rendition which reached No. 1 and Ben Selvin's and his orchestra, which hit No. 19. Now, of course, the song's a standard. Jazz critic Ted Gioia believes the definitive version was recorded in 1941 by Billie Holiday. Click here for more of the song's history, as reported in an earlier Flood Watch article.More About That TableBy the way, the table at the center of The Flood's world also was the starting point for the band's first legacy film, 2018's “Flood and Friends.” If you'd like to see the guys reminiscing about some of the many good people who have visited that room over the years, give this a view below: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

A relic of the Cold War, this tune was composed in 1955 by Vasily Solovyov-Sedoy under the title “Leningrad Nights,” but later at the request of the Soviet Ministry of Culture was renamed "Moscow Nights" with corresponding changes to poet Mikhail Matusovsky's lyrics.For the first half dozen years of its life, the song was known primarily in the Soviet Union, where a young actor named Vladimire Troshin recorded it in 1956 for a scene in a documentary about Soviet athletic competition. Honestly, the film did nothing to promote the song, but thanks to radio broadcasts it gained popularity.The melody hit the big time in the U.S. in November 1961 when trumpeter Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen recorded it under the title "Midnight in Moscow.” For the recording, Ball was inspired by an arrangement he heard by a Dutch jazz group called “The New Orleans Syncopators” who recorded the melody earlier that year.Ball's version peaked at No. 2 on both the U.S. and U.K. pop singles charts and spent three weeks at No. 1 on the American easy listening chart.Chad Mitchell Trio ControversyIn 1962, at the height of the folk revival in the United States, “Moscow Nights” was recorded by The Chad Mitchell Trio on their popular live performance album At the Bitter End on Kapp Records.And thereby hangs a tale, as reported by author Mike Murphy in his 2021 book We Never Knew Just What It Was: The Story of the Chad Mitchell Trio. When the album was released, the guys were on a three-month tour of Central and South America sponsored, not by the U.S. State Department, but rather by the American National Theater Academy. That sponsorship became relevant when in mid-tour state department officials showed up and tried to supervise the shows. When the trio reached Rio de Janeiro, the singers were met by some surly officials from the U.S.'s Brazilian embassy. Following the performance, one of the newcomers hustled the guys into an empty room.“What do you think you're doing,” he said, “singing that Russian song?”The group actually did several foreign language tunes. The parents of the trio's Mike Kobluk, who had emigrated to Canada from Russia, had long loved Russian music and often helped their son phonetically learn native songs. “Russian song?” said Chad. “You mean ‘Moscow Nights'? What's wrong with it?”“Don't you understand what's happening in the world?” the angry official said. “We're here fighting the spreading influence of communism. And you think you're going out to all the villages and sing an anti-American song?”“It's not an anti-American song,” Kobluk interjected. “It's a song about friends having dinner in Moscow.”“It's Russian!” the official shouted.As Murphy notes in his book, “Chad, whose fuse was shorter than either Mike or Joe (Frazier), responded accordingly. ‘Wait a minute. You can't dictate what we sing or don't sing. We're not here representing the State Department.”The official stomped out with ominous last words: “We'll see about that.” At all the subsequent stops, The Michell Trio continued to defiantly do “Moscow Nights.” Finally, in São Paulo, the State Department's Jim Salyers — who himself spoke a little Russian — caught up with them and accompanied them for the next two weeks of the tour so he could closely listen each night.After that, his verdict? “Love the song,” Salyers said, adding with a chuckle, “Keep doing it with your State Department's blessing.” (He was not, incidentally, as happy with the group's performing its controversial “The John Birch Society,” but that's a story for another time.)Pamela the FolksingerAs a young folksinger in college, Flood manager Pamela Bowen had her own special relationship with “Moscow Nights.”A consummate Chad Mitchell Trio fan, Pamela devoted many hours to a close listening to the group's albums. In particular, she painstakingly studied their performance of “Moscow Nights.” Her goal was to duplicate the trio's precise pronunciation of Matusovsky's lyrics so she could perform the same song at folk music shows at Marshall University, where she was a journalism student.Pamela even brought the song to television when she performed it on a local talent show that aired in 1966. There her diligent research was recognized when a Russian-speaking member of the audience sought her out to complement not only her performance, but the accuracy of her hard-earned pronunciation. Alas, neither audio nor video of her performance survives.Our Take on the TunePamela had long retired her folksinging by time her Flood fellows took up “Moscow Nights,” so she could offer no guidance on those tricky Russian nouns, verbs and adjectives. Consequently, the tune today is an instrumental in The Flood oeuvre, drawing inspiration from Kenny Ball and all the jazz innovations that followed.It all started last fall when Charlie, practicing his five-string, stumbled upon the old melody. When he shared it with the group, Danny Cox immediately found it offered lots of a stretching-out room. The tune — performed here at a recent rehearsal — is a welcome change of a pace on a busy night.Another Date with DannyFinally, if your Friday could use more of Dan Cox's musical explorations, we've got you covered. Visit the Danny Channel on the free Radio Floodango music streaming service.Click here to give it a listen! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Roving thunderstorms did not deter a roomful of diehard Flood fans from coming out to party at Huntington's good ol' Bahnhof WVrsthau & Biergarten on Thursday night. And as usual, band manager Pamela Bowen was faithfully at a ringside table to capture some video. These three tunes illustrate the diversity of the evening's fare, opening with a century-old number that your sassy Grandpa probably sang, followed by a swinging instrumental on a 1940s jazz standard and wrapping up with a 1920s Charlie Poole tune that he had to have picked up in New Orleans.Backstories on each of the songs have been covered in previous Flood Watch articles. Here are those links if you want to bone up in case there's a pop quiz at the next Flood affair:* “I Wonder Where My Easy Rider's Gone”* “Opus One”* “Didn't He Ramble?” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

If you grew up in the 1960s or ‘70s, it seemed like many of the songs on the radio were answering other songs on the radio.Roger Miller sang, “King of the Road,” and Jody Miller answered it with “Queen of the House.” Barry McGuire sang “Eve of Destruction,” only to be called out by a group named The Spokesmen with their "Dawn of Correction.” Merle Haggard sang of the “Okie from Muskogee” and drew a prompt reply from The Youngbloods' “Hippie from Olema.”Big NamesSome famous songsmiths also penned answer songs. In 1966, for instance, Bob Dylan's “4th Time Around” was a rather famous response to The Beatles' “Norwegian Wood” of the previous year. And Bob's first hero, Woody Guthrie, is said to have written his greatest song, “This Land Is Your Land,” in 1940 as an answer to Irving Berlin's “God Bless America.” (In fact, Woody originally called his composition "God Blessed America for Me.”)In 1959, one of Carole King's first songs was one she wrote as a reply to Annette Funicello's “Tall Paul.” It contained a classic line, “You can keep Tall Paul / I'll take Short Mort."Meat Loaf wrote “Two Out of Three Ain't Bad” in 1977 as an answer to Elvis Presley's 1956 hit “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You.”And some artists even recorded answers to their own songs. In 1963, for instance, Lesley Gore released “It's My Party,” followed by “Judy's Turn to Cry.” Both of the tunes appeared on Gore's debut album I'll Cry If I Want To.Country artists can get a bit edgy with their call and response. Loretta Lynn's 1967 release of “Don't Come Home a-Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind)” prompted a quick retort from Jay Lee Webb, called, "I Come Home A-Drinkin' (To a Worn-Out Wife Like You).”And some answer songs turned into multi-player comic discourses. For instance, in 1972, The Last Poets' "When the Revolution Comes” inspired Gil Scott-Heron to wax “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” which in turn led to Roy Clark's recording “The Lawrence Welk-Hee Haw Counter-Revolution Polka.”The Flood's FavMeanwhile, in the Floodisphere, the best-loved answer song comes from a pair of tunes written more than a hundred years ago.As we reported here earlier, W.C. Handy's 1915 classic “Yellow Dog Blues” — a melodic mainstay that reaches from the glory days of Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong all the way to today's trad jazz standard bearers — was actually composed as an answer to Shelton Brooks' wonderful 1913 composition called, “I Wonder Where My Easy Rider's Gone.” In recent back-to-back weekly rehearsals, The Flood has revisited both tunes. First came the Brooks original two weeks ago, then, last week, the guys turned to Handy's dandy reply. In The Flood's estimation, “Yellow Dog Blues” is the best of the pair. There are a lot of train songs out there, but none of them takes its riders quite as far as this one. Come along to where “the Southern cross the Yellow Dog!”More, You Say?Finally, if blues is your bag and you want to extend your Friday foray into Floodery, tune in the Blues Channel on the band's free Radio Floodango music streaming service. Click here to give it a spin. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Whenever we have fresh ears in The Flood's band room, as we did last week, the newcomer's first question often is, “What kind of music do you fellas play?”No single easy answer is available, of course, but it is an opportunity for a show-and-tell — well, more show than tell, probably — demonstrating the storied diversity of band's repertoire. At last week's gathering, for instance, in the first dozen minutes of the evening, the guys played across a spectrum, starting with an Irving Berlin tune, followed by a Sonny Terry/Brownie McGhee blues, then a Hoagy Carmichael jazz standard, a Bob Dylan composition and a centuries-old fiddle tune.When the boys wanted to bring out the jug band course for this eclectic repast, they turned to this tune from the head honcho of hokum, Mister Tampa Red.About This SongAs reported here earlier, Shelton Brooks' composition, “I Wonder Where My Easy Rider's Gone,” was recorded by Red on July 9, 1929, with Georgia Tom on piano and jazz singer Frankie “Half Pint” Jaxon doing the vocal honors.And, as also noted, Brooks' piece inspired a famous “answer” song, W.C. Handy's “Yellow Dog Blues,” which continued Shelton's story by tracking down his elusive easy rider.Our Take On the TuneAround here, the best night of the week is whatever night we're all getting together to pick. Everyone always comes in the room ready to rock. But some nights? Well, those night swing even more than usual. At that session last week, for instance, Danny seemed to have a whole barrel of new riffs to try out on his guitar, and Jack was absolutely cooking on his snare and high-hat. And, man, it seemed like Randy was rocking before he even got his bass out of the case. Just listen to how Randy's walking bass line puts a strut and a glide in this great old tune from the Roarin' Twenties. Shoot, you can probably hear Charlie grinning while he's singing.Meanwhile…Well, we're now about a third of the way into the new year. If you'd like a Flood-centric progress report on how the year is suiting the band — and to further sample the group's diverse musical tastes — check out the growing 2025 playlist in the free Radio Floodango music streaming service.Click here to give it a spin. And, of course, while you've got the time machine fired up, if you might as well tool on back to earlier periods of Floodery by visiting the “Hear by Year” section of the service, where annual playlist butons go back to 2009. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Napoleon never heard “Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine,” because, well, it's not French. The tune might be Scottish. But probably not. Some say it's an American march. Maybe Irish instead. Or not.One thing is certain: Definitive derivation of old fiddle tunes is not the hill you'll want to die on. Most of the best-loved melodies have at least a half dozen different names, each usually with its own equally murky history.WhitherThis particular tune is considered traditional, and the first part shows up in several melodies from Ireland such as “Centenary March" and "An Comhra Donn.” A group called The Black Irish Band (who are from Sonora in California, so there's that…) recorded the song in the late 1990s as the Scottish “New Caledonian March.” And, in fact, back in 1837 George Willig of Philadelphia published it as “Caledonian March.” (Guess it wasn't “New” then….) But the tune also is melodically similar to English hornpipes called "Durham Rangers" and "Sherwood Rangers." Meanwhile in America, folklorist Samuel Bayard found the same melody was a common march tune in his primary collecting area of western Pennsylvania, circulating in the 1940s under various names, such as "Bruce's March" and "The Star of Bethlehem." A Keystone State musician told Bayard it was called "Ranahan's March," which he said commemorated a local bandmaster. North Carolina Fiddler Mack Snoderly has played a slow, dirge-like version of it, and he calls it "Dying on the Field of Battle.”But Bonaparte?So, how the heck does Napoleon get into this tangled tale?That was exactly the question pondered recently in an interesting bit of gab on an online discussion board called Banjo Hangout.It all started when a visitor posted a message with the title, “Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine” and noted, “I was wondering which event the title of this tune implies.”After a number of fits and starts in the replies from various readers, banjoist Don Borchelt got down to cases. Noting that Napoleon's army did cross the Rhine in 1805 (in order to invade Austria and fight the battle of Austerlitz), Borchelt went on to say he didn't think the song actually referred to any specific spot of history, pointing out that a number of fiddle tunes refer to Napoleon.“As for the tune's title,” he said, “the various Bonaparte titles — ‘Bonaparte's Retreat,' ‘Napoleon Crossing the Rhine,' ‘Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine,' ‘Bonaparte Crossing the Alps,' ‘Bonaparte's March,' etc. — are often used interchangeably by fiddlers.“The one I generally hear called ‘Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine' is a tune pretty much of American origin,” Don concluded, “and the fiddlers back in the day probably had an imperfect knowledge of Napoleon's military history, in those dark centuries before Wikipedia.”Our Take on the TuneMaybe in the Floodisphere we'll just give our version of the tune the title bestowed on it by our Danny Cox, who with a wink recently said, “Hey, let's play that “Bonaparte Chewin' a Rind.”Actually, Flood old-timers first heard the melody 50 years ago this autumn when fiddlin' Jim Strother played it with The Kentucky Foothill Ramblers at the September 1975 Bowen Bash. It's not known from where Jim got it, but for sure a few years earlier, in 1972, North Carolina's Fuzzy Mountain String Band recorded a rendition that was popular among the hippy pickers of the day.So, if you'd like to run the time machine back a half century and hear Strother's playing that started this whole conversation, click the Play button on the bash legacy film below and move the slider up to 35:30.More Song History? Finally, if sorting out music history appeals to you, be sure to visit the Song Stories section of this newsletter, where we tackle the tales of dozens of tunes in The Flood's very eclectic repertoire. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Randy Hamilton has brought so much to The Flood's table in the past dozen years. As the late Joe Dobbs used to say, Randy's bass is “the heartbeat of the band.”In addition, Randy's vocals — whether harmonizing or taking the lead — have become a definitive ingredient in The Flood's sound. And nothing demonstrates that better than a tune from this week's rehearsal, captured in this video by band manager Pamela Bowen.About the SongAs reported earlier, “When You Say Nothing at All,” the 1988 composition by Paul Overstreet and Don Schlitz, has been a hit for no fewer than four times.— Keith Whitley was first to take it to the top of the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart in late 1988. — Then seven years later, Allison Krauss's version was her first solo Top-10 country hit. — A year after that, Irish singer Francis Black made the song her third Irish Top 10 single. — And that brought the song to the attention of Irish pop singer Ronan Keating, whose 1999 version was his first solo single and a No. 1 hit in the United Kingdom, Ireland and New Zealand.But to this day, “When You Say Nothing at All” is always associated first with Keith Whitley. The Ashland, Ky., native's recording entered the Hot Country Singles chart on Sep. 17, 1988, at a modest No. 61. Then it gradually rose to the top, where it stayed for two weeks at the end of the year. “Keith did a great job singin' that song," co-composer Schlitz told author Tom Roland. "He truly sang it from the heart.”When Krauss covered the song with her group Union Station in 1995, it was for a tribute album to Whitley, and suddenly the Overstreet-Schlitz composition was topping the charts again. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

A half century after the United States won its independence from Britain, Canada was rocked by two armed uprising known as the Rebellions of 1837-38.The revolts failed, resulting in many rebels being deported to Australia and Tasmania as political prisoners facing hard labor or hanging. Others escaped such reprisals by going into exile in the US. Sympathy for these disenfranchised French Canadian patriots was the subject of a song written four years later by a young college student named Antoine Gérin-Lajoie.How the Song Came to BeYears later in his memoir Souvenirs de collège, Gérin-Lajoie told how he adapted his lyrics to the deeply expressive French-Canadian folk tune "J'ai fait une maîtresse" (of which "Si tu te mets anguille" is also a variation). “I wrote that song in 1842 when I was in Rhetoric Class in Nicolet, Quebec. I wrote it one night in bed at the request of my friend Cyp Pinard.”Gérin-Lajoie's verses to “Un Canadien Errant” were published in 1844 in the Charivari canadien, and soon the song was being sung by French Canadians across the country — from Acadia on the east coast to the distant reaches of the northwest territories — stirred by how the lyrics captured the deep sadness of exile. Un Canadien errant, A wandering Canadian, Banni de ses foyers, Banished from his homeland, Parcourait en pleurant Traveled, weeping, Des pays étrangers. Through foreign lands. "Si tu vois mon pays, "If you should see my home, Mon pays malheureux, My sad unhappy land, Va dis à mes amis Go say to all my friends Que je me souviens d'eux.” That I remember them.”The Acadian ConnectionLater Acadians also adopted the song as their own — changing its first line to “Un Acadien Errant” — in the context of the Acadian deportation. Between 1749 and 1755, many Acadians who had refused to swear allegiance to the British Crown emigrated to Lower Acadia or Cape Breton. Then, fearing that they might join the French during the coming Seven Years' War, Nova Scotia Governor Charles Lawrence deported the Acadians to New England and the Atlantic Coast. Cajuns of the Louisiana bayou country also trace their own ancestry to these same exiles.Twentieth Century PerformancesBack to song, Paul Robeson recorded a bilingual version in 1950 under the title "Le Canadien Errant.” However, most Americans learned the tune a decade after that with a French-language performance by Ian & Sylvia, who included it on their debut 1962 album for Vanguard Records. The duo gave the song further prominence at the Newport Folk Festival as recorded on the 1996 album Ian & Sylvia Live at Newport. In the 1969 film My Side of the Mountain, folk singer/musicologist Theodore Bikel sang the first part of "Un Canadien Errant" and then played a bit of it on a "homemade" reed flute. The melody refrained throughout the film. Leonard Cohen recorded "Un Canadien Errant" as "The Lost Canadian" on his 1979 Recent Songs album, and his own song "The Faith," on his 2004 album Dear Heather, is based on the same melody. Our Take on the TuneThirty years ago, when The Flood first started doing this song, the band was back to being a trio of the original guys — Dave Peyton, Joe Dobbs and Charlie Bowen — and often on rehearsal night, the only listener in the room would be Dave's beautiful wife, Susan. At the end of the evening, when the guys asked Susie what last song of the evening she'd like to hear, it was almost always this sweet, sad tune that she remembered hearing 20 years earlier down in Louisiana when she and David and young Davy spent an autumn and winter in Cajun country. We lost Susan three years ago this summer. This one's for you, dear heart. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

One of the best songs written about West Virginia in the past half century was created by a man who was nicknamed for a state two time zones away.Bruce “U. Utah” Phillips wrote “The Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia” in 1971 while reflecting on a visit to the Mountain State years earlier."We were driving in an old car that had a bad leak in the radiator,” Phillips recalled in a story on his website. “We stopped every now and then in these hollers to get water and to talk to the people.“In one place, there was a woman about 50 years old who let us use her pump. I commented to her that down in the town, it seemed that everybody I ran into wanted to get out, wanted to go north or go west and find some decent work…."But, back in the hollers,” Phillips added, “it seemed like the people were rooted to the land, didn't want to go anywhere, even though there wasn't any work.”She gave him many reasons, some of which he didn't fathom, “but she gave me one I could understand, because I have a great affection for the mountains in my state, and I miss them when I spend a lot of time in the east. “She said to me, 'It's these hills. They keep you. And when they've got you, they won't let you go.' "Her comment inspired the key line in the chorus of the song that Phillips would later compose: The green rolling hills of West Virginia Are the nearest thing to heaven that I know. Though the times are sad and drear And I cannot linger here, They'll keep me and never let me go.The Hazel and Alice ContributionIn 1973, when Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard recorded their first album together, they wanted to include Utah Phillips' lovely ode to their home. However, they felt the song needed a better ending, one that offered not only a bit of hope, but also a call to join the fight to preserve those green rolling hills. They added a new last verse: Someday I'll go back to West Virginia, To the green rolling hills I love so well. Yes, someday I'll go home And I know I'll right the wrong. These troubled times will follow me no more.EmmyLou Steps UpEmmylou Harris, who recorded the song on her classic 1978 album Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town, said she loved how the song was about homesickness and displacement.But she added that it took on new meaning when she learned about the menace of mountaintop removal, decapitating hundreds of peaks and poisoning thousands of miles of streams in Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia and in her home state of Tennessee.“It seems like artists today, particularly country artists, tend to play it safe,” Harris said, “and I count myself in there. I've never been that comfortable with overtly political songs. But mountaintop removal is based on pure greed and it's doing such incredible damage.”That's why, she said, Phillips' stark tune so resonated with her.Our Take on the TuneFifty years ago, The Flood's dear friends H. David Holbrook, Bill Hoke and Susan Lewis formed the core of the best local string band, The Kentucky Foothill Ramblers, and, gee, but they taught everyone a slew of wonderful tunes.The group used to sing “Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia” at nearly every show. The Ramblers are long-gone now, but home recordings preserve a lot of the band's repertoire as performed at those parties where The Flood was born back in the ‘70s.Nowadays "Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia" is always on the playlist whenever Floodster Emerita Michelle Hoge is in the room, as she was one night last month.More West Virginia Tunes?Finally, if you'd like more of The Flood's Mountain State melodies, check out the playlist the guys put together a few years ago to celebrate West Virginia Day. Click the link below: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Whenever Floodster Emerita Michelle Hoge makes one of her rare treks back to West Virginia, it's a good excuse to try to land a gig somewhere at which the band's beloved “chick singer” can be the guest star.This time the good folks at Charleston's Edgewood Summit retirement community accommodated that mission, and yesterday the entire Family Flood rolled into that gorgeous facility for an afternoon of tunes, laughs and stories.Sitting in front row, Flood manager Pamela Bowen shots video. Here are four numbers from the show. Incidentally, if you'd like the history of these four tunes, here are links to earlier articles in the newsletter's Song Stories section:* “Peggy Day”* “My Blue Heaven”* “All of Me”* “Up a Lazy River”Yesterday's gig was a return visit to Edgewood for The Flood. Michelle and the band had a similar music party there in October 2023. Click here if you'd like to see a video from that earlier do. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Hokum bands of the 1920s and '30s created a brand of urban folk tunes called “jug band music” that famously blended the sounds of the plantation and the church with those of the swing, swerve and sway of nascent jazz.And no one did it better than those Flood heroes The Memphis Jug Band, formed in 1927 by Beale Street guitar/harmonica player Will Shade. Shade was also known as Son Brimmer, a nickname given to him by his grandmother Annie Brimmer (“son” being short for grandson). The name stuck when other members of the band noticed how the sun bothered him and he used the brim of a hat to shade his eyes.The Ohio Valley InfluenceIncidentally, Will Shade first heard jug band music in our part of the country, on the 1925 recordings by Louisville's Dixieland Jug Blowers, and he wanted to take that sound south.“He was excited by what he heard,” Wikipedia notes, “and felt that bringing this style of music to his hometown of Memphis could be promising. He persuaded a few local musicians, though still reluctant, to join him in creating one of the first jug bands in Memphis.”While Shade was the constant, the rest of his band's personnel varied from day to day, as he booked gigs and arranging recording sessions.Some players remained a long time. For instance, Charlie Burse (nicknamed "Laughing Charlie," "Uke Kid Burse" and "The Ukulele Kid”) recorded some 60 sides with the MJB. Others — like Memphis Minnie and Hattie Hart — used the band as a training ground before going on to make careers of their own.Street MusicThe Memphis Jug Band's venues, as The Corner Jug Store web site noted, included “street corners, juke joints, city nightclubs, political rallies, private parties, hotel ballrooms, medicine shows and riverboats,” and it cut many styles and repertoires to suit its varied audiences.Most of all, the MJB's sound was the music of the street, as demonstrated in the open lines of their wonderful “4th Street Mess Around,” recorded in May 1930 for Victor by Ralph Peer: Go down Fourth until you get to Vance, Ask anybody about that brand new dance. The girls all say, “You're going my way, It's right here for you, here's your only chance.”And what was that “brand new dance?” Shoot, take your pick! The Eagle Rock, the turkey trot and fox trot, camel walk and Castle Walk, the Charleston and the Lindy Hop were all stirring the feet and wiggling the hips of listeners and players in the ‘20 and ‘30s.But Mess Around?But what's a “mess around?” Well, as we reported here earlier, New Orleans jazzman Wingy Manone in his wonderful autobiography called Trumpet on the Wing, talked about watching people dance the mess-around at the fish fries of his youth in the Crescent City at the beginning of the 20th century.“The mess-around,” said Wingy, “was a kind of dance where you just messed around with your feet in one place, letting your body do most of the work, while keeping time by snapping fingers with one hand and holding a slab of fish in the other!” Now, that's an image.Our Take on the TuneThe Flood first started messing around jug band tunes nearly 50 Springs ago, when the band was still a youngster. Before their juncture with juggery, the guys played mainly old folk songs and some Bob Dylan and John Prine and a smattering of radio tunes from folks like James Taylor and The Eagles. But then they discovered some fine old recordings by Tampa Red and Georgia Tom, by groups like The Mississippi Sheiks and Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, and most especially the great Memphis Jug Band. Ever since then, The Flood's musical buffet table has been a lot bigger, with tunes like this one from the warmup at last week's rehearsal.More Jugginess?Of course, The Flood's jug band music mission has continued. If today's song and story have you ready to join the campaign, check out The Hokum channel on the free Radio Floodango music streaming service which has dozens of jug band tunes ready to rock you. Click here to tune it in and you'll be ready to sing along at the next Flood fest. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Texan Cindy Walker already was a well-established songwriter in the fall of 1955 when she attended Nashville's annual disc jockey convention.By then, she had worked with Bing Crosby, not to mention Gene Autry and Bob Wills. She had even scored her own hit in 1944 with her recording of Wiley Walker and Gene Sullivan's "When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again."But Cindy Walker's greatest contribution to American pop music was only now about to happen.How the Song Came to BeYears later, Walker would recall that day. She was leaving the Nashville conference when she was approached by country singing star Eddy Arnold.“He said, 'I've been wanting to see you. I've got a song title,'” she remembered. “He said, ‘I've showed it around a little bit and I haven't had any luck, but I know it's a good title.'” Walker liked the title Arnold suggested — “You Don't Know Me” — but at first she couldn't figure out what to do with it. Back home, though, “I was just sitting there and all of a sudden, here comes, 'You give your hand to me and then you say hello'.” "But I couldn't find any way to finish it,” she told a writer decades later during her Grammy Foundation Living History interview. “Maybe two or three weeks went by and nothing happened. Then one day, I thought, 'You give your hand to me and then you say goodbye' and when I said that, I knew exactly where it was going. I couldn't wait to get to the phone to call Eddy."Crossover GoldWalker's resulting song was a definitive crossover hit. The first rendition of “You Don't Know Me” was released by pop singer Jerry Vale, who in early 1956 carried it to #14 on Billboard's pop chart. Two months later, it entered the country music world when Eddy Arnold's version made it to #10.Then along came Brother Ray. In 1962, Ray Charles included the tune on his #1 pop album Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. His single of “You Don't Know Me” (the song's overall biggest-selling version ever) went all the way to #2 on Billboard's “Hot 100.” That same year it also topped the Easy Listening chart for three weeks.Later the song was used in the 1993 comedy film Groundhog Day, and it was the 12th No. 1 country hit for Mickey Gilley in 1981.Walker's fellow Texan Willie Nelson honored her with his album You Don't Know Me: The Songs of Cindy Walker in 2006, the year she died at age 88. In her obituary, The New York Times noted that Walker had Top 10 hits in every decade from the 1940s to the 1980s.Our Take on the TuneMichelle Hoge brought her band mates this song about a decade ago. It immediately found a place on the next album they were working on and it became a standard feature in most of The Flood's shows. These days, the guys don't see Michelle so often — she and her husband Rich live more than two hours away — but whenever she rambles back this way, as she did last week, this enduring classic is sure to make an appearance.More from MichelleFinally, if you would like to fill your Friday with little more from the one whom the late Joe Dobbs lovingly dubbed “The Chick Singer,” tune in the Michelle Channel in the free Radio Floodango music streaming service.Click here to give it a spin. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Spring in Appalachia is notoriously fickle. One minute the sun is promising an early wakeup call for the dogwoods and the redbuds; the next minute, snow is mocking our optimism.Last week started, for example, with a lovely, bright preview of April. However, in midweek, The Flood's weekly rehearsal was greeted by clouds, biting winds and cold rain. By the time the guys packed up to head home, ice would be forming on the back roads in the hills.But inside the band room, the guys have mad skills for climate control. Want some autumn leaves? They got a tune for that. Want a little taste of June? There's one for that too. And summertime? Shoot! Gotcha covered.Decades' Worth of Summer HeatAs reported here earlier, The Flood started playing “Summertime” a quarter of a century ago with various arrangements. Sometimes, for instance, it has been an instrumental, featuring solos over the by years by Joe Dobbs and Doug Chaffin, by Jacob Scarr, Paul Martin and Vanessa Coffman.The first time the song came to a Flood album — the 2002 The 1937 Flood Plays Up a Storm — Charlie Bowen handled the vocals. Eleven years later, by the time the band released its fifth album, Cleanup & Recovery, the guys had turned over the singing to Michelle Hoge.Nowadays, Randy Hamilton is front and center on the vocals. At last week's rehearsal, the first take on this tune was slow and bit lifeless, but then Randy said, “Let's try it again,” and kicked it up into a new gear. At the start of this track, you'll hear Randy ask his band mates what they think. “Yeah!” they all say, then Danny Cox lets his guitar register his vote with some of the most inspired playing the whole night.By the way, if you like to learn more about how George Gershwin came to write this American classic, click here for a backgrounder in The Flood's Song Stories section. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

For many decades, whenever anyone at a Flood gathering was celebrating a birthday, the guys turned to David Peyton to lead them in a rousing rendition of … no, oh, hell no, not THAT song… (Does this bunch really look like “Happy Birthday to You” people?) No, Br'er Peyton suggested a much more appropriate nativity-observing song for the Flood flock. Not only that, Dave enhanced the tune with his own special touch, the addition of a juicy reference to a sex scandal that was rocking West Virginia politics. More on that little tidbit in a moment.For now, you can hear Dave's birthday tune — a sassy 1930s hokum number — by scrolling back to the top of this article and click the Play button on the video that Flood Manager Pamela Bowen shot 14 years ago this week. The occasion for Pamela's footage was a housewarming at the clubhouse at the Wyngate retirement village where devoted Flood fans Norman and Shirley Davis had just moved. For the fun evening, about 30 of the Davises' new neighbors were in the audience. Among them were guitarist Jacob Scarr's grandparents who were also new residents. The senior Scarrs had been regulars at Flood gigs ever since their grandson's joined the band several years earlier.The SongA highlight of the evening was Peyton's performance of the birthday song; The Flood's version of “You Can't Get That Stuff No More” with Charlie Bowen and Michelle Hoge's harmonies and solos by Dave, Jacob, Joe Dobbs and Doug Chaffin.Back in 2003, when a take on the tune was included on the I'd Rather Be Flooded album, the band described it as a 1932 Tampa Red/Georgia Tom song. That was correct as far as it went, but a little deeper research would have taught the guys that the song actually was written and recorded a year or two earlier by a remarkable young singer/actor/comedian named Sam Theard.Performing well into the 1970s under assorted stage names — including Lovin' Sam and Spo-Dee-O-Dee — Theard was born in New Orleans in 1904. Before he was 20, he was performing with a circus, then working in theaters and nightclubs.Meeting up with Flood heroes Tampa Red and Cow Cow Davenport, Theard recorded one of his best known songs — "(I'll Be Glad When You're Dead) You Rascal You” — for Brunswick in 1929. Over the years that song was covered by everyone from Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway and The Mills Brothers to Fats Domino, Dr. John and Taj Mahal.In the 1930s and '40s, using the name Spo-Dee-O-Dee, Theard was a regular as a comedian at New York's Apollo Theater.It was during this period that he co-wrote his next famous song, “Let the Good Times Roll,” with Louis Jordan, who recorded it with his Tympany Five in 1946. In 1961 at the 3rd Annual Grammy Awards ceremony, Ray Charles won a Grammy for his version of that tune.In the 1950s, Theard wrote for a number of jazz greats, including Hot Lips Page, Count Basie, Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson and Roy Eldridge.Then in the last decade of his life, Theard was discovered by television, appearing in episodes of a variety of shows, including “Sanford and Son” and “Little House of Prairie.”The Ickie Frye InfusionBut you're still thinking about that political sex scandal, aren't you? The one that Peyton worked into The Flood's version of “You Can't Get That Stuff No More”? Okay, here's that story:The original song, as recorded in 1932 by Tampa Red and Georgia Tom, included this verse: There goes Joe with a great big knife Somebody been messin' round with his wife.However, when The Flood recorded it in a marathon studio session in Charleston in November 2003, Dave sang the verse as: There's Ickie Frye with a great long knife. Somebody been a-messin' round with his wife…Uh, Ickie who? Sure, that's not a well-known name today, but if you were a news-reading West Virginian in 2003, you certainly would have known about Phillip “Ickie” Frye, a bass-playing TV/computer repairman who had just blown up Gov. Bob Wise's political career. Newspapers across the state trumpeted the news of how Frye revealed that his wife — state employee Angela Mascia, in charge of European projects for the state development office — was having an extramarital affair with the governor.Red-faced, Wise admitted his infidelity. “I apologize deeply,” Wise said, “to the people of our state for my actions. In my private life, I have let many people down." The following year, Frye even filed to run for governor to "dog Wise," he said, over the affair, but he dropped out when Wise himself announced he would not seek re-election. Soon after The Flood's album was released, Ickie Frye emailed Peyton to thank him for the shout-out on the tune. The ex-governor had no comment. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

For a half dozen years beginning in the late 1990s, The Flood always greeted March's arrival with an annual road trip into the mountains. Providing an evening of music, jokes and stories, the band would entertain a roomful of visiting volunteers, kindly students who had come more than 600 miles from Milwaukee's Marquette University to use their spring break helping with assorted post-winter chores around the little mining town of Rhodell on Tams Mountain about 20 miles south of Beckley.As reported here earlier, from 1997 to 2002 The Flood's original three amigos — Joe Dobbs, David Peyton and Charlie Bowen — shared this weird, wonderful way to celebrate the coming of spring. To read more about these Tams Mountain adventures, click here.But, Hey, This is About a Song…Each year, party hostess Martha Thaxton never failed to ask the guys to play one particular tune before they left for their two-hour journey back to Huntington. It was a song that seemed to speak to Martha's own rambling soul as a die-hard folkie, a beloved Tom Paxton composition from his 1964 debut album for Elektra Records.“I Can't Help But Wonder Where I'm Bound” was a song Dave and Charlie knew well — they had played it with Roger Samples back in the old Bowen Bash days — so they were happy to dust it off for Martha and her visiting good samaritans.In the past 60 years Paxton's song has been recorded by everyone from The Mitchell Trio and The Kingston Trio to Tiny Tim and Dion (no, really!), from The Country Gentlemen and Country Joe to Doc Watson and Nanci Griffith.But surely the most touching rendition was Johnny Cash's recording of the song in his final session in February 2010.In a recent interview, Paxton noted that Cash used to come in The Gaslight back in the early 60s “in what we now know was his worst period. “He was skinny as a rail because of all the pills he was doing. He had not had his renaissance yet. But he was a gentle man. He was a direct man and he took you as you were. I just liked this man.”Paxton said he was “absolutely thrilled … to hear him sing the song. That's just a once in a lifetime kind of thrill.”Elijah Wald Blazed the TrailSpeaking of being thrilled, members of The Flood's crack research department are always overjoyed whenever they discover the blazed trails and rambling footprints of the incomparable Elijah Wald on some musical terrain they've come to explore.For nine years now, Wald's online “Songbiography” has been his musical memoir, giving history and personal reflection on some of his favorite songs, which often turn out to be Flood favorites too. Elijah's site was barely a month old when he took up “I Can't Help But Wonder Where I'm Bound.”It is a tune he loved as a young man, but, he writes, he couldn't “help noticing that Paxton himself got married back when he was writing these songs, and the marriage lasted, and he moved out to the country and raised a family, and all in all has had one of the most settled and stable lives of anyone on the folk scene.“It's as if he actually meant the last verse, where he sings that anyone who sees the ramblin' boy goin' by and wants to be like him should just ‘nail your shoes to the kitchen floor, lace 'em up and bar the door/Thank your stars for the roof that's over you.'”In retrospect, Wald said, “I think it's a nice touch that the singer keeps bemoaning his sad ‘n' ramblin' ways, but it's the girl, rather than him, who leaves on the morning train.”Our Take on the TuneSo this is an evergreen song, and that word has special meaning in The Flood band room. It is reserved for tunes that are timeless. This Tom Paxton classic might be 60 years old, but it feels it could have been written last week — or, well, a century ago. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Coming in from the wind and cold of a rainy winter's night, it was cozy and bright in the band room last Thursday evening. Here are two tunes from the late 1960s that Pamela Bowen captured with her phone during the weekly rehearsal.The video opens with Randy Hamilton leading the crew on Danny O'Keefe's soulful “Good Time Charlie's Got the Blues” followed by a gentle rendition of a long-time Flood favorite, Bob Dylan's “Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

We remember the night Joe Dobbs wandered into The Flood band room a couple of decades ago and said, “Hey, do you know the song ‘Satin Doll'?”Boy, was he asking the right guy. Charlie Bowen grew up in a home full of his dad's jazz records by Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington and Count Basie and his mom's Harry James and The Mills Brothers.In BowenWorld, “Satin Doll” was as much a part of the household soundtrack as anything on the radio right then.Joe didn't really know any of the tune's honored status in the jazz world. However, he was tickled by a folksy jazz rendition of it that was recorded live by fiddler Stephane Grappelli and David Grisman in 1981 and he was ready to tackle it himself.With that, the tune trotted into The Flood repertoire. Click the button below to transport back to 2011 and hear Joe with Flood Lite (Doug Chaffin on bass, Charlie on guitar) sampling the song at the start of a jam session at the Bowen House.About the SongIn 1953, Duke Ellington interrupted his long-time association with Columbia Records to sign with Capitol, thinking the upstart recording company might more effectively promote his music.Among the tunes waxed in the first Capitol session that spring was “Satin Doll,” a song Ellington had just written with his favorite collaborator, Billy Strayhorn. Duke wrote the riff sketch and Strayhorn fleshed it out with harmony and lyrics.Billy's lyrics, though, were not were not considered commercially viable, so Duke's 1953 recording was an instrumental. It was five years later when lyricist Johnny Mercer — a Capitol Records cofounder — wrote sassy new words that resulted in the song we know today.But Who WAS the Satin Doll?Strayhorn biographer David Hajdu famously advanced the notion that Billy named the song after his mother, Lillian, saying that the composer's pet name for his mom was “Satin Doll.”That's a charming story, but the Ellington family has a different take on the tale. Duke's son Mercer wrote in his 1978 memoir that he suspected the mystery woman was his dad's long-time companion, Beatrice “Evie” Ellis.Writing in Duke Ellington In Person: An Intimate Memoir, Mercer said Evie continued to believe the song was written for her. “Pop would always be leaving notes in the house addressing her affectionately as ‘Dearest Doll,' ‘Darling Doll' and so on.”Today's Flood Take on the Tune“Satin Doll” lately has started visiting the Flood band room again. It was the first tune of the evening at last week's rehearsal. Listen as Randy, Jack and Charlie start outlining the tune, laying down the rhythm and those cool chords while Danny is still setting up.You'll hear Charlie sing the first verse. By the second verse in comes Dan's beautiful guitar. In a minute, he's in full gear, and then he's soloing on two idea-filled choruses that define the entire outing.Got That SwingFinally, if you'd like to put a little more swing in your Friday thing, remember that the free Radio Floodango music streaming feature's gotcha cover. Click here to tune in the Swingin' Channel for a randomized playlist of some of The Flood's jazzier moments over the years. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Around campfires North and South, many of the tunes played and sung during the Civil War were the work of a 35-year-old Pennsylvanian who was America's first full-time professional songwriter.By the time the war started, Stephen Collins Foster — who as a youth taught himself to play the clarinet, guitar, flute and the piano — had published more than 200 songs.His best ones — “Oh Susannah,” “Camptown Races,” “Old Folks at Home (Swanee River),” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” “Hard Times Comes Again No More” — already were widely known throughout the country to amateur and professional musicians alike.About “Angelina Baker”This song, though, was not one of the famous ones. Foster wrote “Angelina Baker,” sometimes performed as “Angeline the Baker,” in 1850 for use by the theater world's Christy Minstrels troupe.Today folks know it primarily as an instrumental dance tunes performed by old-time and bluegrass bands, almost always with a lively fiddle leading the way. An early version was recorded for Victor in 1928 by Uncle Eck Dunford of Galax, Va. Meanwhile, West Virginia fiddler Franklin George called it "Angeline" and played it with Scottish overtones.Foster's original, though, was a bit slower and had lyrics that lamented the loss of a woman slave, sent away by her owner.Huntington-born music historian Ken Emerson — who in 1997 wrote a definitive biography called Doo-Dah!: Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture — said that “Angelina Baker” entered the American consciousness during a period of great controversy between free and slave states. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was among the hotly debated topics at the time of the song's composition, and, Emerson noted, Foster's lyrics obliquely acknowledge these controversies. (Angelina likes th' boys as far as she can see ‘em / She used to run old Massa round to ask him for to free ‘em…. Angelina Baker, Angelina Baker's gone / She left me here to weep a tear and beat on de old jawbone… )Our Take on the TuneThe Flood has always celebrated diversity. The guys often follow a folk blues with a swing tune or chase a 1950s jazz standard with some 1920s jug band stuff. And deep in The Flood's DNA are the fiddle tunes learned from Joe Dobbs and Doug Chaffin. This Civil War-era tune the band learned from fiddlin' Jack Nuckols, their newest band mate.From the Archives: How We Met AngelinaAs reported earlier, Dave Peyton and Charlie Bowen started 50 years ago trying to draw Nuckols into the band. On an April evening back in 1974, Peyton and Bowen trekked over to Jack and Susie's place in South Point, Ohio, for a jam session. It was during that session that they first heard “Angelina Baker.” Here from the fathomless Flood files is that specific archival moment. Click the button below to travel back 51 years and hear Jack on fiddle, Dave on Autoharp and Charlie on guitar:More Instrumentals?Finally, if all this has you wanting some more wordlessness in your Friday Floodery, tune in the Instrumentals channel in the free Radio Floodango music streaming service. There you'll have a randomized playlist of everything from folksy fiddle tunes to sultry jazz numbers without a lyric or vocal in sight! Click here to give a try. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Shortly after he recorded “Peggy Day” — exactly 56 years ago today, in fact, an appropriate choice for Valentine's Day! — Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone magazine, “I kind of had The Mills Brothers in mind when I did that one.”A laugh was shared by Dylan and RS Editor Jann Wenner over that thought. However, the remark later really would resonate in the world of The Flood, which has taken much musical inspiration from The Mills Brothers, on everything from “Up a Lazy River” and “Lulu's Back in Town” to “Am I Blue?” and “Opus One.”In other words, Floodsters heard in Bob's little-loved love song a kind of pastiche of the 1930s and ‘40s, its rhythms recalling that era's classic swing thing.StepchildStill, "Peggy Day" remains one of the stepchildren in the Dylan oeuvre. In fact, the tune's only claim to fame is that it was the B-side when Bob released "Lay, Lady, Lay" as a hit single in the summer of '69. Unlike a lot of Dylan songs, "Peggy Day" has no intriguing backstory or associated legend, no deep, nuanced lyrics to invite exegesis by college graduate seminars.As a result, some Dylanologists seem to actually hate the tune. “Frankly, embarrassing,” Clinton Heylin once said of it, while Billboard magazine was even cheekier about the entire Nashville Skyline album from which it came: “The satisfied man speaks in clichés,” the magazine purred with a pucker.Shout-Out to The FloodNo wonder “Peggy Day” is so seldom performed by other artists. A few years ago, Tony Attwood started covering Dylan covers in a series of articles for his fascinating Untold Dylan web site. When Tony turned to “Peggy Day,” he located only one non-Dylan recording of the song: The Flood's version on its 2013 Cleanup & Recovery album.Attwood was complementary of The Flood's performance on the album, which featured the call-and-response vocals by Charlie Bowen and Michelle Hoge. (Click here to hear it, complete with solos by Sam St. Clair, Dave Peyton and Doug Chaffin.)“It's a jolly bit of fun,” Attwood wrote, “which shows this is certainly a song that has cover possibilities — in terms of a second vocalist — the harmonies in the middle 8 are gorgeous as is the instrumental break.”A Little Sumpin' Sumpin' from The VaultActually, a decade before that the song almost made it onto an earlier Flood album. “Peggy Day” was among the dozens of numbers the band recorded during a 10-hour marathon studio session with the late, great George Walker, an evening that yielded 2003's I'd Rather Be Flooded.The tune didn't make the cut for the album, but since things don't get thrown away much around here, the rendition has been patiently passing its time in The Flood Files, just waiting for this moment to arise.Click the button below to hear this archival “Peggy Day” treatment with Sam's harmonica and Charlie's vocals along with a bevy of late Flood tribal elders, including Joe Dobbs on fiddle, Chuck Romine on tenor banjo, Dave Peyton on Autoharp and Doug Chaffin on bass:Our 2025 Take on the TuneSo, this bit of fluff from Bob's fat and happy country squire days of the late 1960s is one of his least-recorded song, but The Flood obviously has always enjoyed playing it over the decades. Here's a joyous take on the tune from a recent rehearsal, featuring solos from everyone in the room, Danny and Randy, Sam and Jack. Happy Valentine's Day, dear ones!And Speaking of Love…Finally, if you'd like a little more Flood in your day of love, remember The Valentine Blend playlist in the free Radio Floodango music streaming service. Click below to read all about it! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Even a rainy winter's night can be fun at one of Huntington's hottest venues, the remarkable Bahnhof WVrsthaus & Biergarten on 7th Avenue.The band hit the Bahnhof stage early Thursday evening, a dozen hours after a night of torrential storms that soaked and raked the entire tri-state from midnight onward.“Listening to The Flood after a flood?” mused by hardy fan at a ringside table. “Well, I can't decide if that's appropriate behavior … or whether we're just poking the eye of the storm gods!”Hard to tell. However, the fact is that it did start raining again before the band's set was finished.Weather TunesThe weather had an impact on the guys' song selection. For instance, Pamela's video from the evening opens with a highly hum-able hymn for any deluge — “Wade in the Water” — and the guys even invited the assembled flood victims to sing along.Then the musical weather forecast turned a bit more optimistic. In the hey-just-six-more-weeks-of-winter mindset, the band offered “Windy and Warm” — the John D. Loudermilk classic made famous by Doc Watson — which in Floodom is a Danny Cox specialty. The song wasn't originally on the set list, but when the band mates saw Flood friends Andrea and Scott Austin in the audience, they edited in the addition. Scott, a big Watson fan, often asks for the tune whenever he drops by The Flood rehearsal.The Dancing DoctorsSpeaking of docs, a perfect Floodish evening also includes a visit with the band's favorite prancing professors, Bonita Lawrence and Clayton “Doc” Brooks. Faculty stars of Marshall University's mathematics department, Doc and Bonnie started dancing to Flood tunes more than a dozen years ago. Initially they favored the late Joe Dobbs' Irish gigs and Doug Chaffin's waltz tunes, but lately, the dancing doctors have revealed a much broader repertoire. Pamela's video closes out featuring the pair hoofing it to the 1920s rocker, “If I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

What an amazing year 1966 was in music. Dylan's Blonde on Blonde hit the racks. So did The Beatles' Revolver, The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, The Stones' Aftermath and so many more.Into this stellar crowd quietly strolled Hums of the Lovin' Spoonful, the third studio album by Greenwich Village's own folk-rock mavens. Today the disc just barely makes it onto a list of the top 50 albums of that lush, flush year, but in its own way, it made wonderful waves.Hums — which would ultimately be the last full project by the Spoonful's original lineup — was the band's concerted effort to record in a wide variety of styles on a single disc. For it, they composed and played pop-, country-, jugband-, folk- and blues-fused tunes.The album spawned four charting singles, including “Summer in the City,” “Rain on the Roof,” “Nashville Cats” and "Full Measure.”Of “Nashville Cats,” principal songwriter John Sebastian said, "We thought our version would cross over to the country market. It never did. So we're always kinda, gee, well, I guess that tells us what we are — and what we aren't."Incidentally, Flatt & Scruggs did take "Nashville Cats" to the country charts, hitting No. 54 with it as a single.And elsewhere in the country crowd, Johnny Cash and June Carter covered Hums' “Darlin' Companion” on 1969's Johnny Cash at San Quentin album.About This Song“Loving You,” Hums' opening track, was never a hit single for the Spoonful, but a month after the disc's release in November 1966, Bobby Darin made the Top 40 with a cover version of the tune. Subsequently, the song also became a good vehicle for four different female vocalists, including Anne Murray (1969), Helen Reddy (1973) and Dolly Parton (1977) and Mary Black (1983).Meanwhile, the song came into the Floodisphere before The Flood was even The Flood.In 1975, after a year of regularly jamming together, Charlie and David started looking for new material to work on beyond their main interests in folk music, and for a brief time they landed on The Lovin' Spoonful's catalog.Here — like the audio version of a crinkled old baby picture — is a sound clip fished from The Flood archives. Click the button below to hear Charlie and Dave sampling the song exactly 50 years ago this week at a jam session at the Peyton House:The Spoonful's Jug Band RootsOnly later did Bowen and Peyton realize that The Lovin' Spoonful had been heavily influenced by some of the same 1920s-'30s jug band tunes that The Flood loves. Before he founded the Spoonful, John Sebastian with his partner Zal Yanovsky, long active in Greenwich Village's folk scene, set out to create an "electric jug band.”"Yanovsky and I were both aware of the fact that this commercial folk music model was about to change again,” Sebastian recalled, “that the four-man band that actually played their own instruments and wrote their own songs was the thing.”In early 1965, as they prepared for their first public performances, Sebastian and Yanovsky along with their new band mates Joe Butler and Steve Boone, searched for a name.It was Fritz Richmond, the washtub bass player for the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, who suggested “The Lovin' Spoonful,” referring to the lyrics of the song "Coffee Blues" by the country blues musician Mississippi John Hurt. It worked and it stuck.Our 2025 Take on the TuneAt last week's rehearsal, The Flood channeled those rich jug band roots of the Spoonful. For this tune, Jack switched from his usual drum kit to those funky wooden spoons and Charlie reached for the five-string. Then Danny, Sam and Randy just did what they always do to make it all work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

At a coffeehouse in Ashland, Ky., 50 years ago this week, Dave Peyton and Charlie Bowen continued their new mission to spread the good news about the work of young singer-songwriter John Prime.As reported in an earlier article here, Charlie and Dave had been listening this this Chicago-based folk wunderkind ever since his 1971 first album. The two, later joined by Flood co-founder Roger Samples, quickly started learning Prine tunes to share and sing along with at the Bowen Bashes and at festivals.The particular song featured in the above music video — one of the oldest audio files in The Flood archives — was only a couple of years old when Peyton and Bowen performed it on a February Friday night at The Catacombs coffeehouse at the Ashland Community College.The SongCharlie and Dave had heard “Please Don't Bury Me” a year or so earlier on Prine's third album, the wonderful Sweet Revenge, The guys were tickled by its sassy irreverence, “a funny song about death,” Bowen commented in his introduction that night in Ashland. In his lyrics, Prine seemed to be reflecting on his own someday-long-in-the-future death: Please don't bury me down in the cold cold ground I'd rather have 'em cut me up and pass me all around Throw my brain in a hurricane, the blind can have my eyes And the deaf can take both of my ears if they don't mind the size.Then When the Song Became Relevant…The song came under poignant re-examination in the spring of 2020 when Prine became one of the first high-profile fatalities of Covid-19 in the first months of the pandemic. In an interview a few years before that, John noted that he had been 27 when he wrote those jocular lines.“That song was originally about this character I had in mind called Tom Brewster,” said Prine. “He dies but he wasn't supposed to, like that scene in those old movies. The angels have to send him back, but they can't the way he is. So they send him back as a rooster, which is why his name is Brewster.“I ended up trashing that whole part,” Prine added, “and came up with this idea of the guy just giving all of his organs away, and I made a whole song out of that. It's the best organ donor campfire song I know of.”More on MortalityLater in his career, Prine frequently gave death further reflection. In 1975, for instance, Johnn penned “He Was In Heaven Before He Died,” inspired by the death of his father four years earlier. And then decades later for what would become his final album Tree of Forgiveness (2018), he wrote “When I Get to Heaven.”Inspired by his surviving cancer in 1998 and again in 2013, his song, the last track on the album, also will always demonstrate that time did not temper Prine's quirky worldview (or otherworldview): Ain't the afterlife grand? I'm gonna get a cocktail, vodka and ginger ale. I'm gonna smoke a cigarette that's nine miles long. I'm gonna kiss that pretty girl on the tilt-a-whirl. Yeah, this old man is goin' to town.Flash Forward…. Waaaaay ForwardWe can't whisk you back to that coffeehouse night 50 years ago. But if you'd like the 2025 version of that evening, set your calendar for this Thursday night, destination: Huntington's Bahnhof WVrsthaus & Biergarten, 745 7th Ave.The Flood will be back at this wonderful establishment to play from 6:30 to 8:30. Join us for an evening of good food, good tunes, and even a bit of that good ol' coffeehouse vibe.Meanwhile, More John?Finally, if you'd like a little more Floodified versions of John's tunes, remember that the free Radio Floodango music streaming service has a randomized playlist of some of the band's favorite Prine pieces.Click here to read all about it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

If your mom (or your grandma or maybe great-grandmother) was a Bobby-soxer in the 1940s, she probably danced to this tune. Sociologists call the bunch born in the 1930s “The Silent Generation” — a term first used in a 1951 Time magazine story to describe their alleged cautious and passive nature — but, well, seriously? Anyone who ever saw them dance didn't think they were all that darn docile. After all, these “Silents” are the same folks who gave us the jitterbug, not to mention setting the stage for early rock ‘n' roll.About This SongAs reported here previously, Sy Oliver's composition “Opus One” was a hit on the radio for Tommy Dorsey in late 1944, but it was an even bigger smash a year later. That's when singer Anita O'Day recorded it with a rocking band fronted by drummer Gene Krupa and featuring legendary trumpeter Roy Eldridge.The song has gone on to be covered many times over the years, from versions by Harry James to those of The Mills Brothers and The Four Freshmen. For more on the song's history — including the story of those sassy lyrics added by Sid Garris — check out this earlier Flood Watch article.Meanwhile, here in The Flood Zone, the song is a perfect warmup for an evening of fun at the weekly rehearsal, offering solo space for everyone in the room.About the VideoThe sound in this video is audio from last week's rehearsal. Meanwhile, for the film footage thanks go out to Douglas K. Morris and Shane Finster of Armstrong Cable.As reported earlier, Doug and Shane dropped into a Flood rehearsal last summer to record an episode of their award-winning Armstrong Neighborhood Channel's Press Room Recordings series. It was a treat to revisit the video from that night to enhance this week's winter evening film.More Swing Tunes?Finally, if you'd like a little more from the “Swing” column on The Flood's menu, the free Radio Floodango music streaming feature has a channel just for you.Click here for a randomized playlist of swing tunes from over the band's decades. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

For the past month, the world has been fascinated by a new movie about a 20-year-old with a head full of ideas rolling from the North Country into New York City in 1961 and changing music forever. The Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown just yesterday scored eight Oscar nominations, including nods for best picture, best director, best lead and supporting actors, best sound and more.It already had garnered awards and nominations, from the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild, from BAFTA and Critics Choice.Our Tribute This week's podcast, a tribute to this wonderful film, features a tune from that same time period in the Dylan story. It's our version of Bob's version of “Corrina, Corrina.”As reported here earlier, most of Dylan's earliest fans know this song as a track on the Freewheelin' album, but it also was the flipside of his first single, a 45 rpm that appeared ever so briefly in record stores in the early 1960s.It's curious that “Corrina, Corrina” is not among the tunes covered in A Complete Unknown, since the movie is all about Bob going electric. As most diehard Dylanologists know, that 1962 track was the young singer's first recorded work with a band (albeit the barest bones of a band, just a bit of light drumming, bass and some tasteful solo electric guitar).That solo guitar was famously played by Bruce Langhorne, the same Bruce Langhorne who three years later reappeared in the Dylan orbit on the Bringing It All Back Home album, whose tunes famously are much featured in the film. Heeeey, Mister Tambourine Man….Our Take on the TuneOn this Flood track from last week's rehearsal, the guitars seem to be dancing together. Just listen to Danny Cox's big, warm solos over Charlie Bowen's subtle slides on his resonator.A Bigger Batch of BobMeanwhile, hey, if you've detected a Dylan deficiency lately in your daily diet, The Flood has a cure: An entire Bob-centric playlist is ready for a spin in the free Radio Floodango music streaming service.Click here to read all about it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

All kinds of stories are told at the weekly rehearsals. Some are shared for laughs. Others are merely melodies and improvisations. Some come with pictures. And some — like this one — are the tales that are many times older than all of us.As reported here earlier, traditional versions of “Pretty Polly” were on some of the first discs made by Appalachian musicians at the dawn of the recording industry. These included Eastern Kentuckian John Hammond's "Purty Polly" of 1925 and the "Pretty Polly" versions of B.F. Shelton and Dock Boggs, both in 1927.To read more about the song's fascinating origin story — it goes back nearly 300 years in Great Britain, had immigrated in the U.S. by the early 20th century to be collected by song hunter Cecil Sharp and obtained honored status in the folk song revival of the 1960s — check out the earlier Flood Watch article by clicking here.Floodifying It The Flood's version of this song lyrically follows the well-established narrative of Polly and Willie's fateful night, but melodically it takes a lot of liberties with the traditional tune. The rendition, in fact, is built on a musical idea that dates back a half century to pre-Flood days.When Charlie Bowen and David Peyton were just starting out as a duo in the early 1970s, they discovered that a repeated scale descending from an opening minor chord resonated nicely on the guitar-Autoharp accompaniment to their voices.Over the decades, each configuration of the band has found something new to contribute to this basic arrangement. And it is still happening. Just listen to what Dan Cox and Jack Nuckols brought to the song at a rehearsal earlier this month.More Folkiness?If you'd like more tunes from The Flood's dustier shelves, you can use Flood Watch's resources to find some. Visit the “Tunes on the Timeline” department; click here to reach it.Once there, scroll all the way to the bottom for links to timeless tunes and their stories, from “Barbara Allen” to “Wayfaring Stranger” listed in the Traditional category.Meanwhile, if you'd like to add even a little more Flood folkery to your wintry Friday, don't forget the free Radio Floodango music streaming service, where you can turn on the “Folk” channel for a randomize playlist of tunes.Click here to give it a spin.A Note about The GraphicsFinally, back to the video that tops this week's article, note that the graphics used to illustrate the performance were generated by artificial intelligence. As reported here earlier, nowadays we sometimes use free online AI software called ImageFX to create accommodating art for these pages. In this case, that software was asked to generate pictures that appeared to be in an old-fashioned quilt. Let us know what you think of the results. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

In the early 2000s, Joe Dobbs expanded his operations at his Fret ‘n Fiddle's music store in downtown St. Albans to include a recording studio that he and his young staff dubbed “The Bunker.”The idea was that at the very least Joe could use the facilities to record some or all of the episodes for his ongoing “Music from the Mountains” radio show. What he really hoped, though, was that the new studio would be used by area musicians to create their next albums.As usual, The Flood was to be the guinea pigs. And the band was primed, because the guys were eager to do a new album to follow up I'd Rather Be Flooded, which had been recorded three years earlier. So, with hopes high, the lads trouped into The Bunker 19 years ago this week.As it worked out, it didn't (work out, that is). That's because at the beginning of 2006, The Flood was still in a bit of a transition. That SongNonetheless, the guys did get a few good tracks from the session, including the one featured in the video at the top of this article. The backstory on this good old Lonnie Johnson tune, "Jelly Roll Baker" — which ultimately found its way to The Flood's self-produced bootleg album, "Hip Boots” — was reported in an earlier Flood Watch article. Click here to read it.Another reason that Jan. 11, 2006, was a memorable night in Flood Lore was because of the good work of Cincinnati fiddler/photograph Ed Strelau, who came along for the ride and took the pictures used in the above video. By then The Flood had known Ed for about four months. Meeting Ed StrelauThe friendship started one afternoon in September 2005 when Charlie Bowen got a phone call from a stranger, a man who identified himself as “Ed.” He was from Ohio, he said, was staying at the Ramada Inn here, was in town on business. He played a little fiddle, Ed added, had heard about The Flood's weekly jam sessions and wondered if he could stop by. In the course of the conversation, Ed dropped Joe Dobbs' name, which of course in Flood circles was as good as the “Open Sesame” got, so Charlie said, “Sure!” and gave him directions to the Bowen House.The following Wednesday night Strelau arrives at the door promptly at 7 with a bag of pork rinds as an offering for the assembled pickers. He was introduced all around the circle — everyone but Joe already had arrived — and the group learned that for nearly 40 years Ed had been an engineer with Turner Construction of Cincinnati. Ed would be in Huntington through the end of the year to oversee work on a building project at Cabell-Huntington Hospital. “We also learned that he played regularly with a band in Cincinnati that specialized in English country dance music,” Charlie later told his mom in an email. As the guys kicked into the evening's first tunes, Ed grabbed a seat near the front. They were playing loudly a short time later when Joe slipped in the back door and headed to the adjoining room to unpack his fiddle.“Hey, Joe,” Charlie called out between tunes, “your friend Ed Strelau is here!”“Who?” Joe called back.Hmmmm. Around the room, eyes turned toward Ed, who seemed equally confused.“Oh, wait,” Ed said finally, “I didn't mean to say I know Joe, only that I heard him on the radio!”More Introductions, More EdQuickly more introductions were exchanged, Joe had a pork rind or two and joined the mix. At one point, Joe even passed his fiddle to Ed, who hadn't brought one, but promised to come appropriately armed in future sessions.That he did. In fact, Ed Strelau was a faithful player at the weekly jams for the next four months, not only contributing tunes, but also occasionally taking pictures of the group. Here's an assemblage of his photos from the period:Last Ed JamThe band's last get-together with Strelau came in early 2006. “What an evening!” Charlie told his mom in an email. “Ed brought his family for a visit. They went skiing and hiking in the mountains over the past few days, and he wanted to wrap it up with the jam session here.“I was hoping the guys would come through for him and they really did,” Charlie added. “Bub delayed his trip to Florida by a day so he could be here, and Joe, who had an emcee job earlier in the evening, came about 10 to be here for the last hour or so. We also had listeners. Besides Ed's wife and son, we had Bill and Nancy Meadows and Tom and Sharon Pressman. It was midnight before Pamela and I got all those folks outa here.”Ed TodayEd Strelau has not been seen in the Huntington area for nearly 20 years now, but according to posts mined this week on the Internet, he's still fiddling regularly with his friends in the Cincinnati English Country Dancers. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Often the first notes of the evening set the pace, the mood and the tone for the entire rehearsal. As you'll hear on this track, Danny Cox walked into last week's session ready to set the Floodometer on sizzle. And it certainly worked. The Flood has been doing this great old 1920s jazz standard for only a couple of years now, but it's already become one of the band's go-to tunes for a good time, especially whenever Danny has new musical ideas to explore.About the SongThis week's featured tune — “Am I Blue?” — has a special place at the intersection of jazz and movie histories. That's because in 1944 a sassy performance of the 1929 classic marked songwriter Hoagy Carmichael's big break in Hollywood.Hoagy is best known, of course, for performing his own compositions (“Stardust” and “Georgia on My Mind,” “Up a Lazy River,” “Memphis in June” and so many others).However, when Carmichael was cast to play the character “Cricket” in Humphrey Bogart's To Have and Have Not, director Howard Hawks wanted a scene in which Hoagy — as a honky tonk piano player in a Martinique dive — is doing the Harry Akst-Grant Clarke tune when a 19-year-old Lauren Bacall makes her film debut.“My first scene required me to sing ‘Am I Blue,'” Carmichael wrote in his 1965 autobiography Sometimes I Wonder. “‘Am I Nervous' would have been a more appropriate title. I chewed a match to help my jitters…. The match was a good decision, it turned out, because it became a definite part of the character.”With some comic results. One morning during the shooting, Carmichael had a scene with Bogart, who walked onto the set chewing on a match. “My heart sank,” Hoagy wrote. “What can you say to the star of the picture when he's apparently intent on stealing your stuff?”Only the next day did Carmichael learn it had all been a gag. “Bogey let me go on thinking they had actually shot the scene that way.”Meanwhile…Elsewhere in the film, Hoagy is seen playing an accompaniment for the very nervous young Bacall as her character, “Slim,” sings his and Johnny Mercer's song, "How Little We Know,” which they wrote specifically for the movie.A 16-year-old Andy Williams recorded the song as a possible alternative track to dub Bacall's low voice; however, Bacall always maintained that the producers ended up using her singing in the film rather the dub.“I'm not sure what the truth of it was,” Williams later wrote in his own autobiography, “but I'm not going to argue about it with the formidable Ms. Bacall!”Meanwhile, more films awaited Hoagy Carmichael. As he wrote, he was cast in "every picture in which a world-weary character in bad repair sat around and sang or leaned over a piano.… It was usually the part of the hound-dog-faced old musical philosopher noodling on the honky-tonk piano, saying to a tart with a heart of gold: 'He'll be back, honey. He's all man'."Song HistoriesIf you would like to read more about the history of “Am I Blue?” check out this earlier Flood Watch report on the song.And for the backstories on other songs in The Flood's repertoire, peruse the newsletter's Song Stories section. Click here to give it a look. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

One of the most curious and complicated characters on the great American musical landscape is Thomas A. Dorsey.A deeply religious man, Dorsey often is called “the father of gospel music,” because he inspired a movement that popularized bluesy gospel songs in churches across America starting in the mid-20th century.Some 3,000 songs — a third of them gospel — were written by Dorsey in his 90 years, including “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” and “Peace in the Valley.” Now, then, about those other 2,000 songs ….Recording as “Georgia Tom,” Dorsey also was instrumental in the early days of secular blues. With his partner “Tampa Red,” he helped popularize the sexy, happy hokum music of the 1920s and ‘30s with tunes like “Somebody's Been Using That Thing,” “Dead Cat on the Line.” and “The Duck — Yas, Yas, Yas.”In the Beginning….Born in the rural Georgia town of Villa Rica, Dorsey grew up in a religious family, but gained most of his musical experience playing blues piano at barrelhouses and rowdy parties in and around Atlanta, where the family moved when Thomas was eight years old. As a young man, Dorsey began attending vaudeville theater shows that featured blues musicians, with whom he informally studied. Despite being meagerly compensated for his efforts, Thomas played at rent parties, house parties and brothels.Seeking a greater challenge, in 1919 Dorsey moved to Chicago, where he discovered that his brand of playing was unfashionable compared to jazz's newer uptempo styles. Faced with more competition for jobs, Dorsey turned to composing. In 1920 he published his first piece, called "If You Don't Believe I'm Leaving, You Can Count the Days I'm Gone,” making him one of the first musicians to copyright blues music.Dorsey also copyrighted his first religious piece in 1922 (a song called “If I Don't Get There"), but he quickly found that sacred music could not financially sustain him, at least not in the Roarin' Twenties, so he continued working the dives and playing the blues.Enter Ma RaineyDorsey's big break came in 1923 when he was hired as the pianist and leader of The Wild Cats Jazz Band accompanying Ma Rainey, a charismatic and bawdy blues shouter who by then had been performing professionally for 20 years.When Rainey and The Wild Cats opened at Chicago's largest black theater, Dorsey remembered the night as "the most exciting moment in my life,” according to his biographer Michael W. Harris.Dorsey worked with Rainey and her band for two years, composing and arranging her music in the blues style as well as vaudeville and jazz to please audiences' tastes. Often at his side was a new member of the band, Hudson “Tampa Red” Whitaker, a blues guitarist who in 1928 would become Dorsey's recording partner for five years.Rainey enjoyed enormous popularity touring with her hectic schedule, singing about lost loves and hard times. She interacted with her audiences, who were often so enthralled they stood up and shouted back at her while she sang.But Dorsey increasingly had misgivings about the suggestive lyrics of the songs he and Red were writing. Finally, Thomas left the tour and tried to market his new sacred music. He printed thousands of copies of his songs to sell directly to churches and publishers, even going door to door, but he still couldn't make it work.About This SongDorsey returned to the blues in 1928, but this time in the recording studios in the persona of “Georgia Tom.” The first Paramount sessions for him and Tampa Red were the last ones for Ma Rainey. In fact, one of the last things the great blues singer ever recorded was this new Thomas Dorsey composition.Nowadays for vinyl collectors, Rainey's “Black Eye Blues” is a rare find. That's because Ma's September 1928 recording of the song wasn't released until July 1930. By then, the Great Depression was raging. Rainey had left the business (retiring to her Columbus, Ga., home). Paramount was ending too; the studio ceased operation in 1932.While audio of the record was later preserved on blues compilation albums (and now on YouTube), the song itself has had a sketchy history. Over the years, the controversial subject matter — domestic violence — has made it uncomfortable for many singers to tackle, especially when dealing with Dorsey's no-compromise lyrics: You low-down alligator, you watch and sooner or later I'm gonna catch you with your britches down!When folkie Judy Henske recorded it in 1964, for instance, her producers at Elektra changed the title to "Low Down Alligator.” Similarly, when Odetta recorded the song two years earlier, she also found the title a bit too much for early 1960s sensibilities. On the Riverside label, instead of “Black Eye Blues,” the song was listed as “Hogan's Alley,” based on Dorsey's opening line (Down in Hogan's Alley lived Miss Nancy Ann….)Hogan's AlleyWhich raises a question. Where is “Hogan's Alley,” anyway?Many cities (from Vancouver to Virginia) have one, but historian Robert Lewis Miesen writes, “Rather than being the name of a person, ‘Hogan's Alley' was a derogatory 19th century label, much as one might use ‘skid row,' ‘ghetto' or ‘hood' today.”He noted that in the same spirit back in 1895, artist Richard F. Outcault — father of the modern comic strip — placed his “Yellow Kid” character in his “Hogan's Alley” cartoons, which appeared weekly in The New York World, starring rambunctious slum kids in the streets.Our Take on the TuneMeanwhile in Floodlandia, when the whole band can't get together — like last week, when it was just Danny, Randy and Charlie — it's an opportunity to lay back and explore tunes not usually on the practice list.In Flood years, this song dates back nearly a half century, to when the fellows were first starting to fool with the hokum tunes of the 1920s and ‘30s.Here's “Black Eye Blues” from last week's gathering. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Hoagy Carmichael was not quite 28 years old when he wrote what music historians consider THE song of the 20th century.Just how big is “Stardust” in the Great American Songbook?* Well, for starters, this is a song that has been recorded as an instrumental or a vocal more than 1,500 times. * Forty years after its publication in 1928, it was still earning more than $50,000 annually in royalties. * The lyrics that Mitchell Parish later brought to Hoagy's song have been translated into 30 languages.“Stardust” simply is “the most-recorded song in the history of the world,” music curator John Edward Hasse of the Smithsonian Institution once told John Barbour of The Associated Press, “and that right there qualifies it as it as the song of the century.”The closest competitor, he said, is “Yesterday” by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and, at No. 3, W.C. Handy's “St. Louis Blues.”Young Hoagy and His SongLate summer 1927 found Hoagy Carmichael back home in Indiana after a romp in Florida; the young man was hanging out near the campus of Indiana University, from which he had graduated a few years earlier.As he related in his first autobiography, The Stardust Road, in 1946:It was a hot night, sweet with the death of summer and the hint and promise of fall. A waiting night, a night marking time, the end of a season. The stars were bright, close to me, and the North Star hung low over the trees.I sat down on the “spooning wall” at the edge of the campus and all the things that the town and the university and the friends I had flooded through my mind. Beautiful Kate (Cameron), the campus queen... and Dorothy Kelly. But not one girl — all the girls — young and lovely. Was Dorothy the loveliest? Yes. The sweetest? Perhaps. But most of them had gone their ways. Gone as I'd gone mine....Never to be 21 again; so in love again. Never feel the things I'd felt. The memory of love's refrain....Carmichael wrote that he then looked up at the sky, whistling softly, and that the melody flowing from his feelings was “Stardust.” Excited, he ran to a campus hangout where the owner was ready to close. Hoagy successfully begged for a few minutes of piano time so he could solidify that theme in his head.True?Is that really how it happened? “What can I say?” historian Hasse told the AP decades later. “It is truly a thing of legend.”The same year, Carmichael recorded an upbeat instrumental version of the song for Gennett Records. The next year, he left Indiana for New York City after Mills Music hired him as a composer. The Reception WidensWest Virginian Don Redman recorded the song in the same year, and by 1929 it was performed regularly by Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club; however, it was Isham Jones' 1930 rendition that made the song popular on radio, prompting multiple acts to record it.For instance, in 1936, RCA released double-sided versions of “Stardust,” Tommy Dorsey on one side and Benny Goodman on the other.Then 1940 was a banner year, with releases of the song by Frank Sinatra, Artie Shaw and Glenn Miller. Since then, “Stardust” has entered the repertoire of every serious jazz singer and instrumentalist around the world.Willie's VersionIn 1978, country superstar Willie Nelson surprised fans with his release of his Star Dust album, which went golden after staying on the best-seller charts for more than 135 weeks.Nelson recalled singing it in the Austin, Texas, Opera House. “There was a kind of stunned silence in the crowd for a moment, and then they exploded with cheering and whistling and applauding. The kids thought ‘Stardust' was a new song I had just written….”Our Take on the TuneSince its composition nearly a hundred years ago now, this song has been performed by many folks as a slow, romantic ballad, drawing out the words and the melody. Good for them. However, when Hoagy wrote this classic, he performed it with a bit of the sass and sway that characterized the jazz of his day, and we in The Flood like to carry on that tradition. The song has some of the best chords of anything in our repertoire and in this take from last week's rehearsal you'll hear two solos in which Danny Cox is finding all kinds of interesting ideas. Click here to come along on his quest.More from Year 2024?It's been a busy, interesting year in the Floodisphere, with lots of new tunes as well as re-imaginings of old ones from The Flood's songbag.If you'd like to join us in a little auld-lang-synery, our free Radio Floodango music streaming features a randomized playlist built around the tunes in all the weekly podcasts of the year. Click here to give Year 2024 a re-listen. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

If there's only one day a year when you are nostalgic, it's probably Christmas Eve. After all, the older you get, the more you likely realize that the best part of Christmas Present often is enjoying memories of Christmases Past. The Flood's memories usually come with a soundtrack as well. Merry Christmas, dear friends!Another Holiday Helping?And if you'd like a little more fa-la-la-la-Flood in your festivities, remember the Radio Floodango free music streaming service has this yuletide playlist. Click here to give La Flood Navidad a spin! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

A few weeks before his death in November 1966, Mississippi John Hurt's rendition of “Payday” was released as the opening track on his Today album for Vanguard Records.At the time, many fans believed the 74-year-old bluesman wrote the song, despite his introduction in which he characterized it as “an old tune… a ‘bandit tune.'” And we now know that a quarter of a century earlier, folklorist John Lomax recorded a version of “Payday” by lesser-known blues artists Willie Ford and Lucious Curtis in Natchez, Mississippi.Still, it is the John Hurt version that has become loved among syncopated fingerpicking guitarists; to this day his take on “Payday” is taught in classes and on YouTube videos.The John Hurt Odyssey: Part IThe Today album, hitting record stores in October 1966, marked the end of a remarkable three years for the venerable blues artist, who was born the son of freed slaves around 1892 in Teoc, Mississippi. John Smith Hurt grew up in the Mississippi Delta, living in Avalon, which sits midway between Greenwood and Holcomb just west of Highway 51.He left school at age 10 to be a farm hand and was taught guitar by a local songster and family friend. Hurt lived most of his life without electricity, did hard labor of all sorts and played music as a hobby at local dances. In the late 1920s, performing with local fiddler Willie Narmour, he won a competition and a chance to record with Okeh Records in two sessions, one in Memphis and another in New York City. John Hurt: Part IIThe resulting records were not a great commercial success — John went back to farming and raising a family that would grow to 14 children — but a quarter of a century later, his music entered the folk music canon. That's when two of those 1928 tracks were included in the holy grail of American music, Harry Smith's 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, considered one of the main catalysts for the folk and blues revival of the 1960s and ‘70s. A decade later, in 1962, the presence of those old cuts — “Frankie” and “Spike Driver Blues” — on in the Smith anthology prompted musicologist Dick Spottswood and his friend, Tom Hoskins, to track Hurt down. Hoskins persuaded him to perform several songs for his tape recorder to make sure he was the genuine article. Quickly convinced — in fact, folkies found Hurt even more proficient than he had been in his younger Okeh recording days — Hoskins encouraged him to move to Washington, D.C., to perform for a broader audience.For the last three years of his life, Hurt performed extensively at colleges, concert halls and coffeehouses, appearing on television shows ranging from “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson to Pete Seeger's “Rainbow Quest” on public TV. Much of Hurt's repertoire also was recorded for the Library of Congress, and his final tunes, recorded in 1964 and released two years later, are on Today.He also developed a delightful friendship with a young folksinger named Patrick Sky who produced that final album for Vanguard, where “Payday” is the opening track.Deeper Roots of “Payday”By the way, in the brand new book, Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs & Hidden Histories, published last spring, author Elijah Wald finds a much longer tail on the tune, not to mention a possible connection to another Flood favorite.Wald notes that back in 1908, Missouri pianist Blind Boone published a pair of “Southern Rag” medleys that African Americans were singing in that region around the turn of the century.“Medley number one was subtitled ‘Strains from the Alleys',” Wald writes, and included the first publication of “Making Me a Pallet on the Floor.'” Wald says the medley also featured “a song that probably reaches back to slavery times and would be recorded in later years as ‘Pay Day,' ‘Reuben,' and various other names.”Our Take on the TunePurists say this doesn't sound much like Mississippi John Hurt's original, but that's pretty much by design. Once The Flood folks learn a song, they usually stop listening to the original so it is free to find its own form in the Floodisphere. That's their take on what Pete Seeger's folklorist father Charles called “the folk process.”And in this instance, “Payday” has been processing in Floodlandia for more than 20 years now, ever since its inclusion on the band's first studio album back in 2001.Here's the current state of its evolution, taken from a recent rehearsal. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

We thank everyone who braved the cold last night and came out to pack the house for our show at Huntington's wonderful Bahnhof WVrsthaus & Biergarten. What a grand evening! Old friends, new friends and a whole bunch of fresh memories.At a ringside table, Pamela Bowen captured a bit of the joy in this video of this trio of tunes from the evening.We are especially happy that her video also recorded some pretty fancy footwork. Our favorite “dancin' doctors” — Marshall professors Bonnie Lawrence and Clayton Brooks — were back in The Flood's fold. We've missed you, folks!Also you'll see the littlest Floodster — Miss Ella O'Geary — busting her first moves to one of the band's numbers. Just like old times. Seems like only yesterday Ella's mom Zoey Stull O'Geary was the youngster dancing to our tunes at venues all across the state.Song HistoriesIncidentally, all three songs in Pamela's video have been explored in our Song Stories section. Here are the specific links:— “Yellow Dog Blues”— “Rag Mama/Gimme Dat Ding”— “Jelly Roll Baker” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

A century ago this year, the fledgling record industry's first supergroup walked into a New York studio and waxed one of its greatest hit.The first time much of the world ever heard a rocking spiritual called “I'm a Pilgrim,” it was on the Oct. 4, 1924, Paramount Record release by the jazzy Norfolk Jubilee Quartet.Starting with its birth in 1919, the Norfolk Quartet offered a unique sound, characterized by a scat-like rhythmic pattern performed by founder Len Williams, the bass singer, while the rest of the group sang the melodies.In 20 years ending in 1940, the quartet recorded nearly 150 sides for Paramount, Okeh and Decca. A third of those songs were secular, for which the group tweaked its name to become the Norfolk Jazz Quartet.And the group was welcomed in that burgeoning jazz community. Soon after their first record in 1921, for instance, the guys were invited to appear with blues singer Mamie Smith in Baltimore and then to do a summer stint on stage in “The Flat Below,” a three-part play by vaudeville's Flournoy Eakin Miller and Aubrey Lyles.The Norfolk group continued to be an immense success in shows across the country, laying the foundation for all the jubilee quartets that followed them.Of course, the song “I Am a Pilgrim” is even more famous than the first group to record it. To today's listeners, in fact, the song is more likely associated with famous performances by the fabulous Kentuckian Merle Travis in the 1940s and beyond. That story is covered in an earlier Flood Watch article. Click here for that deeper dive into the tune's history.Our Take on the TuneThis great old song is often performed with mellow reverence by country and folk artists as well as by many gospel groups. However, The Flood guys, ever since they started doing the tune a couple of years ago, have taken their cue to the song's original recording a hundred years ago. Like the Norfolk Jubilee Quartet, The Flood likes to put a little cut its strut and a glide in its stride. Here's a track from last week's rehearsal. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

By all rights, this Bob Dylan tune ought to be The Flood's theme song. The fact is, though, the guys have been doing it only about a dozen years or so, which is … well, “yesterday,” in FloodSpeak, but since then, they have embraced it.And the song has particularly righteous powers when it comes to warming up a room on a cold December night, as illustrated in Pamela Bowen's video, shot at last week's rehearsal.By the way, for a deeper dive into this song's history, you might check out an earlier Flood Watch article by clicking here.Want More?And hey, if you'd like more of this kind of musical merriment, drop by Huntington's Bahnhof WVrsthaus & Biergarten, 745 7th Ave., this Thursday night, Dec. 12, where The Flood will be playing from 6:30 to 8:30. Good food, good times, good golly! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Singer/songwriter Bob Gibson was a defining figure in the folk music revival starting in the late 1950s, but a crushing dependence on heroin and other drugs sank his career, his marriage and many of his long-time friendships.Gibson — who wrote songs like “Abilene” and “There's a Meeting Here Tonight” that were performed by artists such as Peter, Paul and Mary, The Limeliters and Simon and Garfunkel, as well as The Byrds, The Smothers Brothers and others — hit rock bottom in the late '60s.The Road Down“I left the business in '66,” Gibson wrote in his autobiography, I Come for to Sing. “It seemed to me working in clubs, being on the road, being in show business and around musicians caused me to use drugs. I thought if I got away from that, everything would be fine.”To that end, he spent almost three years in a country hideaway with his young family trying to get clean, but ultimately, he wrote, the hiatus failed its mission.The early 1970s found Gibson relocating again, this time to the West Coast, commuting for occasional gigs in clubs in Chicago and Los Angeles. “I was just hanging in,” he wrote, “doing the same set of songs, and I wasn't writing or learning.”Enter ShelBut then he reconnected with an old friend — writer/artist Shel Silverstein — who helped “in jarring me out of this,” Gibson said. “Shel would come up there and we'd write songs.”Meanwhile, what he called “a classic music business snafu” torpedoed his last major label release, so in 1974 — re-energized by the songs he had written with Shel — Gibson started one of the country's first-ever artist-owned record companies. In those days, his new Legend Enterprises label was a novel approach to making records.Bob's Funky In The Country was its first release, recorded live at the legendary Amazingrace Coffeehouse in Evanston, Ill., near Chicago.Buoyed by a rave review in Billboard magazine, the album gave the fledgling label a fine start, but it was quickly undermined by Gibson himself: The first stop on the road to promote his new album was a few months in rehab. By the time Bob was ready to travel again, the momentum had moved on.The SongA highlight of that lovely album — “Two Nineteen Blues” — is built around Gibson's imaginative reworking of several long-standing blues motifs.His chorus (“I'm going down to the river / Gonna take along my rocking chair”) comes from well-known versions of “Trouble in Mind” as sung by everyone from folkie Cisco Houston to soulful Sam Cooke to country's Johnny Cash.And the song's hook (“Gonna lay my head down on some lonesome railroad line / And let the two-nineteen come along and pacify my mind”) has even deeper blues roots.No less an authority than the great Jelly Roll Morton said “Mamie's Blues” — from which the line comes — was “no doubt the first blues I heard in my life. Mamie Desdunes, this was her favorite blues. She hardly could play anything else more, but she really could play this number.”Desdunes (sometimes written Desdoumes) was a well-known singer and pianist in “The District,” as New Orleanians called the area now generally remembered as “Storyville.”What's in a Name?Blues historian Elijah Wald notes the old song's title is often given as “2:19 Blues,” as if referring to a train time; however, jazz historian Charles Edward Smith recalled Morton explaining that the 219 was the train that “took the gals out on the T&P (Texas and Pacific railroad) to the sporting houses on the Texas side of the circuit.”Despite all its lyrical borrowings from blues antiquity, “Two Nineteen Blues” is unmistakably a Bob Gibson creation. He brought to it a completely new melody and fresh lyrics brimming with his trademark sass and winking understatement. For example, Bob sealed the deal in a final verse that finds his antagonist in a small-town jail, where: I hit the judge and I run like hell And the sheriff he's still askin' ‘round ‘bout me.Our Take on the TuneFor folks who know The Flood only from its studio albums, this is the first tune they may have ever heard from the band.That's because this rollicking composition was what the guys played on the opening track of their very first commercial album nearly a quarter of a century ago now. And speaking of names, because of a design error, the song was erroneously listed on that inaugural album as “Rocking Chair,” a name it has retained in the Floodisphere ever since.A lot changes in a band over the decades, but good old tunes — under whatever name — are like cherished letters from home. Here's a version from a recent rehearsal. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Holidays were hard for Roger Samples in 1975.He was living alone, just him and Josephine the Cat rattling around on Mount Union Road where he was house-sitting for Susan and David Peyton. (As reported earlier, the Peyton family had left town for six months in Lafayette, Louisiana, where Dave was researching Cajun culture for his Alicia Paterson Foundation fellowship project.)Nonetheless, that autumn was a fertile one for Roger and the fledgling Flood. That's because every few days, Joe Dobbs would come by to jam with Rog; when he didn't, Charlie Bowen did. In those waning days of the year, life-long friendships were formed.Holiday AdoptionAs the holidays rolled in, though, the pickings got slim. Busy with Dobbs family affairs, Joe couldn't drop by as frequently. As a result, Roger starting spending many of his evenings at the Bowen house with Charlie and Pamela.“Y'all take in strays?” Roger asked the first night he appeared on their doorstep.“Come on in, buddy! Pull up a chair.”A new routine developed. Getting home from a day of teaching at Mason County's Hannah High School in Apple Grove, Rog would have supper with Charlie and Pamela, then he and Charlie broke out the guitars.That year Roger was even there to help decorate the Bowens' Christmas tree, stringing lights and hanging tinsel while they listened to the new albums by Jackson Browne and David Bromberg, Steve Goodman and John Prine.Pamela usually was the only audience for the tunes Roger and Charlie worked out in those last weeks of 1975, songs like this one, which she recorded in the Bowen living room on Nov. 28, the night after Thanksgiving.About the SongOne of the first things Charlie and Roger learned about each other was their shared love for Bob Dylan songs. For nearly a decade by then, both had been listening to Dylan discs and working up their own versions of his songs.Quickly they found they each had a rendition of “Tomorrow Is a Long Time” which they had heard a few years earlier on the 1971 release of Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. II.Dylan wrote the song in 1962, including it as a demo for M. Witmark & Son, which became his publishing company at the time. (That particular track, incidentally, has long been available as a bootleg; so has an outtake from the June 1970 studio sessions for Bob's New Morning album.)Over the years, “Tomorrow Is a Long Time” has been covered by many Dylan friends and admirers. Most notably, Elvis Presley recorded it in the spring of 1966, appearing as a bonus track on his Spinout album.Elvis and OthersPresley was taken with the song after learning it from West Virginia's legendary harmonica player Charlie McCoy, who played it the previous year on Odetta's album Odetta Sings Dylan. Dylan has said Presley's cover of the song is "the one recording I treasure the most.”Besides Elvis and Odetta, others who have recorded the song include Joan Baez and Ian and Sylvia (1963), Judy Collins (1965), the Pozo-Seco Singers (1966), The Kingston Trio (1969), We Five and Glenn Yarbrough (1970), Rod Stewart (1971), Sandy Denny (1972).Stay TunedMeanwhile, if you enjoyed today's trek in the time machine, hang around. More of that late ‘75 vibe will be featured in a Flood Watch report next week, including a trio of Roger-and-Charlie originals and some vintage solos by fiddlin' Joe Dobbs. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

The quintessential moment of a jazz funeral is the playing of “Just a Closer Walk to Thee.” Some say this custom goes all the back to early days of the New Orleans music scene nearly a century and half ago. It's a lovely story… and, well, untrue.The jazzman most associated with playing this beautiful song — New Orleans' legendary clarinetist George Lewis — revealed the tune actually has a much more recent history, one in which a barroom jukebox plays a prominent role.“The first time I played it was in the The Eureka Band” in 1942, Lewis told his biographer Tom Bethell. “We heard it on a music box, and a woman asked us to play it for a funeral” for her murdered husband.The MurderThe victim in this story, said Lewis, was in an uptown bar in one of New Orleans' rougher neighborhoods known as “The Battlefield.” He was just putting a nickel in the jukebox when someone stabbed him in the back.When the widow later learns that the song the poor man wanted to hear on that fateful evening was the new Sister Rosetta Tharpe recording of “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” she asked George Lewis's band to play it at his funeral.Before that time, Lewis said, the tune was not known in New Orleans; however, after The Eureka Brass Band's performance, bands have been playing it at funerals ever since.The Song's Story“Just a Closer Walk with Thee” is a surprisingly modern song. It was published in 1940 in Chicago by Kenneth Morris, though Morris never claimed to have actually written the melody. In his book The Golden Age of Gospel, Horace Clarence Boyer tells how Morris was riding a train from Kansas City to Chicago. Along the way, he stepped off at one of the stops for some fresh air; while there, Morris heard a station porter singing a song. “He paid little attention at first,” Boyer wrote, “but after he re-boarded the train, the song remained with him. It became so prominent in his mind that at the next stop, he left the train, took another train back to the earlier station and asked the porter to sing the song again.”Morris wrote down the words and music — later adding a few lyrics of his own to provide more breadth — and published “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” that same year.RecordingsThe first known recording was by the Selah Jubilee Singers for Decca Records on Oct. 8, 1941.It didn't take long, though, for the song to get a jazzier treatment. Two months later, also for Decca, Rosetta Tharpe waxed the disc that would wind up on a jukebox in New Orleans and change George Lewis's life. After Lewis recorded it on his 1943 New Orleans Stompers album, “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” became his most requested tune for the remaining 25 years of his life.Our Take on the TuneRecently when Danny Cox read here how The Flood played “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” at a friend's memorial service 20 years ago, he said, “Why don't we do that song anymore?” Well, why indeed? So lately the guys have been dusting it off and just listen to the soulful, sassy spin the lads have put on it. Here's a take from last week's rehearsal.More Churchy Stuff, You Say?If this week's selection has you in the mood for a little more of The Flood's brand of reverence, you might enjoy the “Gospel Hour” playlist on the free Radio Floodango music streaming service.Click here to read all about it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Johnny Cash had a long-time affinity for the work of — and for his friendship with — Bob Dylan.In his book Cash: The Autobiography, Johnny wrote of being on the road in the early ‘60s. “I had a portable record player that I'd take along on the road, and I'd put on Freewheelin' Bob Dylan backstage, then go out and do my show, then listen again as soon as I came off.“After a while at that, I wrote Bob a letter telling him how much of a fan I was,” he said. “He wrote back almost immediately, saying he'd been following my music since I Walk the Line, and so we began a correspondence.” The two finally met in person during the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. They remained close friends for the remaining 40 years of John's life. When his friend died in 2003, Dylan wrote, “In plain terms, Johnny was — and is — the North Star; you could guide your ship by him, the greatest of the greats, then and now.”“Truly he is what the land and country is all about,” continued Dylan, “the heart and soul of it personified and what it means to be here; and he said it all in plain English. I think we can have recollections of him, but we can't define him, any more than we can define a fountain of truth, light and beauty.”Despite their mutual admiration, Dylan and Cash collaborated only one time. That was on Dylan's landmark 1969 recording of the Nashville Skyline album, produced by Bob Johnston.Johnston also had produced Cash's At Folsom Prison the year earlier, and he hoped he could get the two artists to record an entire album together. To that end, Cash and Dylan recorded 15 songs together at the Nashville sessions, but ended up keeping only one of those tracks, “Girl from the North Country.”About This SongAmong those 15 tracks was one of Cash's all-time favorite Dylan compositions, the wistful “One Too Many Mornings,” which Bob wrote for his third studio album, The Times They Are a-Changin'.As noted here recently, the song was famously among a series of tunes Dylan wrote after his breakup with his lover Suze Rotolo. After its album release in 1964, the song sometimes pops up on Dylan's set lists, notably during his 1966 world tour and then, 10 years later, in his second Rolling Thunder Revue tour.But Johnny Cash embraced the song even more, covering it numerous times, including on the album Johnny & June in 1978.He recorded it again in 1986 as a duet with Waylon Jennings for their Heroes album. In 2012, a remix combining Cash's original vocals with new recordings by the Avett Brothers was included on the benefit album Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International.Meanwhile, Johnny and Waylon's vocals on that original Heroes rendition later were augmented by Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson when the four of them created the supergroup The Highwaymen in the 1990s.Our Take on the TuneCharlie Bowen started doing this song back in college to have something to sing and play to the jam sessions in the dorms. It then was one of the songs Charlie brought along in that summer and fall of 1974 when Dave Peyton, Roger Samples and he started The Flood. And this lonely, lovely Dylan tune is still welcome at Flood gatherings, as you can heard on this track from last week's rehearsal.Want More Bob?By the way, if you'd like a little more Dylan in your diet, The Flood has an entire Bob-centric playlist set in up the free Radio Floodango music streaming service. Click here to read all about it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Fifteen years ago tonight, The Flood continued its mission to convince the world that jug band music could fit any occasion.This particular occasion — in the ballroom atop the Renaissance Performing Arts Center in the old Huntington High School building in the city's South Side — was a benefit concert to help out with medical expenses for a family member of long-time Flood buddy Dale Jones.No one knows how successful the band's hokum music proselytizing was — you can draw your own conclusions by watching Pamela Bowen's video from that November 2009 night — but no one doubts the success for the concert: it raised nearly $2,000 for Dale's family.JoelessnessThe band worked at a disadvantage that night, because Joe Dobbs couldn't make the gig, or any other Flood gig for the rest of the year. That's because about the time the band was taking the stage, the fiddler was winging his way to Australia to visit Rod and Judy Jones and to play shows and festivals Down Under over the next month or so.Earlier that autumn, the guys were saddened when they realized they wouldn't have Joe around for the holidays. Oh, Floodsters usually didn't actually do all that much with the Jolly Ol' Elf during the Yuletide, but it was always fun seeing him wear his Santa hat throughout the season (thrilling The Nice and scaring the bejesus out of The Naughty). The Flood's anticipated Joe Deficiency for December 2009 became a regular topic of conversation in the weekly jam sessions at the time.At one point Dave Peyton and Charlie Bowen quipped that anyone who would like to audition to be Joe's stand-in during his absence should just show up at a rehearsal in a Joe Dobbs mask.Honestly, no one thought anyone would actually do it, but, of course, no one should ever count out the creative mind of Carter Taylor Seaton, who is always up for a challenge. The photos above show her and Richard Cobb modelling their masks on either side of the genuine article.Gig NightCarter and Richard were in the audience that night at the Renaissance, along with other Flood friends, like Rose Riter, Norman and Shirley Davis, JoAnn and Bob McCoy and Sharon and Tom Pressman. Even with Joe's absence, the band had a healthy quorum for the gig. The video from the evening features Dave and Charlie front and center with Michelle Hoge and Dave “Bub” Ball. The three jug band tunes are rich in tasty solos by Jacob Scarr, Doug Chaffin and Sam St. Clair. The highlight, though, is the video's debut of young James St. Clair, standing in the front row and almost but not quite busting a few moves during his dad's harmonica solos. That was the same night, incidentally, when the lad told us that since he could now stand on his own two feet, we had to stop calling him as “Sweet Baby James,” which we did. Sorta.More Jugginess?Of course, The Flood's jug band music mission work continues today. The guys are still trying to show the world how to fit hokum into its various holidays and observances.If Pamela's video has you ready to join the campaign, check out The Hokum channel on the free Radio Floodango music streaming service which has dozens of jug band tunes ready to rock you. Click here to tune it in and you'll be ready to sing along at the next Flood fest. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

The band does a lot of time traveling at its rehearsals. In those two hours each week, the guys might start with a rock classic like “Hey Baby,” as they do in this track from last week's get-together.Then in the next moment The Flood Time Machine Lab might transport the lads back to, say, the Roarin' Twenties.There they can sample a song or two of the day, maybe “Dinah” or “Lady Be Good” or “My Blue Heaven.”Then switching gears again, they swoop down into the Thirties or the Forties to toy with tunes from the greats like Hoagy Carmichael (“Georgia on My Mind,” maybe) or Fats Waller (“Honeysuckle Rose”) or Duke Ellington (“Don't Get Around Much Any More”).Then it's back to the Sixties or the Seventies for a bit of Bob Dylan, John Prine or Tom Paxton, Jackson Browne or Neal Young. It's all about rocking the room.This Week's SongThe featured tune this week demonstrates the best part of all that temporal tramping, because it so often lets the guys revisit music of their youth. As reported earlier, “Hey Baby” was a 1961 chart-topper that 17-year-old Bruce Channel wrote with his friend Margaret Cobb. Over the past six decades, the song has brought joy to audiences ranging from the fledgling Beatles when they were starting out back in Liverpool to movie goers years later who packed theaters for films like Dirty Dancing. For more of the song's long history, click here.The Flood started revisiting “Hey Baby” a few years ago when the band was invited to perform it at a very special occasion: the wedding of Floodster Emerita Michelle Hoge; she and Rich Hoge married on May 21, 2022, and The Flood was there for the festivities. Since then, “Hey Baby” has lingered in the repertoire, as you'll hear in this track that started last week's rehearsal at the Bowen House.Want to Do Your Own Time Traveling?If you'd like ride shotgun in The Flood time machine, a new department in the newsletter helps you take your own dash through the decades.Called “Flood Tunes on the Timeline,” the page sorts dozens of the band's performances by the date of the songs' composition. Here's how to use it.Suppose you're in the mood for a little sumpin sumpin from the period that folksinger Dave Van Ronk once wryly called “The Great Folk Scare.” You could visit the tune timeline by clicking here, then scrolling down to “The Sixties” section, where you'll find songs grouped by individual years.For instance, Dylan's “Don't Think Twice, It's All Right” is tucked in under 1962. There's Bob Gibson's “Abilene” in the 1963 list. Paxton's “Ramblin' Boy” comes along in 1964, Eric Andersen's “Dusty Boxcar Wall” is in 1965, and Michael Peter Smith's “The Dutchman” shows up in 1968.Each listed song on the timeline is hyperlinked, so clicking its title takes you to a recent Flood performance. Each entry also has a little (or a lot) of the history of that particular song.The timeline indexes more than a century of music and is regularly updated as new songs and stories are added. Enjoy the ride! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

The word hokum originated in vaudeville to mean a risqué performance laced with wordplay, euphemisms and double entendre.When it appeared on the label of a 1928 hit for Vocalion Records by a new group called Tampa Red's Hokum Jug Band, the term rapidly entered the jazzy lexicon of The Roarin' Twenties.When the group moved on to Paramount Records as The Famous Hokum Boys, it quickly picked up imitators at other studios, often using variations on the same word in their own names. Eventually “hokum” came to describe an entire species of novelty tunes, all those sexy, silly blues of the 1920s and '30s.About Tampa RedHokum's first star, Tampa Red, was one of the most prolific blues artists of his era, recording some 335 songs, 75 percent between 1928 and 1942. Tampa Red was born Hudson Woodbridge in Smithville, Georgia, near Albany in the first decade of the 20th century. When their parents died, he and his older brother Eddie moved to Tampa, Florida, to be reared by their aunt and their grandmother. There he also adopted their surname, Whittaker.Emulating Eddie, Hudson Whittaker played guitar around the Tampa area, especially inspired by an old street musician called Piccolo Pete, who taught the youngster his first blues licks.After perfecting a slide guitar technique, he moved to Chicago in 1925 and began working as a street musician himself. He took the name "Tampa Red" to celebrate to his childhood home.Enter TomRed's big break came when he was hired to accompany established blues star Ma Rainey. There he also met pianist/composer Thomas A. Dorsey, who as working as “Georgia Tom.” Red and Tom became fast friends and music partners.Tom introduced Red to records exec J. Mayo Williams, who arranged a studio session in 1928. Their first effort was a dud, but their next song — the cheeky “It's Tight Like That” — became a national sensation, selling a million copies. Red later recalled seeing people standing outside of record stores just waiting to buy the disc. Since the song was composed by both Red and Tom, they shared $4,000 in royalties from that single song. (That would be about $75,000 today.)While his partnership with Dorsey ended in 1932, Red remained much in demand in recording studios throughout the ‘30s and ‘40s. He was later "rediscovered" in the blues revival of the late 1950s, along with other early blues artists, like Son House and Skip James. Red made his last recordings in 1960.About the SongTampa Red recorded “Somebody's Been Using That Thing” in 1934, but unlike so many of the tunes he waxxed, he didn't write this one.Instead, the song was composed and recorded five years earlier by a curious genre-blending mandolinist named Al Miller.Starting in 1927, Miller played and sang in a style that combined elements of country, blues and jazz on sides for Black Patti records. His eclectic mix of sounds and material gave way to a heavy concentration on bawdry once he arrived at Brunswick for a series of recordings with his Market Street Boys. Miller recorded his “Somebody's Been Using That Thing” on March 8, 1929. It was his big seller. Five years later, after Tampa Red also scored with it, the song even started attracting the attention of artists in the fledgling country and western genre. In 1937, for instance, Milton Brown, called by some “the father of Western swing,” did a rendition for Decca. The following year, The Callahan Brothers (Walter and Homer) of Madison County, Ky., recorded it on the Conqueror label.Our Take on the TuneIf there's such a thing as a "standard" in jug band music, ”Somebody's Been Using That Thing” is certainly one of them. While The Flood's heroes recorded it 90 years ago, the band didn't get around to doing it until back in 2009 when Joe Dobbs recommended it. That was right after he received a recording of it by our old buddy, Ed Light, and his DC-area band with one great name: The All New Genetically Altered Jug Band. We've been Floodifying the tune ever since, as this track from a recent rehearsal demonstrates. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

For such a bunch of old guys, The Flood has always had a rather rad technology division. Back in 2008, for instance, the notion of podcasting was only a few years old when the band started its own online broadcasts. Today, nearly 750 episodes later, the podcast is still going strong, with a new installment each week.That same year, when YouTube was but three years old, The Flood's first digital video was posted, now having been viewed by nearly 10,000 folks around the world. Since then, with band manager Pamela Bowen operating the camera, the band has made and shared hundreds of videos.Enter A.I.So, it should be no surprise that the next tech the lads have tackled is artificial intelligence. Attentive Flood Watch readers have remarked on how the newsletter has suddenly stepped up its game when it comes to illustrating its articles. Imaginative graphics abound:That's because starting last spring, the newsletter began regularly turning to ImageFX — a free online Google AI image generator tool — to create a variety of illustrations in a variety of styles for songs and for videos: These Days “These Days”To show it off, the platform was used this weekend to generate graphics to enrich Pamela's latest video, the band's rendering of Jackson Browne's lovely “These Days” at a recent rehearsal.Responding to prompts for “a moody painting of a man walking wet, deserted city streets,” ImageFx poured out a stream of poignant illustrations for the film. Click here to see the final results.Backstory, Anyone?By the way, if you like to know more about the song's history and how Jackson Browne came to write “These Days,” click here for this earlier Flood Watch report from our Song Stories department. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Sam McGee — called by some “the granddad of country guitar pickers” — got his start in April 1926 when he traveled to New York City for his first recording session, backing up the legendary Uncle Dave Macon on eight sides at the Brunswick studios.Thirty-year-old McGee met Macon two years earlier when the banjoist played a show near Sam's Franklin, Tennessee, home. Sam was a blacksmith in those days, but he had played guitar and banjo for many years.Following the show, McGee invited Macon home and, after hearing Sam pick “Missouri Waltz,” Uncle Dave invited him to play a few dates with him. By the following year, McGee was playing regularly with Macon and fiddler Sid Harkreader at Loew's Bijou Theater in Birmingham, appearing on stage in a rural outfit.Later Macon teamed with Sam and his younger brother Kirk McGee to form an act that was billed as “Uncle Dave Macon and his Sons from Billygoat Hill,” capitalizing on that same backwoods image. “I never did learn much about playing from him,” Sam said, “but I did learn a lot about handling an audience.”About the SongOne of the eight songs Dave and Sam recorded in their April 14, 1926, session in New York was “Last Night When My Willie Come Home,” a song that seemed to be making the rounds in the South at the time.About a year later in Atlanta, for instance, Frank Blevins' Tar Heel Rattlers cut the tune for Columbia. Three years after that in Knoxville, Vocalion recorded it by The Smoky Mountain Ramblers, basically a pickup group backing steel guitarist Walt McKinney.One of the more interesting early covers of the song was blues singer Skip James' rendition, which Paramount Records released in 1932 as “Drunken Spree.” Those first records, waxxed in Grafton, Wisconsin, formed the basis of James' musical reputation.Folkies Find ItAfter that, the Willie-coming-home song seems to have drifted away from music's collective memory for a few decades, until it was reborn in the folk music boom 30 years later.The extraordinary New Lost City Ramblers were the first to give “Late Last Night When Willie Came Home” new energy when the group included it on the second volume of its tunes for Folkways in 1960, inspiring other old-time outfits to follow suit.Enter Doc WatsonThe song launched higher into the folk music stratosphere two years later.That's when Doc Watson recorded it with Clint Howard and Fred Price on an influential Folkways' album of various artists called Old Time Music at Clarence Ashley's.From then on, Doc more or less adopted the tune — which he famously re-dubbed “Way Downtown” — as a favorite vehicle for his virtuosity. Watson's rendition with The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band is one of the standout tracks on the seminal 1972 Will the Circle Be Unbroken album. Over the next few years he and his friends played it at many urban folk festivals.In the last dozen years of his life, Doc was still digging it. He played “Way Downtown” live on his 1999 An Evening with Doc Watson and David Holt album. Along the way, the song also has been covered by Tony Rice, Jody Stecher, Billy Strings and many others.Our Take on the TuneIt's funny how songs come in and out of The Flood's life. A half century ago when the band was just thinking about being born, Dave Peyton and Charlie Bowen would get together on weekends to pick and sing, just the two of them, and among the tunes they'd play was “Way Downtown," which they learned from that old Doc Watson record. After the band came together — as Roger Samples and Joe Dobbs, Bill Hoke and Stewart Schneider joined up — "Way Downtown" was a regular. The song has drifted in and out over the years, and whenever it rambles back in, it's just as comfortable as an old shoe. This is a take on the tune from a recent rehearsal.Audio ExtraOh, and here's a snippet from The Flood archives. Click the button below to hear Charlie at a gig urging folks to sing along on the chorus and explaining how harmonicat Sam St. Clair was promoting a special pronunciation: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

The Coasters were formed 69 years ago this month, when two members of an L.A.-based R&B group called The Robins came east to join Atlantic Records. The new group was dubbed The Coasters because they crossed the continent to come together.About the same time, songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller produced “Smokey Joe's Cafe" for The Robins (their sixth for the group). Atlantic liked the tune so much, the company offered Leiber and Stoller an independent production contract to bring The Robins to Atlantic. However, when only two Robins — Carl Gardner and Bobby Nunn — wanted to make the move to New York, the new Coasters were born; the group's association with Leiber and Stoller was a match made in rock ‘n' roll heaven. The Family Flood grew up singing, laughing and dancing to The Coasters' string of good-humored storytelling hits. Theirs were some of the most joyful radio moments of the 1950s and early ‘60s, starting with “Down in Mexico,” “Young Blood” and “Searchin',” quickly followed by “Yakety Yak,” “Charlie Brown,” “Poison Ivy,” “Little Egypt.”About This SongAs reported earlier, the song featured in this video that Pamela Bowen shot at a recent rehearsal dropped into The Coaster's world in 1957, and various incarnations of The Flood have played it for the past four decades. (For more on that part of the story, click here.)For this latest rendition, the guys were joined by Floodster Emeritus Paul Martin who dropped by to sit in for the evening. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Josephine Baker was only 20 years old when she recorded the song “Dinah” at her first studio session 98 years ago this fall. That was just a year after the provocative dancer/singer arrived in Paris, immediately setting the town on fire with her risqué shows at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.And a West Virginian was right there to help her light those blazes.Ada “ Bricktop” Smith, a young Alderson, WV, native, was in Paris several years ahead of Baker, entertaining at composer Cole Porter's famous parties, often teaching his guests the latest dance crazes, such as the Charleston and the Black Bottom. Josephine Baker always acknowledged she was one Ada Smith's protégés in those heady early days of The Jazz Age.“I didn't get my first break on Broadway,” Baker told London's Guardian a half century later. No, she was just a nameless hoofer in the chorus line in those New York shows, she said, but “I became famous first in France in the Twenties.”“Oh yes,” she added, “Bricktop was there. Me and her were the only two, and we had a marvelous time. Of course, everyone who was anyone knew Bricky. And they got to know Miss Baker as well."Ada Smith became one of 1920s' best known American singers/dancers, owning the famed “Chez Bricktop” in Paris from 1924 to 1961. She even got a shout-out in Woody Allen's hit film, Midnight in Paris, in 2011 when the character of Zelda Fitzgerald proposes an evening's escapade:In the next scene, Cole Porter, the Fitzgeralds and their fabulous friends pile into a period open car and tear down Parisian streetd into the night.Ending up at Chez Bricktop, they watch Josephine Baker dance (and the Fitzgeralds drink…)Back to the Song“Dinah,” considered an anthem of the Roarin' Twenties, was not quite two years old when Josephine Baker recorded it that autumn day in 1926 in Paris.It was back in The States that she learned the hot number when she sang it at New York's Plantation Club on Broadway as the understudy to Ethel Waters.Obviously, the song was still much on Baker's mind when she strolled into the Odeon studio for her first recording session. The band recruited to accompany her on the date is thought to be members of a group called “Olivier's Jazz Boys.”“Dinah” by then had been introduced to the world by Waters within a year of its composition in 1925. After it was recorded by Waters for Columbia in 1926, the song went on to be waxxed by everyone from Fletcher Henderson and Cab Calloway to Bing Crosby, the Mills Brothers and the Boswell Sisters to Chet Baker, Thelonious Monk and Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli.And, as noted in an earlier Flood Watch article, the tune was famously among the favorites of trumpeter Louis Armstrong, who perform it in most of his numerous live shows and his radio appearances for decades after initially recording it in 1930.Our Take on the TuneWhenever the guys haven't seen each other for a couple of weeks, there's always a special joy when they all get back together again. That was certainly the case at last week's rehearsal. Add to that the fact that Floodster Emeritus Paul Martin dropped by to sit in. That always cranks up the energy level in the room. And you can just hear in this first tune of the evening. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

It was seven years ago this Thursday that the great Fats Domino died at age 89.The Family Flood grew up with Fats' music, so it was a joy at last week's rehearsal to take a moment — which band manager Pamela Bowen captured in this video — to remember him with a fun ride on one of his finest songs.About the SongAs we reported in an earlier Flood Watch article, Fats wrote “I'm Walkin'” 67 years ago, working with his frequent collaborator Dave Bartholomew. The song became Domino's third release in a row to reach No. 1 on the R&B chart, where it stayed for six weeks in the long winter of 1957.For more about the tune, click here for our song history story. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Music's most famous breakup in the late 20th century was surely the failed love affair of youngsters Suze Rotolo and Bob Dylan. Or at least it was the most productive parting on record.Following their split, 20-year-old Dylan wrote some his most plaintive songs of the era. “Don't Think Twice, It's All Right” and “Boots of Spanish Leather,” “Tomorrow is a Long Time” and “One Too Many Mornings, “Ballad in Plain D” and more were all clearly about Suze.One of the lesser known of Bob's breakup ballads from the same period was “Mama, You Been on My Mind.” EuropeIn mid-May 1964, Dylan completed a concert tour of England, afterward vacationing in France, Germany and Greece. During his ramble abroad, he wrote several songs for his upcoming album, Another Side of Bob Dylan.Then back in the States, he went into Columbia's Studio A and in a single night (June 9, 1964) he recorded 14 new songs, including one take of "Mama, You Been on My Mind.” When the album was released two months later, though, the song was not included. However, a few years later, “Mama, You Been on My Mind” became one of the earliest outtakes widely circulated on bootleg albums. The boots documented the two drafts of "Mama, You Been on My Mind" that Dylan wrote on notepaper from the May Fair Hotel where he had stayed in London during the tour.Dylan biographer Howard Sounes called it "one of the finest love songs he ever wrote.” Saying Dylan took responsibility for making a mess of his relationship with Rotolo, Sounes said the song showed Bob “could express himself with delicacy and maturity.”PerformancesIn concerts over the years, Dylan has performed the song hundreds of times, most notably in duets with his erstwhile post-Suze squeeze, Joan Baez. Their first duet was at Baez's concert at Forest Hills tennis stadium in Queens, NY, on Aug. 8, 1964. It was repeated a couple of months later, on Oct. 31, during Dylan's show at New York City's Philharmonic Hall. The two reprised their performance a decade later during Bob's 1975-76 Rolling Thunder Revue tour.Baez put a solo version — as “Daddy, You Been on My Mind” — on her 1965 Farewell, Angelina album.Meanwhile, the song has had some superstar coverage over the years, by the likes of Judy Collins and by Johnny Cash, by Rick Nelson and by George Harrison, by Linda Ronstadt and by Rod Stewart, and by everyone from The Kingston Trio to Dion and The Belmonts.Our Take on the TuneFlood founders Dave Peyton, Roger Samples and Charlie Bowen all started listening to the music of Bob Dylan 60 years ago, so it is little wonder that his songs are deeply woven in the band's fabric. Still today, whenever The Flood gets feeling folkie — as the guys were at this rehearsal a week or so ago — it's likely a Dylan tune will be the first to come to mind.Do More Dylan?Evidence of the band's delight in doing Dylan is the fact that one of the first special playlists created for the free Radio Floodango music streaming service a few years ago was this one done to celebrate Bobby's birthday. For more of The Flood's spin on Dylan tunes, give it a listen by clicking here. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com