The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast: Recent Episodes
Charles Bowen
Each week The 1937 Flood, West Virginia's most eclectic string band, offers a free tune from a recent rehearsal, show or jam session. Music styles range from blues and jazz to folk, hokum, ballad and old-time. All the podcasts, dating back to 2008, are archived on our website; you and use the archive for free at: http://1937flood.com/pages/bb-podcastarchives.html
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As we start thinking about what The Flood should play for its set at the latest Diamond Teeth Mary blues festival here in Huntington later this month, one song seems like a natural.
“Gee,Baby, Ain’t I Good to You?” is a near-century-old tune that touched the lives of two great West Virginia jazzmen a dozen years apart.
Big band composer Don Redmond, who hailed from the eastern part of the Mountain State, wrote the song in 1929. Then in 1941, the phenomenal saxophonist Chu Berry from Wheeling recorded it in his very last studio session. Here’s The Flood’s latest take on the Redmond-Berry classic from last week’s rehearsal.
About the Song
As reported here earlier, the mid-1920s had been good to Don Redman. Just barely out of his teens, he was already responsible for integrating the rhythmic approach of Louis Armstrong’s playing into the work of Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra.
In 1927 Redman was wooed away from Henderson to join McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, the house band at the celebrated Greystone Ballroom in Detroit.
“Gee, Baby, Ain’t I Good to You?” was the first song that Don wrote for the Cotton Pickers. After its 1929 release, though, the tune went into cold storage.
More than a decade passed before the next major jazz artist recorded the song, and, as we say, it turned out to be yet another West Virginian.
Wheeling’s proud native son, tenor saxophonist Chu Berry, recorded the song in 1941 on the flip side of his rendition of “Sunny Side of the Street.” (Sadly, it would be Berry’s last recording; an automobile accident in northern Ohio later that year ended his life at just 33.)
Two years later, Don’s song finally made The Big Time when Nat King Cole turned “Gee, Baby, Ain’t I Good To You?” into a national hit, topping the 1943 R&B charts. Around the same time, Count Basie also adopted the song as a favorite, using it to showcase his band’s various vocalists, including legends like Jimmy Rushing and Joe Williams.
For more about the song, as well as about Redmond and Berry, see our earlier Flood Watch article by clicking here.
Mark Your Calendar
The Flood will be at the Diamond Teeth Mary Medicine Show on Saturday, Aug. 22, at Heritage Station, 210 11th Street, in beautiful downtown Huntington. The guys are honored to open the festivities with a set at 6 p.m.
And we’re pleased that our old friend Jim Rumbaugh has agreed to sit in with us on bass, subbing for Randy Hamilton, who can’t make the gig.
And hey, we’re open to suggestions if you’d like to help up figure out our set list for the show. To get you in the mood, you can swing by the free Radio Floodango music streaming service and turn on the band’s Blues Channel for a randomized playlist of the band’s bluesier bits over the years.
Oh, and remember we’ve now got ways to mobilize the ol’ Floodanago.
Click here to find out how to put the Flood radio on your computer desktop and on an iPhone to make your Flood fix always just a click away.
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
Surely, no innovation in modern human history has gotten so deeply into our psyche — into our hearts and into our very minds — as the railroad.
Train imagery fills our art and music, symbolizing so many beginnings … and, well, endings. Here’s a train tune from our folk-infused youth.
About the Song
As reported here earlier, singer/songwriter Eric Andersen introduced his “Dusty Boxcar Wall” in 1965 on his debut album for Vanguard Records, Today is the Highway.
A few years earlier, Andersen dropped out of college in Geneva, NY, and hitchhiked west to San Francisco to try his luck singing solo in North Beach coffeehouses and to seek out his heroes, the poets of the Beat Generation.
In liner notes for that first album, Stacey Williams said “Dusty Boxcar Wall” was written “on the Bay Bridge between Berkeley and San Francisco,” adding, “Eric had been performing at the Cabale coffeehouse in Berkeley with a city group that did country music, The Snopes County Camp Followers.”
Wanting to do a solo with the Snopes group, according to Williams, Andersen wrote “this archetypal song of death, love and separation.”
For more about this seminal Eric Andersen song, see our earlier Flood Watch article by clicking here.
More Music, Please
If this week’s podcast has you in the mood for more tracks about trains, boy, do we have ya covered! Visit the free Radio Floodango music streaming service, and under “The Special Blends,” click on “The Train Set.” The link below tells you all about that particular project:
And if you want even more folk in your Flood Friday, turn on our free Folk Channel.
Or just click here to to take the express route to start that randomized rotation of more than a hundred folky Flood tracks recorded over the decades at jam sessions, rehearsals and gigs.
Finally, remember, we’ve now got cool ways to mobilize the ol’ Floodango. Click here to find out how to put The Flood’s radio activity on your computer desktop and on an iPhone. That way, your Flood fix will always be just a click away.
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
Dave Peyton inspired our writing of this song.
West Virginia’s greatest defender — and her harshest critic — Dave spoke tirelessly from his popular newspaper columns and in his frequent radio and television appearances…
… but also anywhere else that people would listen, in coffee shops and at conferences, in living rooms and at dinner tables, on concert stages and in our band room between our weekly tunes.
Railing against what he saw as the relentless ravaging of the state, he’d say, “Sometimes I think the worst thing that ever happened to West Virginia was when somebody discovered coal.
“But they never stop,” he’d add. “First they came for the timber. Now, after they’re done murdering the mountains, they’ll find something else to take from us.”
Whispered Legacy
What bothered Dave as much as what they took was what the exploiters left behind: a paralyzing — if seldom-spoken — sense of guilt running through generations of Mountain State natives, a communal sorrow for not being able to stop the rape of our home.
“It is whispered if spoken at all,” as our song says:
Of a broken trust and a grief that must Be the cut that has wounded us all.
A half dozen years before Peyton’s death in 2020, his words inspired us, and “Murder of Mountains” started taking shape. With it now finally finished, we are pleased to have it as a tribute to Dave and to all he taught us.
“Star of the County Down”
The melody we use for our new song is the late Joe Dobbs’ version of the Irish tune called “Star of the County Down,” and thereby hangs another tale.
Back in the early 1980s, when Joe’s Fret ‘n Fiddle music store was still in its original location on Huntington’s West 14th Street, a bluegrass mandolin player from Boston was passing through and spent a few nights at the Dobbs house. During a jam session there, the lad played this tune, and Joe loved it. When asked about it, the man said, “It’s an Irish song, but we’ve Americanized it.”
A few months later at the next Bowen Bash, Joe taught it to the the rest of us, as you can hear in the above video (extracted, incidentally, from our Bowen Bash Legacy Film Series). It turns out that Joe’s house guest had been taking lessons up in Boston from an Irish fiddler. “I guess that’s where he got it,” Joe said.
Anyway, for years, Joe and his Flood brothers played “Star of the County Down” in the same moody, stately manner as he had learned from that kind Yankee visitor. It was only later — decades later, in fact — that Joe learned just how “Americanized” the song had been.
Say What Now?
That was when another visitor — this one a fiddler from Ireland — later listened to Joe’s rendition and asked the name of the melody. He was surprised when Joe told him, “Why, that’s ‘Star of the County Down.’”
“Really?” the visitor said. “Well,” he added sheepishly, “there’s good news and bad news, Joe. The good news is that it’s really lovely! The bad news is that’s not how that tune goes.”
“What?!” Joe said.
“Well,” the stranger said, “I’ve never heard anyone play only the harmony part. Uh …. Here’s how we play it.” The visitor feared his revelation would embarrass or anger his host, but, on the contrary, Joe found the news hilarious. The rest of The Flood did too.
“So,” Dave chortled, “guess we oughta write some words to go with that song you wrote, Joe,” planting a seed in Charlie Bowen’s mind that only now is bearing fruit in “Murder of Mountains.”
Epilogue I
Here’s a footnote to the “Star of the County Down” part of this story. The Flood finally took steps to set the melodic record straight when back in 2020 the guys went into Paul Martin’s studio to record their Speechless: The Instrumentals album.
In the years after Joe’s death, Doug Chaffin had stepped up to play The Flood’s fiddle. Click the button to hear his rendition of “Star” from those sessions.
In it you hear Doug open the number by faithfully stating the melody that Joe brought us all those years ago. Then the album’s guest artist, Floodster Emeritus Stewart Schneider, comes forward for a fine Autoharp solo that nails the original melody as it is played in the aire’s Irish homeland. After that, the track rocks back and forth between the two variations.
Epilogue II
By the way, we have also felt it appropriate to add “Murder of Mountains” to the curated “West Virginia Blend” playlist in our free Radio Floodango music streaming service. Click below to read all about this particular special blend.
And remember, we’ve now got ways to mobilize the ol’ Floodanago. Click here to find out how to put the Flood radio on your computer desktop and on an iPhone to make your Flood fix always just a click away.
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
Charlie Bowen remembers a conversation he once had with his old buddy Jim Strother. It was decades ago and the two of them were reminiscing about a time even earlier.
“Remember,” Jim said, “when you’d see a fella ramblin’ along carrying a guitar case, and he’d have his coat collar turned up against the wind and a cap pulled down over his eyes.
“Just one look and you knew everything you needed to know about that guy.” You know, it probably wasn’t always spitting snow, but it certainly is in today’s fanciful memory of that scene. And the soundtrack? Then and now? Why, it was always an early Bob Dylan tune, wasn’t it? Like this one.
Those memories came roaring back at last week’s rehearsal when the first tune that popped into the guys’ heads that evening was “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” a song that Charlie loved from 1963’s Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album.
Learning
To this day Bowen still remembers Strother using the same song to patiently try to teach him the “Merle Travis pick” whose alternating bass characterized so much of 1960s folkdom.
Curiously, the young Dylan said he himself was still learning his composition. “It’s a hard song to sing,” he told journalist Nat Hentoff, who wrote the liner notes for the album. “I can sing it sometimes, but I ain’t that good yet.”
Bob noted that he didn’t yet know how to “carry myself” the way veteran musicians like Big Joe Williams, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and Lightnin’ Hopkins did.
“With those older singers,” Dylan told Hentoff, “music was a tool, a way to live more, a way to make themselves feel better at certain points. As for me, I can make myself feel better sometimes, but at other times, it’s still hard to go to sleep at night.”
As repored here earlier, Bob said of “Don’t Think Twice” that a lot of city singer “make it sort of a love song — slow and easygoing — but it isn’t a love song. It’s a statement that maybe you can say to make yourself feel better. It’s as if you were talking to yourself.”
For more about the song’s history, click here for an earlier Flood Watch article.
More Music? Step Right Up!
If all this ramblin’ down the foggy ruins of time has you in the mood for more Dylan tunes, boy, do we have you covered! Our free Radio Floodango music steaming feature has an entire “Bob Dylan Birthday” playlist with more than an hour’s worth of Flooderiffic Bobby bits. Click below to check it out.
And if you’d like to put even more Floodified folk in your Friday, tune into the band’s free Folk Channel:
About a hundred tracks from decades of jam sessions, rehearsals and gigs are waiting for you there. Click here to turn us on.
Public Floodify
Finally, in case the heat wave breaks next week and you feel like stepping out again, mark Thursday, July 23, on your calendar.
That’s when the band rolls back into good ol’ Bahnhof WVrsthaus & Biergarten, 745 7th Avenue. Come on down for good food, good tunes and a great jump on your weekend! We play from 6:30 to 8.
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
While last week’s rehearsal was our first time to play with the remarkable fiddler John Ace, that evening was likely the last time that Floodster Emeritus Dave “Bub” Ball will get to jam with his old friend.
It was only at the end of the evening we learned that John — after two decades of snow-birding it from Virginia to Florida — is at a new crossroads in his life, set to move permanently to New Hampshire to be near his daughter.
In fact, just hours after the last notes were played that night, Ball drove Ace to the depot so he could board a train for his Alexandria home. After that, Dave turned the car south for his long drive back to his home with his wife Yvonne in Jupiter, FL.
“John and I will stay in touch,” Bub said in an email this week, “but with him in New Hampshire and me about 1500 miles away, the odds are we won’t be able to get together again.”
A train song seemed like the most appropriate choice for the last number of the night and we picked one of the best in our repertoire.
Bub and John’s Journey
As reported here recently, in 2005 John Ace sold his house and car and moved to the sea, living full time on “Four Aces,” his 36-foot fiberglass Cabo Rico sailboat. From then on, he divided his time between summers in Virginia and winters in Florida … and/or the Bahamas, Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, Mexico … wherever the winds carried him.
Now, though, “at 76 traveling becomes a factor,” Bub said of his old friend.
Bub met John about three years ago during one of those winter treks to warmer climes.
“The band he was playing with at the time, Gypsy String Revival, needed a fill-in bassist and gave me a call,” Ball recalled. “He and I became friends and started playing jams together.”
Later, when fiddler Paddy King, one of the original 3 String Circus members, couldn’t make a renaissance fair gig, John filled in.
“He spent Thanksgiving and Christmas with us here and we became close friends,” Bub recalled. “We played many Faire gigs together.”
This summer The Flood got to meet John because Bub needed a fiddler to share the stage with him at the Lewisville, WV, renaissance fair. “John just happened to be in Alexandria, a five- or six-hour train ride to Alderson,” Ball said. “Soooooo, John filled in, and brilliantly I might add.”
About the Song
Featured in this week’s podcast, those last notes of our last evening with John and Bub are from “Yellow Dog Blues,” W.C. Handy’s 1915 masterpiece that speaks so elegantly of the passages in life. As reported earlier, it is the song that brought a classic line to the blues world, talking about going to “where the Southern cross the Yellow Dog.”
For more on the history of this grand old tune, see this earlier Flood Watch article.
And for more of John Ace’s fine fiddling with The Flood during his West Virginia trek, click here and here.
Meanwhile, in Flood Movie News…
Well, Georgia is on our mind these days. Randy Yohe’s award-winning “These Boys” documentary about The Flood has been selected to participate in Augusta’s 12th annual Black Cat Picture Show film festival.
Black Cat is the Georgia city’s only adjudicated international festival for independent films, hosted at Le Chat Noir theater, a 100-seat black box theater in downtown Augusta.
This recognition now brings to a half dozen the number of honors the film has received this year.
As reported earlier, the picture has been praised by two French festivals — ARFF Paris // International Film Festival and the Cine Paris Film Festival — as well as here in the States by The East Village New York Film Festival and Texas’s Austin International Art Festival. Also the Appalachian Film Festival screened the documentary as the featured film on the opening night.
Right now “These Boys” is working its way through film festivals like these, but we look forward to sharing the completed film with everyone later this year. We’ll keep you posted.
Click here to read more about the work on “These Boys.”
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
Recognizing a tune that many of us think ought to be the national anthem, The Flood is celebrating America’s 250th birthday with Woody Guthrie’s most beloved song, as seen in Pamela Bowen’s video below:
Just nine years after President Herbert Hoover signed a 1931 congressional resolution to make “The Star Spangled Banner” the country’s official anthem, Woody wrote “This Land Is Your Land.”
About the Song
Guthrie — having only recently landed in a fleabag boarding house in New York City after rambling and roaming, hitchhiking and hoboing across the country from California — wasn’t thinking about targeting the anthem as he wrote “This Land.” However, he did have another song in his sights.
Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” recorded by Kate Smith in 1939, famously irked him — Woody thought it just didn’t tell America’s full story — and his 1940 composition was inspired as a protest against that tune.
The reason for his ire? Well, everywhere that Woody had wandered in his long trek across the country, he heard “God Bless America” roaring from jukeboxes and radios. For him Berlin’s song was too sappy, too blindly patriotic, too cut off from the hard-knock life that many Americans were facing as the Great Depression dragged into its 10th year.
Guthrie wrote his song as almost a parody. “And I don’t mean that in a humorous sense,” his daughter Nora Guthrie has said. “I mean that strictly in the literal sense of parody as a response to something.”
Woody’s original title was “God Blessed America for Me.” Nora notes, “He crossed it out later and called it ‘This Land Was Made for You and Me.’ See, the parody turned into a more mature comment.”
The Melody
Woody borrowed the melody, as he did for most of his songs. “He tended to write words first, and later on picked out a tune,” said Pete Seeger, Guthrie’s long-time friend and rambling partner.
“Woody once said, ‘When I’m writing a song and I get the words, I look around for some tune that has proved its popularity with the people.’”
In this case, the melody of “This Land” is very similar to “Oh, My Loving Brother,” a Baptist hymn that The Carter Family had recorded a decade earlier as “When the World’s On Fire.” That same melody also had inspired the Carters’ own “Little Darlin’, Pal of Mine” a couple of years before that.
“Missing” Verses
In penning the lyrics to “This Land is You Land,” Guthrie, true to his original mission of protest, included several verses critical of the American economic system. Then, according to biographer Joe Klein, “he completely forgot about the song, and didn’t do anything with it for another five years.”
By the time Woody debuted the song on his weekly radio show in 1944 at the height of World War II, he had revised it, softening the criticism and nixing the more controversial verses about businessmen’s greed and disregard for the needy.
Of this and later self-editing, Woody’s daughter said, “This is the early ‘50s, and [U.S. Sen. Joseph] McCarthy’s out there, and it was considered dangerous in many ways to record this kind of material.”
“Like most of the things, if we’re talking about my dad,” Nora added, “it gets very complex here.”
Noting that when The Weavers recorded the song in the mid-1950s, they also sang only the first three verses, “which, in one way, was very, very helpful to my dad, because we had no money. So thank God that they recorded something, and our family was able to get some royalties from that.”
More recently, a growing number of singers have dusted off one or two of Guthrie’s “lost” lyrics, as The Flood does in this rendition from a recent rehearsal, ending with:
As I went walking I saw a sign there And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.” But on the other side it didn’t say nothing, That side was made for you and me.
Legacy
Forty years ago a 1947 release of “This Land is Your Land” on the Asch record label was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. In 2002, it was one of 50 recordings chosen by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry.
In 2009, Pete Seeger joined rocker Bruce Springsteen to sing it from start to finish as part of President Barack Obama’s inaugural celebration.
In 2021, it was listed by Rolling Stone magazine among its “Top 500 Greatest Songs of All Time,” and just last year it was put at No. 11 on its list of “The 100 Best Protest Songs of All Time.”
Cap’n John Guests on This Podcast
Meanwhile, back to this week’s podcast, we have a guest artist. As reported earlier, fiddler John Ace from Alexandria, Va., accompanied Floodster Emeritus Dave Ball to the latest Flood rehearsals to sit in. With Dave, John was on the way from Florida for gigs in Lewisburg, WV.
Of Fourths Past
Finally, over the years Independence Day has played an important part on many a page in The Flood’s scrapbook. For instance, playing for a Huntington community party during the nation’s bicentennial 50 years ago this weekend was a sweet memory in the band’s first decade. Read all about it and other Fourths by clicking below:
Happy Birthday, America!
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
When the room needs a respite from the band’s frequent fare of loud and raucous tunes, Randy Hamilton and Danny Cox always have just what the doctor ordered.
Friends since high school, these two seem to be able to read each other’s mind when it comes to music. Just listen to how they make this 60-year-old Danny O’Keefe composition sound like something they themselves just wrote.
As reported here earlier, O’Keefe, a Washington State folkster, wrote “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues” in 1967, but its early trips to the recording studio were largely fruitless.
Danny’s own recordings of the tune in 1971 and ’72 were generally ignored. But then the following year the song played a part in the turning point in another artist’s career.
When Waylon Did the Song
That’s when country music star Waylon Jennings had started getting restless, wanting to wrestle creative control away from the slick, over-produced “Nashville Sound” establishment that he had grown tired of.
The seminal Good Hearted Woman album, quickly followed by Ladies Love Outlaws and Lonesome, On’ry and Mean were Waylon’s personal declaration of independence, establishing him as a prominent representative of the new “outlaw country” movement.
Watching and listening from the sidelines, O’Keefe later said that Jennings’ cover of “Good Time Charlie” on that third of those albums was his absolute favorite version of his own song, capturing the groove and swagger he had always intended.
And O’Keefe’s lyrics — about aging, watching friends drift away and using “pills to ease the pain” — perfectly fit the rugged, hyper-honest persona of the burgeoning outlaw movement.
When Willie Answered
A half dozen years later, Waylon’s fellow outlaw Willie Nelson also took a turn with the tune, but his take of “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues” gave it a much different vibe.
On his 1979 collaborative album with Leon Russell, One for the Road, Willie treated the song as an intimate, jazz-infused acoustic prayer.
In his characteristic style of singing slightly behind the beat, Willie captured the lyrics’ quiet, lonely acceptance of sitting in an empty room after the party is over, much as Randy and Danny do in this rendering from a recent Flood rehearsal.
For more on the history of this lovely tune, see this earlier Flood Watch article.
Mid-Year Report
So, we’ve reached the midpoint of 2026. If you’d like a sample of what the Floodisphere has been sounding like so far this year, tune into Radio Floodango.
Its “Hear by Year” section enables you to aim your time machine at the podcasts of any specific year since 2009. Click to here to reach the 2026 tunes.
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
Rabon Delmore never learned to drive a car, so it was always his older brother Alton behind the wheel as they tooled between gigs in the early days of their career during the Great Depression.
That routine played a big part in The Delmore Brothers’ prolific songwriting life. As he later described it in his autobiography, Truth Is Stranger Than Publicity, Alton would hum melodies while he drove and he and Rabon would harmonize on new verses as they occurred to them.
Riding shotgun, Rabon acted as the editor and scribe. He wrote down the words on the fly, adding, deleting and refining the lines to fit the duo’s signature syncopated rhythm.
Because of this practice, the Delmores’ songs were well polished by the time they got to a recording studio to preserve them for later generations of fans. It also gave them an edge in other ways too.
Brown’s Ferry Debut
For instance, while “Brown’s Ferry Blues” wasn’t released on record until 1934, the song had began developing in their minds four or five years earlier, and it served as their secret weapon at a crossroads moment in Athens, Alabama: the February 1930 Limestone County Fiddlers’ Convention at the Old Athens Agricultural School.
The poverty-stricken brothers arrived carrying their guitars in makeshift cases that their mother had sewn out of cotton picking sacks on with their names were painted in pokeberry juice. Facing stiff competition — including a tie-breaker with three heavily favored local girls — their well-honed tune sealed the win.
“We had ‘Brown’s Ferry Blues’ down pretty pat,” Alton wrote in his memoir. “In fact, we could play it then just as good as we ever did... When we did it, the people really went wild and we won that contest without any question or any doubt. And that started us on our way to the Grand Ole Opry and the big record companies.”
Whither Brown’s Ferry?
The title of the tune, incidentally, was inspired by Alton and Rabon’s deep roots in northern Alabama, named after an old ferryboat that crossed the Tennessee River about 30 miles south of their home in Elkmount, Ala.
Alton’s book noted the old crossing was a place he and Rabon loved to visit when they were growing up in their lean years as a tenant farmer’s sons.
By the way, decades later that peaceful river spot of the 1920s underwent a massive transformation. In 1973, the Tennessee Valley Authority opened the Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant on that exact site, turning the idyllic old-time ferry landing into one of the largest nuclear power facilities in the country.
Song Legacy
The song “Brown’s Ferry Blues” was a milestone in establishing Alton and Rabon as one of the most influential duos in early 20th century American music history.
In December 1933, the Delmores traveled to Chicago for their first recording session with RCA Victor’s budget label, Bluebird. “Brown’s Ferry Blues” was recorded on the first day and sales quickly made the number a hit.
The pair soon became the most popular act on the Grand Ole Opry. Starting in the mid-1930s, they recorded more than 80 sides for Bluebird.
The shadow of “Brown’s Ferry Blues” followed them. In 1943, when Alton organized an all-star gospel quartet at WLW in Cincinnati alongside Merle Travis and Grandpa Jones, they chose as the group’s name “The Brown’s Ferry Four.”
Flooding the Ferry
Dave Peyton, Roger Samples and Charlie Bowen used to play this tune back in the 1970s when the band was just getting started at the Bowen Bashes.
But the song only recently has come back into the Floodipshere. Here it is from a recent rehearsal, featuring Danny Cox’s guitar and Jack Nuckols’ fiddle.
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
Our Flood brother Danny Cox and his sweet wife Tami are on vacation this week, but before they hit to the road, we had to give them a good Flood set-off. Here’s a little traveling music, the last tune of last week’s rehearsal.
About the Song
When Merle Travis included “I Am a Pilgrim” on his seminal 1947 Folk Songs from the Hills album in 1947, listeners assumed he wrote it. After all, the same album included two of Travis’s best-known original compositions, “Dark as a Dungeon” and “Sixteen Ton.”
Actually, though, “Pilgrim” is a traditional gospel tune that has deep roots among white and African-American musicians alike.
As we reported earlier, Kentucky-born Travis had a mentor: legendary fingerpicking stylist Mose Rager of Muhlenberg County. Legend has it that Mose's brother Lyman learned "I Am a Pilgrim" while in jail when he heard it being sung by a black prisoner in a nearby cell.
As Asheville, NC, musician/author Wayne Erbsen has noted, “I Am A Pilgrim” was recorded “by 14 African-American groups before it was even a gleam in Merle Travis' eyes."
For more on the story’s curious history, see this earlier Flood Watch backgrounder.
More from the Danny Channel
Has today’s podcast got you in the mood for more from Danny Cox’s fertile musical mind? Us too! So, come with us to the Danny Channel in the free Radio Floodango music steaming service. Click here to give it a spin.
For Your Next Road Trip
Speaking of travelin’ music, remember that your friends in The Flood have created a road-friendly play list. Click below to read all about that:
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
Woody Guthrie once wrote that a song is just “a conversation fixed up to where you can talk it over and over without getting tired of it.”
“When you sit down with a couple of friends,” he continued, “and you’ve all got your guitars parked under a shade tree or in an old kitchen, you aren’t trying to show off. … You’re just talking.
“One guy tells a story with his strings, and the next guy nods his head and matches it with a little lick of his own. It makes the world twice as level and half as steep.”
That is a concept that The Flood certainly embraces. And nothing demonstrates it better than this week’s podcast, featuring the guys’ latest take on the rockin’ “Opus One.” This particular musical conversation — taken from the opening moments of last week’s rehearsal at the Bowen house — is really saying, “Damn, man, it’s good to see y’all again!”
Pete’s Two-Cents’ Worth
Woody’s old friend and young protégé Pete Seeger also knew a thing or two about that kind of wordless musical chat. “It’s an effortless shorthand,” he wrote in his book, Where Have All the Flowers Gone.
“You look across the circle and catch an old friend’s eye just as the harmony locks into place,” he wrote, “and there’s this quiet, shared smile that says, Yes, this is exactly where we’re supposed to be. It’s the sound of community in its purest form.”
Pete said it even better in one of his “Johnny Appleseed Jr.” columns in the good old Sing Out! magazine: “You realize that the song is just a vehicle for the affection in the room. It’s a way of saying ‘I’m glad you’re here’ without having to make a formal speech about it. It fills you up and stays with you long after the instruments are put back in their cases.”
Jive Talk
Such wordless wordiness is even better defined in the jazz world, where improvisation is the mother tongue. Musicians might have played a tune a thousand times before, “a melody so old it felt like part of the weather,” Geoff Dyer wrote in 1991 in his seminal But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz in a passage about listening to old friends play.
“But they didn’t just play it,” he recalled. “They pulled it apart like an old clock to see how it worked from the inside. … It was a language made entirely of nods, shifts in weight, a sudden drop in volume … that told everyone, let’s go down this alleyway for a second.
“Listening to them,” Dyer remembered, “was like watching people walk through a dark house they’d lived in for 40 years — they knew exactly where the furniture was, so they could dance through the rooms without ever bumping into a thing, even with the lights completely out.”
Brain Business
Famed neurologist Oliver Sacks was fascinated with how music affects the mind. In an essay called “The Common Pursuit,” reflecting on lifelong bonds forged by musicians, he reached a lovely conclusion.
“They do not play to impress,” Sacks wrote. “They play to inhabit a space they built together 50 years ago. To sit in a room and witness this is to realize that music is not merely an acoustic phenomenon, but a profound architecture of memory and shared love.”
Meanwhile, About This Week’s Tune …
As reported earlier, “Opus One,” written by Sy Oliver, became a huge late World War II-era hit for Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra. Dorsey recorded it as an instrumental on Nov. 14, 1944.
The following summer, the signature vocal version was released by Anita O’Day in an all-star session. Drummer Gene Krupa led the big band and trumpeter Roy Eldridge accented O’Day’s vocals.
For more on the song’s history, click here to read the earlier Flood Watch backgrounder.
More from This Groove?
If today’s musical conversation has you wanting more from The Flood’s jazzier selections, drop by the free Radio Floodango music streaming service and click into the “Swingin’” channel.
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Three summers ago when Charlie Bowen took his first tremulous steps into the world of banjocity, he bought a six-string banjo … and immediately got grief.
“That ain’t no banjo!” one friend declared. “That’s just a guitar with delusions of grandeur. You can play dress it up all you want, man, but you’re not playing a banjo.”
“Okay, now, wait a minute,” Charlie protested. “If a banjo’s got four strings, it’s a banjo, right?”
“Sure,” the friend conceded. “That’s a tenor banjo, like the late, great Chuck Romine used to play.”
“And if it has five strings, it’s a banjo?”
“Well, of course. That’s God’s own old-time and bluegrass banjo.”
“But,” Charlie persisted, “if it’s got six stings, it’s NOT a banjo?!”
“Nope,” the friend insisted. “You can call it a ‘banjitar’ if you’d like or ‘ganjo,’ but don’t be calling it a banjo.”
“You know what, old buddy?” Charlie concluded. “You are a banjo bigot!”
But despite his brave front, Bowen finally caved to the peer pressure. The six-string banjo (which by then he had lovingly christened “Buzzkill”) was retired to a lonely closet. In its place Charlie bought his first five-string and began to learn tunes.
Truth be told, Bowen has fallen in love with the instrument, practicing every day, even starting to work the five-string into a corner of The Flood’s repertoire on a song or two (or three…).
Schooled by Seva Venet
By the beginning of this year, Buzzkill had been pretty much forgotten. That is, until last month when Charlie and Pamela traveled to New Orleans for a wonderful Road Scholar program built around the annual French Quarter Festival, four solid days of memorable music.
A highlight the whole long weekend was when legendary clarinetist Dr. Michael White played a private concert for the Road Scholar folks at their hotel. Sitting in with White’s quartet that morning was renowned New Orleanian Seva Venet, who was holding down the rhythm section with his six-string Vega banjo.
During the intermission, Charlie chatted with Venet, who said that he was quite aware of how provincial some banjo fanciers could be. However, Seva said, the six-string banjo has a proud legacy all its own. In fact, the banjo of choice for most players of early jazz and blues was the six-string.
Johnny St. Cyr, he noted, famously played his six-string in Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven groups as well as with Jelly Roll Morton’s various ensembles. Legendary New Orleanian Danny Barker and early bluesman Papa Charlie Jackson also played the six. Even jazz superstar Django Reinhardt started out playing a six-string banjo in the dance halls of Paris, long before he cemented his legacy as the pioneer of the gypsy jazz guitar.
The secret to playing the instrument, Seva said, is that, while it is tuned like a guitar, it’s not played like one. Don’t pick it like a guitar, he said, but play it high on the neck where the slapped chords can sing out.
And, like his hero Danny Barker, Venet likes to add color to his chords by playing 6ths and 9ths and other variations on the usual banjo choices.
Buzzkill Bounces Back
Inspired by hearing and watching Seva Venet play that morning, Charlie came home from the New Orleans Road Scholar outing eager to bring Buzzkill out of the retirement, especially on The Flood’s old hokum tunes like this week’s podcast selection, “Tear It Down.”
As noted earlier in Flood Watch, a lot of the hokum tunes that The Flood has always loved were born far to the south of us, in place like Memphis and New Orleans.
So it’s always a treat to find a song that grew a little closer to home. This tune traces back to a youngster named Bob Coleman — Kid Cole, they called him — from the west side of Cincinnati. It was 98 years ago this very month that Bob recorded it in Chicago.
More Hokum?
Finally, if more hokum music is what you need to make your Flood Friday complete, remember we’ve got a whole channel waiting for you on the free Radio Floodango music steaming service.
Just drop in and click the “Hokum” button or, better yet, take the express route by clicking this link to jump to it directly.
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Since it is Memorial Day weekend, we wanted to offer something appropriate in this week’s podcast.
Of course, in the Floodisphere, our spiritual inclinations generally lean more toward a rambunctious New Orleans jazz funeral than to a little church in the wildwood. So, here’s jubilant little hymn from your friends in The Flood.
The Jazz Funeral Tradition
Blending strong European and African cultural influences, the jazz funeral predates the birth of jazz itself. The tradition traces hundreds of years further back to Louisiana’s colonial era when military-style brass bands often were hired to play during funeral processions.
This European element merged with West African spiritual practices, incorporating the belief that celebrating after death pleases the spirits who protect the dead.
Jazz joined the mix at the beginning of the 20th century, and by mid-century the jazz funeral was crossing ethnic and religious boundaries in New Orleans.
How It Happens
Marching from the church or funeral home to the cemetery, the band initially plays somber dirges and hymns.
A dramatic shift in tone occurs after the deceased is entombed and the hearse departs. That symbolic moment “cuts the body loose” and the music quickly becomes more upbeat and swinging, featuring lively, raucous tunes (like another Flood favorite, “Didn’t He Ramble?”)
This final phase brings on cathartic dancing as attendees celebrate the life of the deceased. Onlookers form the famous “second line,” twirling parasols and handkerchiefs in the air as they step off to the band’s rousing cadence.
About the Song
This week’s song — “Just a Closer Walk wirh Thee” — is often associated with jazz funerals, but, as we reported here earlier, this custom actually is a relatively recent development.
New Orleans’ legendary clarinetist George Lewis, the jazzman most associated with this beautiful song, told his biographer, “The first time I played it was in the The Eureka Band” in 1942. “We heard it on a music box, and a woman asked us to play it for a funeral” for her murdered husband.
When the widow learned that the song her husband wanted to hear on a jukebox the night he died was the new Sister Rosetta Tharpe recording of “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” she asked George’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 “Closer Walk” at funerals ever since.
And the song itself is surprisingly modern, published in 1940 in Chicago. Click here to read more about the song’s curious back story.
More Gospel from The Flood?
If all this has you craving a little gospelizing by the boys in the band, remember The Gospel Hour playlist in The Flood’s free Radio Floodango music streaming service. To read all about it, click the link below.
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The Flood band room is usually a rather raucous place — rocking tunes, loud talk, lots of laughter — but often that mood can turn on a dime to something softer, even almost fragile.
We hadn’t done this old Jackson Browne song for years, but something last week — about watching the beautiful spring evening come falling in, seeing those long shadows rolling down over the newly green leaves outside our windows — brought this song back to mind.
About the Song
“Jamaica Say You Will,” which Browne wrote in 1969 when he was just 20 years old, not only launched the singer/songwriter’s career, but also even helped found the record company that would bring his music to the world.
The story goes that artist manager David Geffen signed Browne in 1970 after listening to a demo of this specific song. Right away, Geffen started searching for a record contact for his new artist.
At one point, he pitched Browne to Atlantic Records president Ahmet Ertegun, saying, “You’ll make a lot of money.” To that, Ertegun reportedly replied, “You know what, David? I have a lot of money. Why don’t you start a record company and then you’ll have a lot of money.”
A year later, Geffen partnered with his old friend Elliot Roberts to create Asylum Records with the help of Ertegun, who put up the initial funds. Atlantic Records distributed Asylum Records with the profits split 50/50.
Jackson Browne was one of first artists whom Geffen and Roberts signed for Asylum, and “Jamaica Say She Will” was the opening track of Browne’s self-titled debut album when it was released in September 1972.
Browne was quickly joined on the new label that same year by Linda Ronstadt, John David Souther, David Blue, Joni Mitchell, Glenn Frey and others.
For more about the song’s back story, see our earlier Flood Watch article by clicking here.
“Jamaica” is one of several Jackson Browne songs in The Flood’s repertoire. As reported elsewhere in Flood Watch, from its earliest days the band has played “These Days” from Browne’s second album, For Everyman.
More Song History?
Meanwhile, if these back stories about songs hit the spot, you might want to browse Flood Watch’s growing archive of articles that explore the history of tunes in the band’s eclectic repertoire by visiting the free “Song Stories” department.
There you can browse songs by their titles or by the time periods in which they were written and/or discovered.
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This great late-‘60s Lovin’ Spoonful tune is the perfect opportunity to answer readers’ requests for another little sample from Danny Cox’s latest reunion with his old guitar-pickin’ buddy Bobby Murnahan. Just listen and at the end this track you’ll hear Dan and Bob trading choruses on “(Sittin’ Back) Lovin’ You.”
As reported here last week, Danny and Bobby grew up together in Lawrence County, Ohio. It’s rare they can get together these days, but whenever Murnahan travels back this way from his Colorado home — as he did last month — we try to get him to join us in The Flood band room.
About the Song
The vehicle for this Cox-Murnahan moment is John Sebastian’s 1966 composition, which was the opening track for Hums of the Lovin’ Spoonful, the third studio album by Greenwich Village’s own folk-rock mavens.
Today the disc just barely makes the list of top 50 albums released in that stellar year of rock which saw Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, The Beatles’ Revolver, The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, The Rolling Stones’ Aftermath and so many more.
Not that Hum was ho-hum. On the contrary, as reported here earlier, that one album spawned four (count ‘em, four) charting singles for the Lovin’ lads, including “Summer in the City,” “Rain on the Roof,” “Nashville Cats” and "Full Measure.”
And while “Lovin’ You” was not among the disc’s hit singles for The Spoonful, a month after the album’s debut in November 1966, the song was covered by Bobby Darin who took it into the Top 40.
After that, the tune also became a successful number for four different female artists, including Anne Murray (1969), Helen Reddy (1973), Dolly Parton (1977) and Mary Black (1983).
For more on the history of the song — including a side note on The Flood’s early infatuation with it — see our earlier Flood Watch article by clicking here.
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We knew the band room was going to rock last week as soon as we saw Danny Cox was bringing along his life-long buddy, guitarist Bobby Murnahan, who was visiting from Colorado.
As noted here earlier, Danny and Bobby have known each other since before grade school. “Our parents attended the same church,” Danny has said, “and we got acquainted in Sunday school.”
Almost immediately the youngsters were united by their interest in guitar innovator Chet Atkins. One day after church, Bobby showed up at the Cox house asking Danny to show him some Atkins-style picking.
“I showed him what little I knew,” Dan remembers, and Bob took it from there. He and Dan purchased the Chet Atkins Goes to the Movies songbookand Bobby worked out the tunes. “I learned how to play Chet correctly because of his deciphering abilities,” Dan says.
Dan and Bob have been good friends ever since. For more on the story of their friendship, see our earlier Flood Watch article by clicking here.
About This Song from Last Week’s Rehearsal
As we noted in an earlier Flood Watch article, “Deep Ellum Blues” — first recorded on Bluebird by The Shelton Brothers (under the pseudonym “The Lone Star Cowboys”) — is all about life in a notorious neighborhood of Dallas.
While New Orleans had its French Quarter and Chicago its Bronzeville, in Dallas it was Deep Ellum with its equally sketchy, colorful résumé.
In the 1920s, if you walked down the streets on Deep Ellum, you could easily have rubbed shoulders with Blind Lemon Jefferson and Huddie Ledbetter, with Robert Johnson and Bessie Smith (not to mention with gangsters Bonnie and Clyde and Pretty Boy Floyd).
Other versions of the song that celebrated this darker side of the Big D were made between 1957 and 1958 by Jerry Lee Lewis for Sun Records, by Bobby Jackson for Gold Air Records, by Mary McCoy & The Cyclones for Jin Records and, later still, by The Grateful Dead, Levon Helm and Rory Gallagher.
For more on the history of this terrific Texas tune — as well as about the district of Deep Ellum — see our earlier article by clicking here.
More from Flood Guests?
Over the years, many guests — visitors like Bob, as well as returning Flood alumni (whom we call “Floodster Emeriti”) — sit in with us at rehearsals, jam sessions and performances.
The band’s web site devotes a page to a growing list of these guest appearances, with links to the audio and video of their visits.
To use this registry, click here to reach the page, then scroll and click on an underlined date associated with a guest. On the subsequent page, click on the title of the song to hear the audio or on a video's start arrowto view it.
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A half dozen years after his death at beginning of the horrid Covid pandemic, songwriter John Prine is still very much on the minds of the folks in The Flood band room.
In fact, every spring since the sad April 2020 day of his passing, John’s wonderful songs start popping up among the tunes that fill the weekly rehearsals, like this one, one of our favorites, which Prine wrote a few decades back.
As reported earlier, “One Red Rose” is a song that an old band mate, the late Roger Samples, got enamored of as soon as he heard it on John’s then-new 1980 Storm Windows album.
How the Song Got Floodified
The Eighties were a time of change for us. Rog was ending his time with The Flood, the band he helped form nearly a decade earlier. That’s because he and his new wife, Tammy, and their young family were moving from their native West Virginia to the green hills of Mount Sterling, Ky., a hundred miles to the west.
But before he and the brood hit the trail, Rog taught the rest of the guys the tune and played it for the folks gathered for the last of the Bowen Bashes in September 1981, as heard in the video below:
Back then, The Flood never worked out a full arrangement of the song, and honestly the rest of us soon forgot it. Or we thought we did. But then a few years ago, Charlie Bowen woke up from a sound sleep grinning at a dream he had just had in which he thought he heard Roger singing that old song again.
Here’s brief audio of Charlie relating that very story at a gig a while back:
Nowadays we do “One Red Rose” as a little three-minute reunion, both with Roger and with John.
More Prine Music?
Meanwhile, want to hear more Flood renditions of John Prine songs? Gotcha covered. Not long ago, we released a special John Prine Memorial Show. Click the image below to check it out.
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Our rendering of this ancient bittersweet song of love and loss dates back more than 45 years now. But each times the band plays it, it seems as new and fresh as a summer evening.
According to Flood lore, our version of this classic Appalachian folk song hearkens back to a hot summer’s night at the Bowen House in the early 1980s.
Over beers and sandwiches, Flood co-founders Roger Samples and Charlie Bowen sat at the kitchen table trading daydreams, lies and memories, interspersing them with songs, new and old.
At some point Rog started playing a melody that he was working out for a possible original song. But right after he laid out his chord sequence, Charlie started singing the lyrics of “Come All Ye Fair and Tender Maidens” as he remembered them from an old Jean Ritchie album.
“Huh!” Rog said with grin. “Who knew my new tune already had words!”
For more on the back story of this wonderful old folk song, see our earlier Flood Watch article by clicking here.
More Flood Yarns?
A band that has been around as long as ours has many stories and yarns that form Flood lore and legends. Often between the tunes at jam sessions, rehearsals and public performances, someone in the group feels compelled to tell a tale, and if there’s a recorder running, it is saved for the ages.
The “Stories” section of the band’s website contains a linked index to the stories we’ve saved this way, inviting you to click in and enjoy the ride. Some of the stories are about specific songs, and there are even dozens of jokes. Click here to check it all out.
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Tunes in The Flood repertoire are always subject to re-evaluation and rehabilitation. Perhaps a new key will freshen it up. Maybe there are new verses that can be sung. A new rhythm? A new chord or two?
“Ready for the Times to Get Better,” the Allen Reynolds song that Randy Hamilton brought to the table a few years ago, is just such a song.
About the Song
As reported here earlier, the tune already had very long journey to Floodlandia. The first time it was played in our band room was about 15 years ago on a mellow autumn night when Randy and his buddy Paul Martin dropped in to jam with us.
Neither man was a member of The Flood yet — Randy would join the following year and Paul a few years after that — but their song was the hit of the evening (as reported in that week’s Flood podcast).
However, “Ready for the Times to Get Better” didn’t work its way into our repertoire until a few years ago when Danny Cox happened to start picking it between songs on the night’s practice list.
The jaunty melody really jingled in our memory and Dan and Randy got together to woodshed a little, working it out. And since then band had been honing its arrangement, Sam polishing his harmonica solo, Jack and Charlie smoothing out their respective drum and banjo rhythms.
The Tommy Emmanuel-Doc Watson Effect
The song’s evolution in the band room took another turn last month when a Flood hero saluted another Flood hero with a special release from his first solo album in 10 years.
Grammy-winning guitarist Tommy Emmanuel’s Living in the Light is a virtuosic blend of acoustic pop, jazz, classical and roots music.
Most of the performances on Living in the Light were recorded in one or two takes, exuding the sense of joy and wonder in these sonic explorations.
One track on the album — what he listed as “Waiting for the Times to Get Better” — has special meaning for Emmanuel, who in early March chose the 103rd anniversary of the late Doc Watson’s birth to release a video of the song he learned from Doc’s work.
“When I heard Doc Watson sing this song,” he told Bluegrass Today, “I knew I should try to do the same. I love his voice and guitar playing so much — it’s so honest. If you look up the word ‘honesty’ in the dictionary, there’s a picture of Doc!
“I wanted to do a tribute in my own way. ‘Ready for the Times to Get Better’ is my attempt at singing a message. It’s simple. We are all waiting for times to get better in our world, and singing seems to help me get through these tough times.”
Meanwhile, when our Danny Cox listened to the track, he heard something else: a chord or two that were different from previous versions. Gently, Danny brought that Emmanuel effect to The Flood’s take on the tune, and that’s where its Floodifying stands today.
For the back story of this great Allen Reynolds composition, see our earlier Flood Watch article by clicking here.
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The Flood started playing around with hokum music — those good old jug band tunes from the 1920s — about a half century ago, but it took another 20 years for us to feel confident enough to try to write one of those kind of songs ourselves.
Charlie Bowen started putting this tune together back in the 1990s, but then it took another 30 years for us to feel like we could play it.
In fact, the song didn’t really start coming together until Jack Nuckols joined the band. Who knew that the spark we were waiting for was Jack’s spectacular spoon playing to finally reach that jug band junction? See what you think.
Night of the Broken Spoons
Long-time Flood Watch readers will recall that when Jack first sat in with the band nearly three years ago now, we passed him the house bongos to play, but then when a jug band tune came around, we put spoons in his hands.
Jack was rocking it hard, and we were digging on those rhythmic riffs. But then, just as we were fixing to turn it over to him for a solo, darned if those poor spoons didn’t break in his hands. Now, Jack was apologetic, but — as you can hear here in that week’s podcast — the rest of us all thought it was a hoot! What better way to end a song called, “Tear It Down”?
(By the way, now that Jack is a full-time Floodster, we got him a more industrial-strength set of spoons, ones that can take a pounding as you can hear this week.)
About the Song
For more on the back story of “Lovin’ You Would be So Good for Me,” check out this earlier Flood Watch article.
More Hokum, You Say?
Meanwhile, if all this has put you in the mood for a little more juggery in your jaunty Friday, visit the Hokum channel of the band’s free Radio Floodango music streaming service.
There you’ll find several dozen randomized tracks of the band playing those jolly jug band tunes that inspired this Bowen composition. Click here to give it a spin.
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Here’s a little festive Floodery to help you celebrate this first bright, sunny Saturday of Spring 2026. Pamela Bowen recorded these four minutes at this week’s rehearsal at the Bowen House with the band enjoying its newest favorite Tom Waits song.
Waits wrote “Come On Up to the House” back in 1999 but, as reported here earlier, The Flood is late to the party on that one. We never heard the song until late last year when it was featured in the closing credits of the latest “Knives Out” movie, Wake Up Dead Man. But we’re making up for lost time, having a ball with its sorta post-apocalyptic gospel vibe.
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Most love songs are about young love, and of course that is special, but really it’s nothing compared to love that has aged like fine wine. Here’s a song to all those champion life-long lovers out there.
About the Song
Charlie Bowen wrote “The Answer Is You” while reflecting on the decades that he and Pamela have been “in each other’s care,” the lyrics say.
Beyond that, the song also was inspired by all those couples who have passed in and out of the Bowen House over the years, scores of folks who are part of The Flood’s loving family.
This song actually has been in the wings for some 15 years now, patiently waiting for its Flood debut. Only recently did we realize that what it needed was Jack’s tasty rhythm and Danny’s definitive guitar stylings. They’ve certainly made it worth the wait.
More Charlie Tunes?
Meanwhile, if you’d like more tunes from Br’er Bowen, check out the Charlie Channel on the band’s free Radio Floodango music streaming service.
Click here to give it a spin.
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This tune — “July, You’re a Woman” — entered the Floodisphere in the first hours of The 1937 Flood’s half-century origin story.
As reported earlier, this lovely John Stewart composition is one of the songs that Charlie Bowen brought to his very first jam session with the late David Peyton at the 1973 New Year’s Eve where The Flood was born.
For that first year, the song limped along as just a duet by Dave and Charlie. It started coming into its own, though, as the Family Flood began to expand. First, Roger Samples returned to the Huntington area from the East and joined the band, bringing his formable guitar chops and vocals. A year later, fiddler Joe Dobbs came on board, and the rest is Flood history.
Debut at the Bash
”July, You’re a Woman” got its debut as a Flood feature that fall at the next edition of the Bowen Bashes, the semiannual music parties at which The Flood became the house band. Audio of that inaugural 1975 performance is captured in the video below:
The song remained a Flood favorite throughout the Bash years, but when the band went into an extended hiatus in the 1980s, the song seemed to go with it.
“July” Redux
In fact, “July” completely disappeared from The Flood’s collective memory until three decades later.
Only recently, in a bit of nostalgia for those halcyon days of the band’s birth, did Charlie start revisiting some of the group’s earliest tunes. Topping the list was one of his favorites, that old John Stewart song.
It’s grin-worthy to imagine how much Dave, Roger and Joe would appreciate the latest generation of Floodsters and their kind treatment of this first tune, as heard at last week’s rehearsal.
And Remember “These Boys”
And speaking of origin stories, remember that the Huntington premiere of Randy Yohe’s award-winning film, “These Boys” — tracing The Flood’s 50-year story — happens March 20, 2026, at the Foundry Theatre at City Hall, 800 Fifth Avenue.
In case you missed it earlier, click here to read Jim Casto’s Herald-Dispatch advance on the showing.
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As we were packing up following our most recent gig at Bahnhof last month, an old friend stepped up with a question.
“Say,” he said, “where’d’ya get that melody for ‘Pallet on the Floor’? I’ve been hearing that song for years, but I never heard it played the way you did it tonight. D’y’all write that?”
“Well,” we said, thinking fast, “yes! Yes, we did! Do you want to buy it? You know, everything we’re wearin’ is for sale!”
He took a step or two back. (We get that a lot.)
Seriously, though. Did we come up with that melody? Damned if we know!
Origin Stories
As reported here earlier, The Flood drew inspiration for its version of “Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor” from Rolf Cahn’s singing of the song on a Folkways album that he made with Eric von Schmidt way back in 1961.
In his liner notes for the disc, Cahn said he and Eric adapted their rendition from various performances of the song, including Jelly Roll Morton’s Library of Congress taping of it in 1938.
When we first listened to Cahn and von Schmidt’s seminal Folkways album a half a century ago, we just took Rolf at his word. However, all these years later — with YouTube having so many of those classic old albums easily accessible online — we can check Cahn’s sources.
And guess what?
We can find no other early recording — not Morton’s, not Mississippi John Hurt’s 1928 version of the song, not Virginia Liston’s first waxing of it three years before that — that used Rolf’s imaginative rendering.
And, of course, there is no one around anymore to ask — Rolf died in 1994, Eric in 2007 — but from our research we’re now prepared to conclude that the tune was their own creation (perhaps improvised on the spot on that night at Folkways when their record was made).
And We’re Not Done Yet
Meanwhile, our band has — as usual — added its own touches to the tune. As Flood folks started doing “Pallet” a couple of decades ago, they steadily honed and noodled with the melody, in particular stirring in some of the classic jazz variations they had heard.
Sidney Bechet’s 1940 recording comes to mind, as well as Louis Armstrong’s 1954 performance of “Atlanta Blues,” in which W.C. Handy famously borrowed from traditional bits and pieces of “Pallet on Your Floor.”
So….?
In the end then, the question remains: Did we write this tune?
And the answer is still … uh…. damned if we know….
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Here’s a song that we likely wouldn’t even know about were it not for the persistence and curiosity of a researcher who was far from an ordinary young woman of her time.
Born in 1892 in Paducah, Ky., into the family of a prominent U.S. congressman, Mary Guthrie Wheeler was destined from the start for adventure.
Rather than settling into a quiet, conventional life, she embraced the extraordinary, serving, for instance, as an American Red Cross nurse in France during World War I and earning a Medal of Gratitude.
Song Catching
But her most enduring adventure took place back home along the bustling Ohio and Tennessee rivers, doing work that would contribute to America’s understanding of its own music.
As a little girl, Mary was often taken by her nanny, Susan Collins, down to the Paducah riverfront to watch the comings and goings of the majestic steamboats. As they walked, Collins, who had worked as a cook and chambermaid on the rivers, usually sang to the youngster, planting the seeds of what became a lifelong fascination.
Decades later, Wheeler realized that the river culture of her youth was rapidly fading. By then armed with a music degree from the Cincinnati Conservatory, Mary set out on a bold mission: to preserve the songs and stories of the roustabouts of the packet boat era.
Mary’s methods were as intrepid as she was. Venturing into the neighborhoods of former river workers, she refused modern audio equipment offered to her by famous folklorists like Alan Lomax. Instead, Wheeler embraced a deeply personal approach. She sat with singers in their homes, writing down their lyrics and committing the melodies to memory, then racing back to her desk to transcribe the musical notation.
This Song’s Story
It is because of her devotion to detail that we know songs like “Alberta, Let Your Hair Hang Low,” published in her 1944 book Steamboatin’ Days.
As reported here earlier, Mary’s curiosity led her one late afternoon to the street of a former river worker named Gabriel Hester. Mary was welcomed by his wife to wait on their porch, and soon she was treated to Gabe singing the haunting melody of “Alberta.”
Between verses, Hester also told stories. He recalled, for instance, how roustabouts usually sang while they worked. Sometimes, as the music drifted up, steamboat passengers would drop coins from the upper decks in appreciation.
Here, from a recent Flood rehearsal, we offer our own appreciation of Gabe Hester’s song.
More Back Stories?
Flood Watch does a mess of song catching itself, of course. If you’d like to see and hear what we’ve learned about the history of other songs in the band’s eclectic repertoire, visit our free “Song Stories” department.
There you can browse songs by their titles or by the time periods in which they were written and/or discovered.
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 love how this song, which Randy Hamilton brought the band nearly a decade ago now, continues to boldly represent a new direction in Appalachian music.
Perspective, Then….
For decades, bluegrass music played it safe when singing about the American Civil War. It generally stuck to well-worn tales of shared heartbreak, ruined farms and missing home, while conveniently ignoring the brutal realities of slavery. During the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, the music even took a more startling detour into full-blown Confederate nostalgia, romanticizing the Old South.
But “Can You Run?” is part of what scholar Carter W. Claiborne of North Carolina State University considers a brave new wave of songs that are finally shaking up that sanitized narrative.
… Now
Written by Eastern Kentucky’s own Chris Stapleton, the song shatters the genre’s old boundaries. Instead of being just another wistful ballad about a homesick rebel soldier, “Can You Run” takes listeners down what Claiborne calls an “emancipationist path.”
There's smoke down by the river Hear the cannon and the drum I've got one thing to ask you, honey — Can you run?
Writing recently in Gettysburg College’s Journal of the Civil War Era, Claiborne calls Stapleton’s song a cultural reset for the entire genre by shining a spotlight on the lived experiences of enslaved people.
You know I hate to ask so late But the moment's finally come And there won't be time to change your mind. Can you run?
“Modern bluegrass,” Claiborne writes, “has taken up a more balanced approach to the Civil War, incorporating African American and Unionist perspectives, and finally corrected the reconciliationist view with the emergence of emancipationist music.”
For more about the song and about its composer, Chris Stapleton, see our earlier Flood Watch article, by clicking here.
More from Randy?
And if all this has you in the mood for more music from Randy Hamilton, check out the Randy Channel on the band’s free Radio Floodango music streaming service.
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
When this Tom Waits song turned up during the closing credits of the latest “Knives Out” movie, Wake Up Dead Man, we heard shouts from all around the Floodisphere: “Whoa! What a great tune that would be for The Flood!”
We agree. We only wish we’d thought of it earlier. After all, “Come On Up to the House” has been around for more than a quarter of a century, appearing as the closing track on Waits’ 1999 Grammy-winning Mule Variations album.
Oh, but how our late co-founder Dave Peyton would have loved to have had a piece of this goofy/gritty gospel groove!
A Little Waitsian Exegesis
Tom Waits, one of the world’s smartest songwriters, created a tune chock full of literary and philosophical references, as well as clever cultural shout-outs.
Country music lovers, for instance — at least those with long memories — will recognize a kiss being tossed in Tom’s repeated line in the chorus: “The world is not my home, I’m just passing through.”
Don’t get it? Think all the way back to 1962 and to the great Jim Reeves crooning:
This world is not my home, I’m just a-passin’ through My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue. The angels beckon me from heaven’s open door And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.
But ”Come On Up to the House” has more on its agenda than simply quoting 60-year-old classics. Waits surely is the only songwriter in the house to zip from 20th century country cool to 17th century political philosophy.
What? It’s true. By the second verse, the lyrics are reaching back to source material predating Jim Reeves by a good three centuries. Philosophy students perk up when “House” takes a moment to direct our attention to Thomas Hobbes’ famously dark assessment of human life: “Nasty, brutish and short.”
A Peyton-Worthy Punch Line
The song’s funniest, sassiest lines — the ones Dave Peyton certainly would have relished — have the most obscure provenance. Who doesn’t smile when Waits’ lyrics get to this entreaty:
Come down off the cross — We can use the wood!
This bit of irreverent humor generally is attributed to the late comedian/satirist Bill Hicks, whom Waits once described as being “like a reverend waving a gun around.”
While there’s no evidence that the “cross/wood” lines are original with Hicks — some think Lenny Bruce might have fashioned them a couple of decades earlier — it is for sure that Bill popularized the comment in his stand-up routines in the 1980s and early 1990s.
And we do know that Tom Waits is a big Bill Hicks fan. In fact, a few years ago when someone asked him to compile a list of his all-time favorite albums, Tom put Hicks’ 1990s Rant in E Minor in his top 20.
Waits on Waits
Finally, “Come On Up to the House” also has a sample of Tom Waits sampling Tom Waits.
The song’s line “whipped by the forces that are inside of you” was used in another Waits’ song — “Spidey’s Wild Ride” — released on 2006’s Orphans, Brawlers, Bawlers & B*s* album. (This album compiled outtakes that were recorded from 1984 to 2005, so it is possible that song was written before “Come on Up to the House.”)
For certain we know that a variation on the line came up in a 2002 newspaper article. Austin Chronicle writer Margaret Moser, interviewing Tom over the phone, asked the songwriter where he was as they spoke.
“I’m out on my own recognizance in the day room,” Waits replied, “gluing pieces of macaroni on cardboard and painting it gold. After that I get to make a belt that says, ‘Whipped by the forces within me’ on the back.”
Ah, aren’t we all, Tom? Aren’t we all…?
More Gospel from The Flood?
If all this has you craving a little gospelizing by the boys in the band, remember The Gospel Hour playlist in The Flood’s free Radio Floodango music streaming service. To read all about it, 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
We’re setting the time machine back 20 years to a snowy Saturday night in Charleston.
The Flood was on stage at the West Virginia Cultural Center for a FOOTMAD (“Friends of Old-Time Music and Dance”) concert, sharing the bill with another great band, Stewed Mulligan.
As reported here earlier, it had been a fun evening of jug band songs and general silliness, blues and fiddle tunes and old-time string band music, so when Michelle Hoge started a classic 1940s jazz standard, a hush fell over the audience.
In seconds, people were softly humming along, then they smiled so much during Doug Chaffin’s sweet mandolin solo that he had to take a second chorus.
Finally, by the time Michelle got to the end of the number, people were on the feet to cheer her. What a sweet memory.
About the Song
A celebrated ballad that successfully bridged the gap between 1940s R&B and 1960s pop, “Since I Fell for You” evolved from a modest hit into a timeless standard.
Pianist/bandleader Buddy Johnson in late 1945 wrote the song that his publisher categorized as a “jump blues.”
Johnson famously had a passion for classical music but played to the tastes of his Southern audiences andc composed the song for his sister, Ella Johnson, to sing.
While their original recording had some impact, it was Annie Laurie’s 1947 version — recorded with Paul Gayten — that attracted serious attention, reaching No. 3 on the Billboard “Race Records” chart.
The song found its definitive voice, though, in 1963 thanks to singer Lenny Welch, who was familiar with the song through a 1954 doo-wop cover by The Harptones and suggested it to Archie Bleyer, the president of Cadence Records.
When Bleyer bought the original sheet music, Welch was surprised to find a distinct piano introduction that had been omitted from the versions he had heard previously. This recovered intro became a highlight of Welch’s recording.
Recorded on Aug. 13, 1963, Welch’s version broke out in California markets before sweeping across the U.S. It peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 3 on the Easy Listening chart, selling over a million copies.
Welch’s smooth, middle-of-the-road vocals cemented the song’s status as a pop classic. Since then, the song has attracted covers across the genres, including jazz greats like Dinah Washington, country stars like Charlie Rich and Ronnie Milsap and contemporary icons like Bonnie Raitt.
Further Floodifying the Song
While the Feb. 11, 2006, show featured in the audio at the start of this report was The Flood’s first public performance of the song, “Since I Fell for You” stayed in the band’s repertoire for years. However, its title didn’t always come readily to mind. Click the button below for a funny exchange at a rehearsal a few years later:
Meanwhile, a dozen years after the song’s Flood debut at FOOTMAD, the band was back in Charleston, this time at Taylor Books, where Pamela Bowen shot this video:
Framing Michelle’s vocals were solos by Floodster Emeritus Paul Martin and guest artist Jim Rumbaugh.
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
Our Randy Hamilton was born to sing songs like this. He and Danny Cox brought us “Spooky” last summer and we’ve been loving it ever since.
Especially when we added Sam St. Clair’s funky harmonica and Jack Nuckols’ tasty percussion.
About the Song
As reported here earlier, while The Classics IV made the lyrics famous with a chart-topper in the fall of 1967, the story of “Spooky” began several years earlier in an Atlanta club. Following a show sometimes in 1965, saxophonist Mike Sharpe (Shapiro) and his band mate pianist Harry Middlebrooks Jr. began riffing on the George Gershwin classic, “Summertime.”
As they improvised, they realized they had stumbled upon something special. As they continued, the duo developed their own melody, to which Sharpe randomly assigned the name “Spooky.”
The original version was recorded as a jazz instrumental featuring strange high voices to enhance the eerie vibe; it eventually peaked at No. 57 on the U.S. charts in January 1966.
Sharpe and Middlebrooks initially thought the song’s life cycle ended there, but a year later, The Classics IV added those lyrics about that “spooky little girl like you,” propelling the track to No. 3 on the Billboard 100.
Harry’s Story
Meanwhile, as “Spooky” was conquering the airwaves, co-writer Harry Middlebrooks was entering one of the most high-energy phases of his career: touring with Elvis Presley. It was the fall of 1970 when Middlebrooks received a call from Elvis’s producer, Felton Jarvis, inviting him to join The King’s first tour in 10 years.
Middlebrooks served a unique dual role on the road: he performed as part of the opening act to warm up the crowd and sang tenor in the backup quartet, providing the vocal harmonies essential to Elvis’s ‘70s sound.
In a moment of professional synergy, Elvis, who was fond of “Spooky,” actually performed a cover of the Sharpe-Middlebrooks’ hit during various live shows and rehearsals in 1970.
Beyond his most famous composition, Middlebrooks established himself as a prolific figure in the entertainment industry. He composed for television and penned more 300 tunes recorded by such diverse artists as Tom Jones, Liberace and The Oak Ridge Boys.
Middlebrooks recorded several albums for Reprise and Capitol Records and established himself on the club scene in Southern California, eventually singing at more 80 clubs.
He became an in-demand session and backup singer for Neil Diamond, Anne Murray, Marty Robbins and others. In particular, he relished his seven-year run backing Glen Campbell for his Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe concerts.
Another Helping of Randy Tunes?
So, has today’s podcast got you hankering for more tunes from Randy Hamilton? Coming right up!
Just drop by the free Radio Floodango music streaming service and click into the Randy Channel for a randomized playlist of Hamilton-centric songs from The Flood repertoire. Or just click here to take the express route!
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 fun of playing some songs is that we just never know what we’re going to hear.
This George Gershwin piece has been like that ever since Danny Cox brought us better chords for it a year or so ago. Now the song is like a shiny little red convertible parked in the garage just waiting for the next sunny day.
You and your buddies pile in, not knowing where you’re going, just enjoying the company and the sights and the sounds of each other’s laughter. Hop in! We’re going for a joy ride!
About the Song
As reported earlier, “Lady Be Good” has been a perennial party favorite for more than a century now.
Nineteen-Twenty-Four was a watershed year for Gershwin. After spending more than a decade pounding the pavement in New York’s Tin Pan Alley, he composed his landmark "Rhapsody in Blue." Then, alongside his brother Ira, George scored his first major Broadway hit, the musical comedy Lady Be Good, which ran for more than 300 performances.
The enduring significance of the show’s title tune, "Lady Be Good," lies in its rare ability to transcend musical eras. A unique entry in the Great American Songbook, it beautifully bridged two distinct jazz ages, surviving the transition from the loose Dixieland style of the Roaring Twenties to the smooth swing sound of the 1930s.
A favorite among jazz legends as diverse as Charlie Parker and Lester Young, the song’s rich history also includes interpretations by vocal icons like Ella Fitzgerald and Mel Tormé.
For more on the back story of this song, see this earlier Flood Watch entry.
More Floodifaction?
And if this has you hungry for a little more of the band’s jazzier selections, drop by the free Radio Floodango music streaming feature and click on the “Swingin’” Channel.
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
Some songs just seem to go right to the heart of what connects us all, especially when the subject is hard times.
This song from a recent Flood rehearsal is often considered a classic example of the old notion of singing the blues to get rid of the blues. Historically the tune also represented liminal moments for two distinctively different musical artists.
About the Song
As noted in an earlier Flood Watch article, Ray Charles wrote and recorded “Hard Times (Who Knows Better Than I?)” in the mid-1950s during a period of heavy creative output at Atlantic Records.
But the song languished in the Atlantic vault until the September 1961 release of The Genius Sings The Blues, a highly praised compilation of some of Charles’s earlier singles along with some previously unreleased stuff.
While Brother Ray rarely spoke at length about composing these tracks, the origin of “Hard Times” seems deeply rooted in his personal history, especially his relationship with his mother, Aretha Robinson, who died when he was still a teenager.
The song also is another marker for those who follow the Ray Charles story. By the early 1960s, Charles had largely stopped writing his own material to focus on interpreting others’ work, making “Hard Times” one of his last significant original compositions.
The Eric Clapton Connection
Three decades later, “Hard Times” marks a period of transition for a great artist of the next generation.
Eric Clapton, having recently overcome his battles with drug addiction, viewed his 1989 Journeyman recording sessions as a way to further master his craft, focusing on his love for blues.
The lyrics of “Hard Times,” which deal with personal struggle and perseverance, resonated with that personal journey.
The song has stayed in the Clapton repertoire. It was later featured on his 1991 live album 24 Nights, recorded at the Royal Albert Hall. More recently in 2025, he revisited it, playing on a cover for Nathan East’s collaborative album with his son Noah, titled Father Son.
For more of the back story of ”Hard Times,” check out this earlier Flood Watch article.
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
Sometimes the chemistry’s right, the stars align — however you want to say it — and the best song of the night is one you didn’t even plan to play.
At a recent rehearsal, for instance, the band came in with a number of tunes to focus on. Among them were new songs the guys were just starting to work on. Others were old familiar numbers that they were polishing up to include in the next recording session for the new album.
Progress was made in the first hour or so on each of these fronts. Then between songs, on an impulse, Charlie Bowen reached for his resonator guitar. As you’ll hear in this track, while the guys were chatting, he started noodling on the strings with his slide.
Suddenly they found themselves playing a tune that hasn’t popped up for a while at the weekly rehearsals, and just like that they were sharing their favorite moment of the entire night.
About the Song
As reported earlier, “Driving Wheel” was written by Canadian folksinger David Wiffen for his self-titled debut album on Fantasy Records back in 1970.
Alas, the album received spotty promotion so the song was not widely known until it later appeared on Tom Rush’s own self-titled album, his first for Columbia Records.
Since then, “Driving Wheel” has become something of a signature song for Rush, still today regularly making the set list for his shows around the country. Other artists also have covered the song over the years, notably David Bromberg (who 50 years ago played dobro on Rush’s classic rendition) as well as Roger McGuinn and The Cowboy Junkies.
For more about the song’s back story, see this earlier Flood Watch article.
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
Redbud trees and mockingbirds, honeysuckle and sassafras. For many a West Virginian, these are emblems of home.
And pecan pie. You can’t forget pecan pie.
But you gotta be careful how you say it. How you pronounce those words — PEE-con puh-aye, y’un’stan’ — tells us a lot. If you say, puhCAN … well, yeah, we’ll still know what you’re talking about, but we’ll also know you’re not one of us.
How the Song Came to Be
Such Appalachian icons and shibboleths were much on Charlie Bowen’s mind as he wrote this song recently, though the real impetus for “Pecan Pie & Sassafras Tea” was a story that his grandma told him a lifetime ago.
Grandma Bowen — “Hattie” to everybody on Tyler Mountain — grew up on Eighteen Mile Creek along the edge of West Virginia’s Mason and Putnam counties. Wise in the ways of the woods, she knew her weather signs and what roots to harvest for tonics in the spring and fall, what barks to brew for colds and headaches and other complaints.
Hattie also knew her animals. She used to caution, for instance, about telling secrets around mockingbirds, because, well, those darn birds? why, they’d tell them!
Tickled at the notion of a secret-telling mockingbird and imagining it making long-distance connections among different sets of lovers, Charlie set to writing this song.
Melodic Inspiration
Its melody has Appalachian roots as well.
As part of his current banjo quest, which now has been ongoing about 2 1/2 years, Bowen at one point came across the old tune called “Lazy John,” which comes from the playing of influential Monticello, Ky., fiddler Clyde Davenport.
Davenport, who died in 2020 at age 98, once said that he in turn learned the tune from a radio broadcast in the mid-1940s, specifically a recording by Texas musician Johnny Lee Wills (brother of Bob Wills) and his western swing band.
Now, Bowen has yet to bring that song into his repertoire (apparently John’s not the only lazy one in this story!), but twists and turns in Davenport’s playing inspired the melody that Charlie ultimately put together for “Pecan Pie & Sassafras Tea.” We hope you enjoy it.
More from Charlie?
If this little excursion has you thinking that a little more of Charlie’s tunes would further enhance your Flood Friday, remember there’s a randomized Bowen playlist in the band’s free Radio Floodango music streaming service.
Click here to reach the Charlie 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
Our guitarist Danny Cox paints pictures with his sound. He has a positively uncanny capacity for discovering ways to bring out the colors and textures in all kinds of melodies and to plant stories in the minds of everyone who hears.
Just listen to his treatment of this rich old Sonny Burke composition, finding all kinds of new magic and nuance in this poignant melody.
About the Song
As reported earlier, “Black Coffee,” written in 1948, spent the first decade of its life as a darling of vocalists. Recording it, for instance, revamped the careers of both Sarah Vaughan and Peggy Lee as their fans grooved on Paul Francis Webster’s sparse, evocative lyrics.
But composer Burke knew the potential of his melody as well; he himself performed it on alto sax in 1948. However, about decade passed before the song started getting serious attention as a jazz instrumental. That’s because it was just what a young Ray Charles was looking for.
While Brother Ray rarely singled out “Black Coffee” in interviews, he spoke extensively about the artistic philosophy that informed his instrumental treatments during that era.
His decision to record “Black Coffee” instrumentally for The Great Ray Charles album was a deliberate effort to be recognized as a serious jazz musician, not just an R&B star on the radio.
For that project, his second studio album, Charles avoided his signature vocal style in order to highlight his piano blues with all those Art Tatum-influenced flourishes. For the “Black Coffee” session (April 30, 1956), he deviated from his usual big-band horn arrangements and stripped the performance down to a trio. He was joined on the date by Oscar Pettiford on bass and Joe Harris on drums.
Later in his autobiography, Brother Ray, he noted that these sessions allowed him to explore the chord structures of this fundamental jazz standard.
Other Renditions
After Ray Charles’s performance, other artists took “Black Coffee” on instrumental outings, such as Bobby Scott (1959), Earl Hines (1964) and Earl Grant (1968).
Meanwhile, a wide and wildly varied group of singers also have served up “Black Coffee” in the 70 years since its introduction, from Canned Heat (on its 2003 Friends in the Can album) to the Pointer Sisters on 1984’s That’s a Plenty album.
k.d. lang’s “darkly twangy” version from her 1988 album Shadowland is considered an essential track in her discography, bringing a new interpretation to the song.
Women have been especially attracted to the song, from Petula Clark (1968), Sinead O’Connor (1992) and Rita Cooledge and Gladys Knight (both 1996) to Maria Muldaur (2002) and Marianne Faithful ( 2008).
For more about the song’s history, see our earlier Flood Watch article by clicking here.
More from Danny
Meanwhile, speaking of more renditions, would you like some more Danny Cox tunes for your Flood Friday? We gotcha covered. Visit our free Radio Floodango music streaming service and give the Danny Channel a listen.
Click here to set the Danny playlist in motion.
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 the end of his life, Billy Mayhew might well have wished he’d never written that damned song.
Oh, it was a hit, all right — the only one the old Baltimore vaudeville piano man ever wrote — introduced to the world by 1930s radio superstar Kate Smith and later jazzed up by the great Fats Waller who got everyone humming the thing.
Still, within months of the publication of “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie,” Billy and his wife and co-author Margaret Konig Mayhew were dragged into court with a demand that they share the song’s mounting royalties.
How the Song Came to Be
Billy wrote “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie” in the early 1930s, but after five years of hoofing it around to pitch it in New York’s Tin Pan Alley, he could find no one who wanted to publish it. According to later court documents, Mayhew was about to give up when in June 1935 he met Helen Meehan in the music department of the S.S. Kresge Company store in Baltimore.
For nearly two decades by then, Meehan had been employed as a sheet music buyer, meaning she had contacts in the publishing world. Right away, Helen went to bat for Billy, reaching out to representatives of music houses. In early 1936 she landed the song with Broadway publisher Donaldson, Douglas and Gumble, Inc. (If that name rings a bell, it might be because we met the firm’s founder Walter Donaldson back when we talked about his “My Blue Heaven” and again in the back story of his “Makin’ Whoopee.”)
When Donaldson published it, “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie” hit the big time. It was first recorded and released by Freddy Ellis and his orchestra, followed by Kate Smith and then Fats Waller. Dream come true. But before the year was out, Billy’s dream took a nasty turn.
The Court Case
In the Circuit Court of Baltimore City in late July 1936, Helen Meehan sued him, claiming Billy Mayhew himself had done a bit of lying when he promised to give her 50 percent of the royalties if she got the song published. After a two-year court fight, a decree was issued in Meehan’s favor, establishing her as a creditor for $7,163.10 (about $170,000 in today’s dollars). This decision was affirmed on appeal the following spring.
However, it appears only the lawyers profited from the case. While Helen Meehan successfully established her claim, she found it hard to collect. Her main obstacle was a representative of the song’s publisher, which placed an attachment on Mayhew’s royalties in New York as early as February 1937.
In a desperate attempt to stop that payment, Meehan filed an involuntary bankruptcy petition against the Mayhews, arguing that Billy and Margaret’s failure was a “preferential transfer.” But the U.S. District Court didn’t buy it, dismissing her petition and ruling that the publisher’s claim was based on a lien established years earlier and therefore was not a fresh act of bankruptcy.
The Last Decade
After that, we lose track of Helen, but Billy and Margaret Mayhew ended their days living and working at a brother-in-law’s boarding house and “truck farm.” Today, incidentally, the farm — located on Bar Neck Road in Cornersville, in Maryland’s Dorchester County — is listed on the state’s Inventory of Historic Properties, all because of its association with the song.
No more hit songs came from the couple, though they seem to have kept trying. For instance, the day after Christmas in 1940, Billy and Margaret filed copyright papers for a composition with an intriguing title: “Can’t Do a Thing with My Heart.” Alas, we find no indication that it was ever published or recorded.
Billy died Nov. 17, 1951, and Margaret died a month later. Both are buried in Baltimore’s Oak Lawn Cemetery.
The Song Lives On
The Mayhews wrote the song as a waltz, and that’s how Freddy Ellis’s orchestra performed it in its first recording.
The early performances — by Kate Smith, Ruth Etting, Vera Lynn, et al — played it straight (very straight).
But then also came Flood hero Fats Waller, who never played anything straight. Fats kicked the tune into 4/4 and gave it his signature blend of stride piano and irreverent, satirical humor. For instance, while the ladies Kate, Ruth and Vera all loyally sang the Mayhews’ original lyric “If you break my heart I’ll die,” Fats ad libbed, “If you break my heart, I’ll break your jaw!”
From Fats forward, the song that originated as a sappy Tin Pan Alley ballad got its groove on, transforming into a high-energy (often comedic) jazz performance for everyone for the Ink Spots (1942) and Billie Holiday (1949) to Jimmy Rushing (1955) and Tony Bennett (1964) to Steve Goodman (1975) and John Denver (1998).
Floodifying It
This song has rattled around in the Floodisphere for decades but only recently did we decide to give it a spin. Whaddaya think?
More Song Histories
Do you enjoy this back stories on the songs we play? We got a million of ‘em! Well, hundreds, anyway.
Drop by the free “Song Stories” archive — just click here to reach it — and you’ll find an alphabetized list of titles. Click on one to reach our take on that particular tune.
Or if you’d like to find songs from a specific decade, visit the archive’s “Tunes on a Timeline” department — click here! — to locate songs by their years of origin.
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
Wrapping up a recent Christmas party at which we had a houseful of friends and neighbors (including our buddy Jim Rumbaugh sitting in as a guest artist), The Flood unwrapped its new anthem to winter.
It is this mashup of “Moscow Nights” and “Greensleeves.” Today we make this performance our gift to you. Merry Christmas from the Floodisphere!
The Songs
Let’s talk about the bits and pieces that make up this jolly seasonal offering.
“Moscow Nights”
As reported earlier, “Moscow Nights” was composed in 1955 by Russian musician Vasily Solovyov-Sedoy. It was originally entitled “Leningrad Nights,” but, it being the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Ministry of Culture directed it be renamed to celebrate Moscow and directed 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, The melody didn’t hit the big time in the U.S. until 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.
But there is a lot more to this story. Like when The Chad Mitchell Trio’s controversially battled with the U.S. State Department over performing the song in foreign lands.
And like the time that Flood manager Pamela Bowen got kudos for performing the song in its original Russian during her folksinging days as a student at Marshall University.
Click here to read these and other “Moscow Night” yarns.
“Greensleeves”
The song’s musical team mate in this track — “Greensleeves” — probably is the oldest melody we know. It has been associated with Christmas ever since a century and half ago when the tune was set to the verse “What Child Is This?”
But the song originally wasn’t religious in nature at all. On the contrary, as reported here, its earlier lyrics told the story of a painful romantic conundrum (with some, uh, subtly salacious references).
Popular legend even has sometimes attributed the song’s composition to England’s King Henry VIII, who was said to have written it for the ill-fated Anne Boleyn. That association, though, is wrong, says author Lisa Colton in her book Angel Song: Medieval English Music in History.
Colton finds “Greensleeves” originated a generation later, during the reign of Henry’s daughter, Queen Elizabeth I. First published in 1580, the tune was used for a wide variety of 16th and 17th century broadside ballads.
And there’s much more to this back story as well. Click here to read it.
Reviewing 2025
This is our last podcast of the year. We look forward to roaring into 2026 with you all. Meanwhile, if you’d like to get a jump on your auld-lang-syning, you can tune into a randomized playlist of this year’s 52 podcasts via the band’s free Radio Floodango music streaming service.
Click here to give it a spin.
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It was 16 years ago tonight at the Christmas Eve-eve-eve party in the Bowen House that the late Dave Peyton gifted us with a classic rendition of his all-time favorite John Prine tune. And fortunately, Pamela Bowen had her camera running to preserve the video above.
“Come Back to Us, Barbara Lewis Hare Krishna Beauregard” was introduced on Prine’s 1975 Common Sense album, but the song didn’t really resonate with Br’er Dave until he heard it again about a dozen years later as the opening track on the John Prine Live album.
By that time, The Flood had gone in recess, as reported here earlier, but the song was still very much on David’s mind when the band reconvened in the mid-1990s, and “Barbara Lewis” then kept coming back to us in the years to come.
About the Song
The late John Prine said in the liner notes for that 1988 “live” album that he wrote “Barbara Lewis” in the summer of 1973 while he was touring Colorado ski towns with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott.
The lyrics were inspired, he said, by the “leftover hippies” he encountered in the Rocky Mountains, people who had drifted through various counterculture movements and religions without ever making it all the way to California.
It was, he said, as if they got to the Rockies and said, “God, I can’t get over that,” and just settled in.
Besides that, John added, “I had different friends of mine who went through the ‘60s, from being totally straight or greasers, then turned into hippies, and then into a religious thing. So I created this character who had done all those different things.”
About the title, Prine said he got the name Barbara Lewis from the R&B singer (”Hello Stranger,” 1963; “Baby, I’m Yours,”1965).
And the rest of the name of the character? “It just falls off the tongue really nicely,” John said, noting he often tried to match a syllable for each note. “I call it the Chuck Berry School of Songwriting. He’s got it so dead-on that you can just read his lyric, and that would be a melody.”
More John and More Dave
If this single song doesn’t completely satisfy your Flood needs right now, you can have many more helpings at the band website’s free Radio Floodango music streaming service.
For instance, if you’d like more Floodifying of John Prine songs, check out our John Prine Memorial playlist. Click below for the details:
Meanwhile, if you’d like to listen again to some of the many beloved tunes featuring our old buddy Dave Peyton, check out the David Channel.
Click here to give it a spin!
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Christmas is usually a pretty raucous time in our band room, with old friends coming back around and new friends ... well, new folks just starting to figure us out. Yes, indeed, we do tend to take those tidings of comfort and joy at their word.
And our holiday celebration is especially memorable if we can get that jolly ol’ Jim Rumbaugh back into the room, as we did at a recent festive gathering at the Bowen House. To make the season bright, we always try to get Jim doing his bluesy Christmas contribution, a song he calls, “Got My Yule Log Burnin’.”
Jim’s path to writing the tune began while he was working at his wife Donna’s greenhouse, which sold Christmas trees every year. As part of the business, Donna made wreaths, which required pieces of greenery. Jim was tasked with taking the reject trees and cutting off their branches so she could use them for the wreaths. This process left him with substantial pieces of pine log, typically five to seven feet long, which he then had to cut into foot-long pieces to be bundled and sold as Yule Logs.
While cutting these logs, Jim began pondering the purpose of the items he was creating, wondering if anyone actually burns a Yule Log.
“I thought, ‘I wonder if there’s a Yule log-burning song?’ and I started singing, ‘Got my Yule Log burning,’ which sounded a whole lot ‘Got my mojo working!’”
Well, after that, all that was needed was a bit of Christmas cheer and space for a couple of well-tempered harmonica breaks. Demonstrating the results, Jim got everyone in the room singing along, as you’ll hear here!
To Keep the Holidays Bright…
So, Merry Christmas from your friends in The Flood.
And for a little more fa-la-la-la-Flood in your festivities in this week’s countdown to Christmas, remember the Radio Floodango free music streaming service has this yuletide playlist.
Click here to give La Flood Navidad a spin!
More from the Righteous Mister Rumbaugh
Meanwhile, if today’s podcast has you wanting more helpings of Jim Rumbaugh’s bluesy offerings, you’re in luck! Jim is the star of a popular episode in the “Pajama Jams” video series that The Flood released back in 2021. Click below to check it out!
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 story goes that folkie John Denver was just 22 years old when he played at Arizona’s Lumber Mill Club in Scottsdale and met a girl named Bobbie Wargo.
The two had much in common. Both grew up in military families. Both were musicians and aspiring songwriters. Both were looking for love.
And love was what they found as they played together at her parents’ piano. It was for her that John wrote one of his first songs. And “For Bobbie” was to be the first original tune that Denver ever recorded.
I’ll walk in the rain by your side, I’ll cling to the warmth of your hand…
Bobbie Wargo may have contributed to the song’s lyrics; there is evidence that she also might have been the inspiration for his next song, “Leaving on a Jet Plane.”
(All of this was half a decade before John Denver met the iconic “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” recorded it and, as reported here earlier, became forever an honorary Mountaineer.)
“For Bobbie” was, as Denver later told writer Deborah Evans Price in American Songwriter magazine, “an early attempt to order my romantic thoughts.”
The Song’s Recording History
The song was first recorded by the Mitchell Trio under the truncated title of “For Bobbi” in 1965, the same year in which Denver joined the group, replacing founder Chad Mitchell who had moved on to a solo career.
The following year the song took a whole new turn when Mary Travers (of Peter, Paul & Mary) rechristened it “For Baby” and recorded it to honor her young daughter Erika.
Travers changed the meaning to reflect a mother’s love for her newborn, and this version gained significant popularity. The song appears on the 1975 Peter, Paul & Mommy, Too album as part of a medley entitled “Poem for Erika/For Baby”
That wasn’t PP&M’s first outing with it; nine years earlier, in 1966, “For Baby (For Bobbie)” appeared on the group’s sixth studio release called simply Album.
Meanwhile, Denver himself re-recorded the song — this time also listing it as “For Baby (For Bobbie)” — on his popular 1972 Rocky Mountain High, his first Top-10 album.
In the seven years between Denver’s first and second release of the song, a half dozen other artists covered “For Baby (For Bobbie)” including Bobby Darin (1966), Dion and the Belmonts (1967) and Anne Murray (1968).
Our Take on the Tune
One of the first tunes that Charlie Bowen and his cousin Kathy Castner did when they started singing together more than 30 years ago was Denver’s lullaby-like love song.
So it’s only natural that “For Baby (For Bobbie)” is in the mix whenever Kathy gets to make one of her rare trips from Cincinnati to Huntington to sit in with the band. Here’s a take on the tune from last weekend.
Since Flood harmonicat Sam St. Clair couldn’t make it that evening, we corralled the player whom Sam lovingly calls his “overstudy,” the incomparable Jim Rumbaugh, to sit it and bring some memorable solos.
And Now From the Wayback Machine…
Oh, and want a little trip down mem’ry lane? Here’s a video of a For Baby Moment that Pamela Bowen caught almost a decade and half ago:
From the summer of 2011 in the Bowen House, this performance is complete with sweet solos by Dave Peyton and Jacob Scarr.
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At a good rehearsal — and, heck, that’s just about every rehearsal nowadays — none of us really wants it to end.
Oh, sure, we get tired — two hours of hard picking take a toll — but as Gladys Knight used to say, none of us wants to be the first to say goodbye.
In fact, as you hear at the conclusion of this week’s podcast, which features the final tune of a recent rehearsal, we often even keep extending the ending, jockeying to be the one to play the last note.
The moment is always really fun if that last tune of the night is an especially goofy one, and you can’t get much goofier than “Yas Yas Duck.”
About the Song
This late 1920s hokum song came into The Flood’s life more than 40 years ago. In fact, it had its public debut at what turned out to the last of those semiannual music parties that birthed the band, as seen in this excerpt from the “Bowen Bash Legacy Films” series:
In those days — the above audio is from September 1981 — chasing down the history of these quirky little tunes was challenging. The World Wide Wide was still more than a decade away, so to suss out songs’ back stories, we had to rely on often sketchy liner notes on rare albums and on even rarer books covering esoteric genres.
We learned our version of the song from a 1973 Yazoo Records compilation called Tampa Red, Bottleneck Guitar (1928-1937), the same record we studied so we could cop other Tampa tunes like “What’s That Taste Last Gravy?” “Black Eyed Blues” and “No Matter How She Done It.”
Mastered by Nick Peris, the LP featured liner notes by Seattle bluesman John Miller who gave us no hint of the song’s colorful evolution. For years, we just assumed that it was another of Red’s collaboration with Georgia Tom Dorsey.
Only recently were we able to use web resources to determine that the song traces back to what Wikipedia characterizes as “a ‘whorehouse tune,’ a popular St. Louis party song,” first recorded in January 1929 by a great St. Louis piano pounder named James “Stump” Johnson. It would be four months later before Tampa Red and Georgia Tom recorded their version in Chicago.
For more about “Yas Yas Duck” (and all its various alternate names), check out our earlier Flood Watch article by clicking here.
Latest Floodification of The Duck
As you’ll hear on this track, this hokum classic, whether it comes at the beginning of an evening of music or at the end, is always good for a few laughs.
As noted above, it was 1981 when The Flood first publicly played the tune. But the song was still very much in Flood Consciousness 20 years later when the band made its first studio album. Click the button below to hear the album track from 2001:
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This song, while beautiful at any time of the year, is especially resonant at the dawn of a new holiday season. So this morning, as our Thanksgiving gift, here’s The Flood’s latest performance of the late Michael Peter Smith’s evocative “Spoon River.”
Thanksgiving, as a season celebrating the bonds of friends and families, is a particularly good time to appreciate a song that reminds us in the very first verse how “all our lives were entwined to begin with.”
As we noted an earlier in Flood Watch article, Smith once famously commented, “I like songs that delight in giving you a picture,” and “Spoon River” does that in spades, from images of riverboat gamblers and Union soldiers to the calico dresses in the attic along with Grandfather’s derringer case.
Thanksgiving gatherings often involve opening drawers, unlocking old doors and retelling stories to reconnect with ancestors through the objects they pass down.
And more. Our favorite lines, at the end of the second verse —
There are words whispered down in the parlor, a shadowy face. The morning is heavy with one more beginning ….
— evoke the way that memory itself seems to drift through a house during the holidays, the past present with the living.
May this song bring you joy and sweet memories as you come and ride through the morning.
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Here’s another tune that Danny Cox has brought to us from his decades of lovingly listening to Chet Atkins and Jerry Reed’s famous recordings.
One of Jerry’s composition, “Baby’s Coming Home” is a standout tune that was introduced on 1974’s landmark Chet Atkins Picks on Jerry Reed album.
As reported here earlier, Atkins and Reed were not only esteemed guitarists but also good friends who shared a profound musical chemistry. A major figure at RCA, Atkins was instrumental in bringing Reed to the label.
The album testified to Atkins’ continued endorsement of the younger man’s talent, showcasing interpretation of 10 of Reed’s unique and often humorous compositions.
Chet and Jerry were known for their distinct fingerpicking styles, drawing inspiration from pioneers like Merle Travis and incorporating their own original, complex techniques. This is what attracted Danny Cox to their work when he was still just a teenager learning to pick.
About the Song
Jerry Reed wrote “Baby’s Coming Home” around the time Chet was coming up with the plans for his 1974 tribute album. Atkins’ rendering of the song is the first track of the disc’s B side.
Incidentally Jerry himself performed on only two of the album’s tracks (”Squirrely” and “Mister Lucky,” and sadly not on “Baby’s Coming Home”). However, a few years later, he and Chet did pick the tune together on TV. That wonderful, light-hearted segment was preserved on this YouTube video:
A Muppet Moment
By the way, four years later, “Baby’s Coming Home” made a curious comeback. This time with a tuba-and-banjo-heavy Dixieland-flavored arrangement, the song was the soundtrack for a sketch called “Lunchtime” during Episode 316 of The Muppet Show. Check this out:
More Atkins-Reed Collaboration
Chet Atkins Picks on Jerry Reed reminded many fans of Chet’s Grammy-winning 1970 Me and Jerry release, an all-acoustic, instrumental album that featured the two buddies teamed up on a range of songs, from country and pop covers to original instrumental workouts.
Several decades later, this collaboration was followed by another celebrated joint effort, the 1993 Grammy-winning Sneakin’ Around album.
More from Danny?
If all this has you in the mood to put a little more Danny Cox into your Flood Friday, drop by the free Radio Floodango music streaming service and give the Danny Channel a spin.
Click here to check it out!
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
Educated ears in the summer of 1957 were still trying to decide if this new rock ’n’ roll thing was really music’s future or was just a passing fancy.
Two summers had passed by then since the new sound burst upon the American scene. The ear-opening “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley & His Comets was quickly followed by Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” and Little Richard’s “”Tutti Frutti.”
The following summer the rock kept rolling, when The King arrived. This new kid, Elvis Presley, topped the charts for weeks on end with “Heartbreak Hotel,” with “Hound Dog,” with “Don’t Be Cruel.”
But by 1957, the cigar-chomping bigwigs in the record company boardrooms still weren’t sure. Not sure sure, you understand.
The Summer Doldrums
After all, traditional pop crooners seemed to be staging a comeback. Perry Como (of all people!) hit No. 1 with “Round and Round.” Pat Boone scored with the languid “Love Letters in the Sand.” Debby Reynolds had a hit with “Tammy.” Holy schlock, Batman, even Elvis seemed to be getting goo-goo eyed all of a sudden with “(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear.”
So, the question in ‘57: where were summertime’s rebels? That year the cool kids had already packed up their beach towel and gone on back to school by the time rock’s Next Big Wave hit:
— Sept. 9, 1957, Buddy Holly and The Cricket, “That’ll Be the Day.”— Oct. 11, 1957, Everly Brothers, “Wake Up Little Susie.”— Oct. 21, 1957, Elvis, “Jailhouse Rock.”— Dec. 21, 1957, Danny and the Juniors, “At the Hop.”
But even before that fall, diehards could dig a little deeper in the radio playlist for up-and-coming rockers. Jerry Lee Lewis was howling away with “A Whole Lot of Shakin’.” Fats Domino was still down there somewhere with “I’m Walkin’.” Jackie Wilson was right on deck with “Reet Petite.”
About This Week’s Song
And languishing even further down on the summer music charts — oh, somewhere around No. 24 or so — was the subject of this week’s podcast. It’s The Flood’s favorite souvenir from the Summer of ‘57: The Coasters’ wonderful “(When She Wants Good Lovin’) My Baby Comes to Me.”
As reported here earlier, this winking and nodding Jerry Leiber-Mike Stoller composition was a minor hit for The Coasters. It did resurrect nine years later when a little known group called The Chicago Loop took it for a spin and got to No. 37 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
But in the Floodisphere, we much prefer a different pressing of the song released one year earlier.
Favorite folksinger Tom Rush’s 1965 self-titled debut Elektra album included a version of the tune accompanied by bassist Bill Lee along with John Sebastian (of The Lovin’ Spoonful) and Fritz Richmond (of The Jim Kweskin Jug Band.)
This track, captured at last week’s rehearsal, features the arrangement we’re working up to include on the new album when we start recording in the weeks ahead.
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
Fourteen years ago this week, The Flood had a wonderful evening with a local legend, a gentle soul named Mark Keen. Visiting from his Pittsburgh home, Mark sat in on harmonica for a rollicking evening of blues.
Growing up in Huntington, Mark and a long-time Flood buddy, guitarist Randy Brown, went all through school together here back in the ‘70s.
Mark didn’t get back to Huntington very often, but when he did, Randy brought him around to jam with The Flood on the evening of Nov. 9, 2011. The video above — shot by Flood manager Pamela Bowen — is a homage to that night.
The Keen Family
It was one of Mark’s rare visits back to his hometown since his father’s death. Leonard Keen died in 2009 at age 94 after nearly 50 years of running a fixture on Huntington’s 9th Street, Keen Jewelers.
Born in Cincinnati in 1914, Leonard served in the U.S. Navy and during the Great Depression worked for the federal Works Progress Administration.
In a story in his “Lost Huntington” column in The Herald-Dispathc, local historian James E. Casto quoted Keen as saying, “My wife was a native of Huntington. So during a visit to her parents, we decided that Huntington would be a good place to open a store.”
Keen and his wife Betty Ann moved from Louisville to Huntington and in April 1958, Mayor Harold Frankel helped cut the ribbon at their new store, which was located at 322 9th St. Exactly 20 years later, on April 16, 1978, after urban renewal forced the jewelry store to relocate, Frankel again did the honors, helping Keen cut the ribbon at a new location, just down the street at 419 9th St.
Leonard and Betty’s son Mark was born in 1952 and grew up in Huntington, a talented drummer and harmonica player who performed with bands here and later in the Pittsburgh area.
Mark’s Passing
After The Flood’s delightful jam that November evening at the Bowen House, we never got to see Mark again. A half dozen years later, he passed away at 65 at home in Oakmont, Pa., of natural causes.
Following a celebration of Mark, he was interred at Huntington’s Spring Hill Cemetery.
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
From a thousand miles away, Matt Whyte has been a Flood fan for at least a decade and a half, but until recently he was never in the same room with the band.
Instead, Matt always had to limit his Floodifying to singing along with the albums he received from his mom, JoAnn McCoy.
But he was attentive to his studies. We know that because last week when he and JoAnn finally traveled from their Bradenton, Fla., homes to reach the Bowen House for his first in-person Flood encounter, Matt was so well-versed that he had specific requests for tunes he’d like to hear.
Top of the List
His favorite? Matt has a particular affinity for “Didn’t He Ramble?” a tune that he learned from the band’s 2011 Wade in the Water album.
That rollicking century-old song relates the deeds and misadventures of a rambling ne’er-do-well named Buster:
Mama raised three fine sons, Buster, Bill and me, Buster was the black sheep of our little family….
The opening verse’s second couplet, though, is the one that most resonates with our young Matt:
Mama tried to quit him of his rough and rowdy ways. She finally had to have the judge to give him 90 days!
That struck a chord because nowadays it is Matt himself who often hands out such sentences. You see, back in Bradenton, JoAnn’s son is Judge Matthew Whyte for Florida’s 12th Judicial Circuit Court for DeSoto, Manatee and Sarasota counties.
Matt’s Vocal Contribution
Matt even has a favorite part of his favorite Flood tune. The second verse of “Didn’t He Ramble?” begins:
He rambled into a swell hotel, his appetite was stout, But when he ‘fused to pay the bill, the landlord throwed him out.
On the original Wade in the Water album cut, the late Dave Peyton underscored that moment with an emphatic “Get out!”
“I laugh every time I come to that part,” Matt told us at last week’s rehearsal. So it was just natural that when we played his tune for him and we came to that spot, we let His Honor do the honors. You can hear the debut Matt Whyte Solo at 01:39 in this week’s podcast.
A Family Tradition of Floodishness
As noted, Matt Whyte’s Flood interests are a family tradition. Beginning in 2006, Matt’s mom, JoAnn, and her husband, the late Bob McCoy, were often in the room for the weekly Flood gatherings, sharing jokes and stories, smiling at our progress on their own favorite tunes.
The pair was on hand for some important Flood events, from the debut of Jacob Scarr, the 14-year-old guitar savant whom we called “Youngblood,” to the beginning of the weekly Flood podcasts in 2008.
One of the first podcast listeners was Bob when he and JoAnn returned to Florida that December.
Sometimes he and JoAnn even challenged traffic regulations on their drives north, just to reach the room before the music started.
No wonder JoAnn was eager to share her Flood love with her son Matt.
About the Song
When the great Charlie Poole and his North Carolina Ramblers recorded “Didn’t He Ramble?” in 1929, the song already was more than a quarter of a century old, with roots in the New Orleans of Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton.
But, as we reported in Flood Watch a while back, the seeds of the song are planted even deeper than that. For instance, the song’s key lines (Didn’t he ramble? Didn’t he ramble? / Oh, he rambled till the butcher cut him down!) crop in a Texas work song that was published in 1888.
For more on the song and its wild and rambling history, click here to read that old Flood Watch article.
Meanwhile, 800 Songs Along
Incidentally, this is the 800th episode of The Flood’s weekly podcast since it began 17 years ago next month.
That means that the website now has more than 50 hours of free Flood music online, contributed at a rate of four or five minutes a week. Click the link below for details on those developments:
Meanwhile, a few years ago, that deep, broad database of all those Flood tunes inspired us to roll out our most ambitious project to date. Radio Floodango, the free music streaming service, lets you listen to a continuous, randomly generated playlist of Flood tunes whenever/wherever you’d like. For more about that, check out this earlier article.
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’s not easy to make the top dozen in CMT’s “100 Greatest Love Songs,” but that is precisely the placement that the music network awarded to Keith Whitley’s recording of “When You Say Nothing At All.”
The song has a beloved place in our hearts. We remember the Christmas Eve in 1988 when that lovely number hit No. 1 in Billboard’s Hot Country Singles.
And for many of us, that is the sweet tune that first came to mind just five months later in a much sadder moment: when we heard the shocking news that 34-year-old Whitley had died at his Goodlettsville, TN, home.
One of Us
The news hit especially hard in our area. Keith Whitley was a local hero. Born in Ashland, he grew up in the nearby Sandy Hook, Ky.
It seemed like every one of that town’s thousand residents knew Keith, but conversation was almost non-existent on the day of his passing. Words lost out to stunned silence.
Today his memory is permanently etched into the landscape. A street is named “Keith Whitley Boulevard.” A memorial statue stands near the Elliot County Veterans Memorial and Cemetery. Peaceful, it is hallowed ground.
Our Channelling Keith
Some songs are like old friends. This old Paul Overstreet-Don Schlitz tune is certainly like that.
We hadn’t played it in six months or more, and then one sultry night last August, it strolled back into the band room like it had never left. Danny Cox kicked off those familiar first chords. Randy Hamilton stepped up with the opening lyrics, and this was the result.
For more about the history of how this song came into being, see this earlier Flood Watch article.
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 over the years, this tune has conjured up a very specific gig memory for Floodsters.
It dates back to a weekend when the band was invited to the top of West Virginia’s Snowshoe Mountain to be part of a rather swank do (“a wine and cheese affair,” as the late Joe Dobbs liked to call such jobs).
We were on a stage under a huge event tent on the grounds of Snowshoe ski resort in Pocahontas County. The summer evening breeze was sweet. The glasses were tinkling. Then, toward the end of the night, a jolly gypsy troupe of motorcyclists rolled and crashed the party.
We didn’t know what would happen next. For a moment there, it looked to some of us like that edgy turning point in a Tarantino picture.
But just as suddenly, the guys in leather and the guys in suits started mingling together, laughing, drinking, swapping stories. Deep in The Flood’s memory banks to this day are images of that eclectic crowd of bankers and bikers singing along as one on this song.
“Ohhhhh, MAma! Ain’t you gonna miss you best friend nowww!”
About the Song
As reported in an earlier Flood Watch article, Bob Dylan’s “Down in the Flood” was one of many songs that would fill the world’s first great bootleg albums, like the unforgettable Great White Wonder, which made the rounds from 1969 onward. (Nearly all those tracks later were officially released by Columbia Records as The Basement Tapes.)
It turns out that “Down In The Flood” (also known as “Crash on the Levee”) evolved during a specific 1967 jam session at the Woodstock, NY, in the house that the guys dubbed “Big Pink.”
As The Band’s Robbie Robertson remembers it, at that session Bob and the boys started fiddling with an old John Lee Hooker song called “Tupelo Blues,” about the historically devastating 1927 Mississippi River flood.
That tune apparently triggered Dylan’s memories of another song, one from his repertoire in the early years, called “James Alley Blues,” based on a 1927 Richard “Rabbit” Brown recording. Significantly, that song uses the phrase “sugar for sugar, salt for salt,” a line that would find its way into Bob’s own lyric.
For more on the song’s history, click here to read that earlier article.
Our Latest Take on the Tune
Bob Dylan once famously spoke in another 1960s song about “a thousand telephones that don’t ring.”
But that’s hardly a problem for us in our new millennium. On the contrary, we’re all walking around with phones in our pockets that are apt to sound off at the most inopportune moments.
Like in the middle of this track from last week’s rehearsal when Sam St. Clair’s phone chimes in. But our Sam’s an especially cool lad, so you’d that expect even his phone’s ringtone would contribute something special.
And it does. Wait for it: at 02:43, a nifty xylophone audition at mid-song!
More Bobby? Step Right Up!
The Flood does a lot of Bob Dylan tunes, of course. We even have a special playlist of them that we put together for a Dylan birthday observance a few years ago. 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
When Thomas A. Dorsey (a.k.a. “Georgia Tom”) walked out of a New York City recording studio in the winter of 1932, he ended a highly successful music partnership with Tampa Red (a.k.a. Hudson Whittaker).
Over four years, Red and Tom garnered a happy following for their infectious, highly danceable brand of blues tunes.
In 1928, the two young men had teamed up and recorded for the Paramount label the hit “Tight Like That.” The success of that number — based on Blind Blake’s “Too Tight” and on Papa Charlie Jackson’s “Shake That Thing” — inspired imitators and launched the blues genre known as “hokum,” as reported here earlier,
Whittaker and Dorsey recorded more than 60 sides together, often under the name “The Famous Hokum Boy.” Some of these rollicking tunes have been covered by The Flood over the years, songs like “Somebody’s Been Using That Thing,” “Yas Yas Duck” and “You Can’t Get That Stuff No More.”
And add to that list the last tune that Tom and Red ever recorded together. The composition they called “No Matter How She Done” was waxed on Feb. 3, 1932, and released that spring on Brunswick’s Vocalion label.
Nothing in Red’s sassy lyrics hinted at an end to this lucrative collaboration:
The copper brought her in, she didn’t need no bail She shook it for the judge, they put the cop in jail!
As we noted in an earlier Flood Watch report, when Dorsey left the blues field in 1932 to take up a career as gospel songwriter and choir director, Whittaker continued as a solo blues artist well into the 1940s.
Floodifying It
Flash forward seven decades. When The Flood started doing this song in the early 2000s, we committed what some folk purists consider a sacrilege: We altered both its title and its hook, removing one entire syllable. Instead of Tampa Red’s original “No matter how she done it” lyric, The Flood opted to sing “Any way she done it.”
We’re still doing it that way, in fact, as you hear in this track from a recent rehearsal. And, no, we have no excuse, not really, except an aesthetic one. We felt the revision simply allowed the line to flow more easily off the tongue. (Call your neighborhood linguist and ask about the joys of removing “alveolar taps.”)
One thing for sure: now, as then, the new phrasing does facilitate group singing, as you can hear on the band’s lively original rendering 20 years ago on our Plays Up a Storm album. Click the button below to hear it:
That track, recorded on the evening of Nov. 16, 2002, featured Sam St. Clair, Joe Dobbs, Doug Chaffin, Chuck Romine, David Peyton and Charlie Bowen.
The Bob Wills Connection
While the tune (any way we sing it) has always had a happy hokum vibe, “No Matter How She Done” took a curious turn four years after Tampa Red and Georgia Tom’s inaugural recording.
In September 1936 in Chicago, the song got a cool country treatment by no less a luminary than Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys.
This was just three years after Wills organized the band in Waco, Texas, and set about defining the style of music that’s come to be known as “Texas swing.”
Released as a single in May 1937, “No Matter How She Done It (She’s Just a Dirty Dame)” was recorded in Wills and the Playboys’ second major recording sessions for the American Record Corporation.
The session is particularly important for Wills collectors, because it features the lineup that would define the Texas Playboys sound for years to come, including vocalist Tommy Duncan, pianist Al Stricklin, steel guitarist Leon McAuliffe and drummer Smoky Dacus.
More Hokum, You Say?
Meanwhile, if more hokum music is what you need to make your Flood Friday complete, remember that we’ve got a whole channel waiting for you on the free Radio Floodango music steaming service.
Just drop in and click the “Hokum” button or, better yet, just use this link to jump to it directly.
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Danny Cox has an abiding love for the works of guitar heroes Jerry Reed and Chet Atkins, and the song “Drive In” — which Dan brings to this week’s podcast from a recent rehearsal — beautifully displays those intersecting energies.
As reported here earlier, Reed often wrote wonderfully tasty riffs and licks only to forget them the next day when he moved on to some new project. Atkins, a detail-driven professional and a successful producer, completed and recorded many of Jerry’s pieces, practicing and polishing them to perfection.
It was one of these fertile periods of Jerry’s noodling and Chet’s cultivating that produced “Drive In.” Chet was the first to record the piece, the opening track of his acclaimed 1968 Solo Flights album.
Later John McClellan’s book Chet Atkins in Three Dimensions: 50 Years of Legendary Guitar included a transcription of the tune, further cementing its place in Chet’s legacy repertoire. It’s no wonder that these days that the song is a popular vehicle for aspiring pickers on YouTube.
More from Danny?
If all this has you in the mood to put a little more Danny Cox into your Flood Friday, drop by the free Radio Floodango music streaming service and give the Danny Channel a spin.
Click here to check it out!
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The sing-along — “if you know it, sing it!” as we say around here — is fundamental to folk music. As folk music’s guiding spirit, the late Pete Seeger, once said, “I rather put songs on people’s lips than in their ears.”
Pete believed songs offered powerful magic to bring unity. “Get people to sing together,” he said, “and they’ll act together too.”
“Once upon a time,” he said, “wasn’t singing a part of everyday life as much as talking, physical exercise and religion? Our distant ancestors, wherever they were in this world, sang while pounding grain, paddling canoes or walking long journeys. Can we begin to make our lives once more all of a piece?”
We love how Seeger broke that idea down.
“Finding the right songs and singing them over and over is a way to start. And when one person taps out a beat, while another leads into the melody, or when three people discover a harmony they never knew existed, or a crowd joins in on a chorus as though to raise the ceiling a few feet higher, then they also know there is hope for the world.”
“I’ve often thought,” Pete said, “standing onstage with 1,000 people in front of me, that somebody over on my right had a great-great grandfather who was trying to kill the great-great grandfather of somebody off to my left. And here we are all singing together... Gives you hope.”
About This Song
For us nowadays, there’s no better sing-along than this tune, which the newest Floodster Jack Nuckols brought us about a year ago, a song that stars the beautiful Ohio, which rolls and flows beside our towns and through our hearts.
The song “Shawneetown” is a wonderful reflection on the early history of boating up and down the Ohio River. While it sounds like an old tune, it is largely a 1970s composition by folk artist Dillon Bustin.
As we reported here earlier, Bustin based the first verse and chorus on historical fragments published in 1828 and quoted in Leland D. Baldwin’s 1941 book, The Keelboat Age on Western Waters, including:
Some rows up, but we rows down, All the way to Shawneetown, Pull away — pull away!
Bustin, who combined these fragments, composed the tune and several additional verses for the song we have now.
Shawneetown is in southern Illinois where the Ohio meets the Wabash River. It was the first Anglo settlement on the Ohio, serving as a major trade center and a government administrative center for the Northwest Territory in the early 19th century. Keelboats were the most efficient commercial vessels of the time.
The song’s first studio recording was likely the 1978 rendering by American folk duo Malcolm Dalglish and Grey Larsen. It appeared on their First of Autumn album.
For more history of this good old tune, see this earlier Flood Watch article.
And Even More Song Histories
And speaking of song histories, we have back stories on more than 200 of the tunes we play.
Check out Flood Watch’s free Song Stories section and click on a title to see what we have on file about it. You can browse them alphabetically by song titles or chronologically by the years in which they were written. Click here to give it a look.
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In his quarter century with The Flood, the late Doug Chaffin brought dozens of great tunes to the band, and the loveliest of the bunch was one of the last.
The truth is we always listened to everything Doug told us, because his musical instincts were usually right on the money. For instance, whenever we were playing a show and Doug leaned over and whispered, “Hey, maybe we oughta do this song next,” Charlie Bowen revised the set list on the fly, because Doug had a sixth sense about what people would like to hear.
That’s why a half dozen years ago, when Doug told us we ought to learn “Amelia’s Waltz,” we perked up. The song ended up being one of the sweetest tracks on our 2019 Speechless album, as you can hear in the video above.
The piece you hear sounds like an old tune, but it actually was written in 1981 by Bob McQuillen, the late New Hampshire composer, who penned it in honor of the then-three-and-a-half year-old daughter of a friend and fellow musician, a woman named Deana Stiles.
“Amelia’s Waltz” is one of those sweeping melody that sounds like it ought to be the soundtrack of a big, lush movie. And it turns out that the plot of such a movie could easily be based on the tune’s very namesake.
So, Who is Amelia?
Considered the dean of contra band music in America, the late Bob McQuillen — “Mac” to his friends — wrote some 1,300 tunes in his 60 years of playing. Most of his compositions he named after people or events in his New England life, and the song named “Amelia’sWaltz” is one of his best.
Besides having a gorgeous song named for her, Amelia Stiles’ other claim to fame is that she was born in a New England curiosity, a structure called “The Lindbergh Crate,” and…. well, heck, let’s let Mac himself tell that tale.
A few years before his death in 2014 at age 90, McQuillen was interviewed by a Danish fiddle website about the back story of “Amelia’s Waltz” and here’s what he told them.
“This is sort of complicated,” he began. “After Charles Lindbergh flew across the ocean in the Spirit of St. Louis, the thing was to get the plane back. They took the wings off and put them in one crate and the fuselage in another, then sent the whole thing back to this country aboard ship.
“I don’t know where the wings box went, but the fuselage crate eventually wound up on the banks of the Black Water River in Contoocook, a little town in New Hampshire.” Later, someone added a slanted roof to the crate and turned it into a little cabin in pretty little spot in the piney woods.
“Now along comes Deanna Stiles,” Mac continued, “and she lives in this thing for a while. She also develops a fondness for some dude and out of that we get the emergence of a cute little baby girl, who, because this was Lindbergh’s crate, was named Amelia (after Amelia Earhart). About three years or so after that was when I decided that Amelia ought to have a tune. And that’s how it all happened.”
The earliest recording of the tune we’ve found is John McCutcheon's 1982 release on his Fine Times at Our House album for Greenhays.
And Whither the Crate?
Meanwhile, The Lindbergh Crate has had a moving history of its own (with the accent on the moving….)
Its modern chapter began in 1990, when history lover Larry Ross purchased the structure from David Price of Contoocook. Price had received higher offers, but Ross convinced him to sell the crate for $3,000 when he explained his vision to use it as a museum and an educational tool for children. Ross brought the crate from New Hampshire to his property in Canaan, Maine.
There, Ross restored the 290-square-foot crate in his backyard, adding a new roof, porches, doors and windows, transforming it into the Lindbergh Crate Museum. Inside, he displayed donated Lindbergh memorabilia, including a bust, letters, tapestries and photographs.
For 30 years, Ross hosted an annual “Lindbergh Crate Day” for the community, but during the Covid pandemic, he decided it was time to downsize and sought a new home for the crate.
He connected with Morrill Worcester, founder of Wreaths Across America, whom Ross had previously invited to Lindbergh Crate Day.
Ross felt Worcester’s location in Columbia Falls, Maine, was suitable because the nonprofit’s mission—”remember, honor, teach”— aligned with the crate’s educational purpose.
The Lindbergh Crate was shipped in October 2020 from Canaan and arrived safely at the Wreaths Across America Museum in Columbia Falls. Last year it was moved again to nearby Jonesboro, Maine, where it has been restored by the Worcester family.
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Danny Cox and Randy Hamilton brought us this tune a year or so ago and as it matures, it just keeps enriching The Flood’s bloodstream.
Not only that, the song is very much on target to be included on the next Flood album when work begins on that project in the months ahead. Give it a listen in this take from a recent rehearsal.
About the Song
As noted in an earlier Flood Watch article, “Deep River Blues” is usually associated with the late, great Doc Watson, who included it on his self-titled debut Vanguard Records album back in 1964. The song became so connected to Doc over the years, in fact, that many fans thought it was original with him.
However, as we noted, Doc was just 10 years old in 1933 (he was still “Arthel” to his North Carolina family in those early days) when Alabama’s Delmore Brothers released their Victor recording of “I Got The Big River Blues.”
Still thinking about that performance 30 years later when he hit the recording studio, Doc fashioned his famed rendition as he thought his hero guitarist Merle Travis would play it, with a heavy emphasis on the thumb thumping out a driving bass line.
In the latest Flood rendition, Danny beautifully carries on that tradition.
Turn Your (Flood) Radio On!
Want to spice up your Friday with a little more from Randy and Danny? The free Radio Floodango music streaming feature has got you covered with randomized playlists of tunes featuring each of them.
Click on the graphic above to zip right to the Randy Channel or on the graphic below to give Danny a spin!
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Brooklyn-born Elliott Charles Adnopoz had only just started calling himself “Ramblin’ Jack” in the early 1950s when he came upon a new hero in the wilds of San Francisco.
This was a couple years after Elliott had met in his first and most influential mentor — the legendary singer/songwriter/poet Woody Guthrie — whose work and philosophy would shape the 20-something Jack’s long life as an itinerant folksinger.
Enter Lone Cat
A few years after Woody, Elliott rambled all the way across the country and met an extraordinary 60-year-old one-man band by the name of Jesse “Lone Cat” Fuller who was playing on the streets and in the coffeehouses of California’s Bay Area.
Jesse, taking a liking to the eager young wanderer, personally taught Jack his best composition — “San Francisco Bay Blues” — just a few years after he had written and recorded it himself.
To this day, Jack Elliott — who just last month turned 94 and is still traveling and performing — makes Fuller’s tune a centerpiece in his set list, often introducing it with stories about the song's creator.
As the first performer to cover the tune after Fuller’s original recording, Elliott included the song on his 1958 album, Jack Takes the Floor. That track played a crucial role in popularizing “San Francisco Bay Blues” during the burgeoning folk revival of the 1960s. After Jack’s take, the tune entered the canon of many an up-and-coming trouper, from Tom Rush to Richie Havens to Peter, Paul and Mary.
Since then, the song has had an extraordinarily diverse number of covers, by Bob Dylan and Jim Kweskin, by Jim Croce and The Weavers, by Hot Tuna and Janis Joplin.
Even The Beatles faked a version of it during the Get Back/Let it Be sessions on Jan. 14, 1969. Later John Lennon recorded an unreleased version during his Imagine sessions in May 1971, while McCartney performed it often during his solo concerts in San Francisco. It is still played frequently at Paul’s soundchecks around the world.
Eric Clapton performed the song on MTV Unplugged in 1992 during the taping in England. The live album earned six Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year.
How Jack Began to Ramble
Back to Jack, Elliott's life took many turns before he embraced music. Born in New York in 1931, Jack grew up in a family that hoped he would follow his father’s example and go into medicine.
But young Elliott was captivated by rodeos and the cowboy life, attending events at Madison Square Garden. At just 15, he rebelled. Running away from home, he joined Colonel Jim Eskew's Rodeo, a journey that took him across the Mid-Atlantic states.
Though his rodeo stint lasted only three months, the experience was formative. After he learned guitar and some banjo from a singing cowboy rodeo clown named Brahmer Rogers, Jack was on the path to a music career.
Back in Brooklyn, he polished his guitar playing and then started busking for a living. It was just a little later that Jack became a devoted student and admirer of famed folkie Woody Guthrie. Elliott even lived in the Guthrie home for two years.
Jack absorbed Guthrie's style of playing and singing so well that Woody himself once remarked, "He sounds more like me than I do."
About That Name
One story about Jack is that his iconic nickname didn’t relate so much to his wanderlust as to his storytelling acumen.
The late folk singer Odetta always contended that it was her mother who coined the name. "Oh, Jack Elliott,” she was said to have remarked, “yeah, he can sure ramble on!"
Jack’s Musical Offspring
In the early 1960s, Elliott toured Britain and Europe with banjo-picking buddy Derroll Adams, recording several albums for Topic Records. In London, the two played small clubs and West End cabarets.
Upon returning to the States a couple years later, Elliott found that his albums had preceded him. Suddenly, he had become something of an underground star in the nascent folk music scene around Greenwich Village. Now he was the mentor to newcomers, most notably to a 19-year-old Bob Dylan, who had just hit town. Bob came such a “Ramblin’ Jack” fixture that some started calling him “son of Jack.”
Over the years, Jack influenced a generation of musicians, from Phil Ochs and Tom Rush to the Grateful Dead. In the UK, Paul McCartney, Elton John and Rod Stewart all have paid tribute to his style.
But it took a few more decades for Elliott to finally get widespread recognition. His 1995 album, South Coast, earned him his first Grammy. In 1998, he received the National Medal of Arts from President Bill Clinton.
His long life and career were chronicled in the 2000 documentary, The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack, directed and produced by his daughter, Aiyana Elliott.
Back to the Song
Honestly, we don’t remember when we first started doing Jesse Fuller’s “San Francisco Bay Blues.” It was back when we were youngsters at those good old folk music parties in the ‘60s.
A decade later, the tune was firmly entrenched when The Flood came together. And we were still playing it in 2001 when we recorded our first album, on which it’s the closing track.
That was a good call, because we often use this song to close out a show, since it gives everybody in the band one more solo before we call it a night, as you can hear in this take from last week’s rehearsal.
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Some newer immigrants to Floodlandia were surprised by last week’s article celebrating two West Virginia natives — Don Redmond and Chu Berry — who became legendary jazzmen.
“I’m sorry,” one of the new friends confided, “but to me the idea of West Virginia conjures up fiddles and banjos. I’ve never thought of it for jazz.”
He’s forgiven. Many don’t realize the Mountain State’s musical traditions are more diverse than stereotypes suggest.
Meet Maceo
In fact, this year marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of one of the greatest jazz standards of all times, and it was written by an extraordinarily prolific West Virginian who was a major influence in 20th century music.
Maceo Pinkard, born in Bluefield, WV, in 1897, the son of a coal miner and a school teacher, was educated at the Bluefield Colored Institute, class of 1913, and wrote his first major song — called “I’m Goin’ Back Home” — the following year. (Today Bluefield State University holds a festival each year to honor of its famous alumnus.)
Pinkard wrote hundreds of tunes, including many for stage and screen, his greatest being “Sweet Georgia Brown,” which he published in March 1925. Yes, she might have been a sweet Georgia peach, she was mountain girl at heart. Click here for The Flood’s latest take on the tune from a recent rehearsal.
As reported here earlier, the song that would top Maceo Pinkard’s obituary when he died in 1962 at age 65 was co-written with lyricist Ken Casey.
Soon after “Sweet Georgia Brown” was composed, it was introduced to the dancing/singing/humming/whistling public by bandleader Ben Bernie. As that nationally known orchestra did much to popularize the number, Pinkard cut Bernie in for a share of the tune's royalties by giving him a co-writer credit. They both could have retired on the royalties.
But Pinkard was far from done. He went on to compose iconic tunes such as “Sugar (That Sugar Baby of Mine)” and “Them There Eyes,” the latter famously popularized by the legendary Billie Holiday in 1939.
Maceo and Duke
Pinkard also was a mentor to a young Duke Ellington — 20 years his junior — introducing him to New York City’s music publishing industry during the early stages of Duke’s career. That kindness helped Ellington lay the foundation for future success.
After meeting at Barron's nightclub in Harlem in the spring of 1926, Pinkard took Ellington downtown to "Tin Pan Alley," the center of the music publishing world on Broadway. There Pinkard arranged for Ellington to have his first meeting at Mills Music. Irving Mills later became Ellington's manager and business partner, a critical boost for the careers of both men.
Years later, Ellington said “thank you” to Pinkard by recording some of his early champion’s compositions, including the standards "Sweet Georgia Brown" and "Them There Eyes," highlighting Pinkard's musical legacy.
Paul Whiteman and Bix Beiderbecke
Paul Whiteman — whose band included Bing Crosby, Hoagy Carmichael, Frankie Trumbauer and Bix Beiderbecke — brought Pinkard in to write material for them. Segregation of the mid-1920s onward thwarted Whiteman’s efforts to hire African-American musicians for his band, but he was determined to play the music of Black composers and Pinkard was his first choice.
For instance, in 1927, Pinkard published "Sugar" and, in June 1928, Whiteman's band was the first to record it, scoring a huge hit. Since then, "Sugar" has been done by everyone from Louis Armstrong to Fats Waller (who performed it on the pipe organ). To this day, jazz artists still cover it.
Beiderbecke and Pinkard became friends and when Bix went out on his own, Pinkard penned "I'll Be A Friend With Pleasure" for his band (featuring Gene Krupa on drums, Benny Goodman on clarinet and Jimmy Dorsey on sax). Recorded in September 1930, it was among the last numbers that Bix recorded before his death at 28 the following summer.
African American West Virginia
Pinkard’s story embodies the resilience and creativity of the Black community of West Virginia’s Mercer County. Growing up in Bluefield, Maceo was shaped by the region’s rich heritage, which flourished around institutions like the Bluefield Colored Institute (now Bluefield State University), a hub of African-American culture in the early 20th century.
Established in 1895, two years before Pinkard’s birth, Bluefield State emerged as a beacon of opportunity for Black West Virginians. Besides providing access to higher education in the industrialized southern West Virginia, it also was a cultural epicenter, hosting luminaries such as Langston Hughes, Fats Waller and Duke Ellington.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Bluefield emerged as a hidden gem on the map of the so-called “Chitlin Circuit,” a national network of venues and businesses that provided platforms for emerging Black jazz and pop musicians during the latter years of institutionalized segregation.
More Jazz from the Floodisphere?
The Flood constantly expands its repertoire of jazzier tunes from the 1920s onward. To sample a randomized playlist from the cooler corner of the songbag, drop by the Swingin’ Channel of the free Radio Floodango music streaming service.
Click here to give it a spin.
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The last time legendary Wheeling-born saxophonist Chu Berry was in the recording studio, he gave some jazz love to a song written by a fellow West Virginian.
The date was Aug. 28, 1941, and the tune — one of the four sides that Berry and his jazz ensemble would record that day for Milt Gabler's Commodore label in New York City’s Reeves Sound Studios on East 44th Street — was “Gee, Baby, Ain't I Good to You.”
The song was still relatively unknown. No one else had recorded it in the dozen years since Piedmont, WV, native Don Redmond wrote it for McKinney's Cotton Pickers to wax in 1929.
As discussed here in an earlier article, the Roarin’ Twenties has been good for Don Redman. He was responsible for integrating the rhythmic approach of Louis Armstrong’s playing into arrangements for Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra. In 1927 Redman was wooed away from Henderson to join McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, the house band at the celebrated Greystone Ballroom in Detroit.
When Chu Berry revisited the song in 1941 (to be on the flip side of his version of "Sunny Side of the Street”), it featured ex-Bennie Moten/Count Basie trumpeter Oran “Hot Lips” Page, whose bluesy singing and plunger mute work capped the session.
Incidentally, Page recorded it again in 1944, but even more importantly for the song’s legacy (and to Don Redmond’s checkbook) a year earlier the song was also recorded by an up-and-comer named Nat “King” Cole, who took it to No. 1 on the Billboard Harlem Hit Parade where stayed for four weeks.
Losing Chu
Chu Berry would not live to know any of that.
Almost exactly two months after the August 1941 recording date, he was on his way to Toronto for a gig with the Cab Calloway Orchestra, with which he had played for four years. Heavy fog made visibility poor, and the car in which Chu was a passenger skidded and crashed into a bridge abutment near Conneaut, Ohio, 70 miles northeast of Cleveland.
Berry died three days later from his injuries just a few weeks after his 33rd birthday.
Chu Berry was brought back to Wheeling for his funeral. More than a thousand mourners attended, including Cab Calloway and the members of his band who ordered a massive floral arrangement in the shape of a heart.
At the funeral, Calloway told mourners Chu had been like a brother to him. The big man had charmed the world, he said, with advanced harmonies and smoothly flowing solos that would influence musicians for generations to come. “Chu will always be a member of our band,” Cab said. “He was the greatest.”
Berry’s Roots
Born in Wheeling in 1908, Leon Brown Berry took up the saxophone as a youngster after being inspired by the great tenor man Coleman Hawkins. Berry went on to model his own playing after Hawkins, who would later be quoted as saying, “Chu was about the best.”
By the time of his 27th birthday, Chu had moved to New York where he worked with Bessie Smith, Lionel Hampton, Count Basie and others.
Eventually, he became the featured sax player with the hottest jazz band of the day, Cab Calloway’s legendary Cotton Club Orchestra. In 1937 and 1938, he was named to Metronome Magazine’s All-Star Band.
Younger contemporaries — notably Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie — almost certainly heard Berry up close and personal at the now-legendary Monday night jam sessions at Minton’s Playhouse in New York City, gatherings widely credited for the development of the bebop in the mid-1940s.
Famously, in 1938 Parker — 14 years younger than Chu — named his first child Leon in tribute to Berry.
And the Nickname?
Multiple explanations have been given as to how Leon Berry got his nickname. Music critic Gary Giddins has said Berry was called “Chu” by his fellow musicians either because of his tendency to chew on his mouthpiece or because at one time he had a Fu Manchu-style mustache. Both stories work; take your pick.
Our Take on the Tune
Joining The Flood repertoire, some songs fit in right away, while others, like this one, need a little time to settle in, but when they do, wow — they’re as comfortable as an old shoe.
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As Appalachians, we are mighty proud of Chris Stapleton, the 47-year-old Lexington, Ky., native who grew up not far from us in the tiny Johnson County town of Staffordsville in Eastern Kentucky.
To date, Chris has won 11 Grammys, 11 Academy of Country Music Awards and 15 Country Music Association Awards.
Besides that, he also has been named the ACM's Artist-Songwriter of the Decade, and not long ago Rolling Stone magazine included Stapleton among the “200 Greatest Singers of All Time.”
Stapleton had written and/or co-written nearly 200 songs. He has six No. 1 country songs to his credit, including Kenny Chesney’s “Never Wanted Nothing More,” Josh Turner’s “Your Man,” George Strait’s “Love’s Gonna Make It Alright” and Luke Bryan’s “Drink a Beer.” His work has appeared on albums by Adele, Kelly Clarkson, Brad Paisley, Taylor Swift and so many others.
About This Stapleton Song
History lovers also have always populated The Flood camp, so it’s not surprising that this is our favorite Chris Stapleton composition.
“Can You Run?” is set during the American Civil War and tells the story of a young slave pleading with his lover to join him for a dangerous dash to the Union line so that he can join “the freedom line of the Lincoln soldiers.”At one point in the song, he tells her: You know I hate to ask so late But the moment's finally come, And there won't be time to change your mind. Can you run?
Click here to read more about this wonderful work.
Our Take on the Tune
The Flood’s current iteration of “Can You Run?” has been eight years in the making. Randy Hamilton brought the song to the band in the spring of 2017. He already had worked out the basic arrangement in his head, but it took a while to get the instrumentation just right.
For instance, Jack Nuckols, whose drumming is so fundamental to this track, didn’t arrive on The Flood scene until a couple of years ago, about the same time that Charlie Bowen began learning a bit of banjo, so that his five-string could provide a kicky little counterbalance to the sweet soloing by Danny Cox and Sam St. Clair.
Happy with where the song has come, the guys are pretty likely to want to include it among the tunes they record on the new album they hope to start work on this fall. Stay tuned!
More From Randy?
Finally, if you’d like to hear more tunes that feature Randy Hamilton’s vocals, check out the Randy Channel on 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
On a cold night in the early 1930s, a young West Virginian named Tom Kromer huddled in a railway boxcar as it rattled westward across the country.
Hungry, sleepless and surrounded by other men just trying to make it through the night, Tom braced himself against the trembling boxcar wall and scribbled a few observations on a scrap of paper.
Five years later, those notes — scrawled on Bull Durham papers, in the margins of religious tracts in a hundred rescue missions, upon wastepaper scavenged from the cluttered floors of county jails — would become Waiting for Nothing, Kromer’s raw, unflinching autobiographical novel that portrayed America’s dispossessed during the Great Depression.
From Huntington
Tom Kromer’s story begins in Huntington, WV, where he was born in 1906. His father, an immigrant who had spent his boyhood in the coal mines, died young from cancer.
His mother dreamed that her children would escape that hard life through education, and for a while, it looked as if Tom might. He attended Marshall College (later University) off and on, but never managed to finish. When the stock market crashed in 1929, Tom’s tuition ran dry and so did his prospects.
The real turning point came when Kromer left school and set out west, hoping for farm work.
Finding no work, Tom slipped into a life “on the fritz,” his phrase for years spent as a hobo moving from one town to the next from his West Virginia hills to the California coast. Unlike the romantic drifter of folklore, Kromer was, in his own words, “a tramp of circumstances.”
He begged, starved, took shelter where he could. It was not uncommon for him to go days without food. It was brutal. But it also gave him a voice unlike any other.
The Novel was Born
In 1935, he published his acclaimed novel Waiting for Nothing. Written in jagged, stark prose, it asked for no pity, offered no sentimentality. Kromer stripped life down to the details of what it took to survive as a “stiff,” lining up at soup kitchens, hopping freights, making the complicated calculations of what a hungry man might do for a meal.
Critics compared Kromer’s style to Hemingway. His themes were hunger, fear, endurance, and above all, the cruelty of a system that left millions with nothing. He wasn’t interested in prettying up the story.
Kromer’s second novel, Michael Kohler, would have turned to the struggles of working-class families and the violent West Virginia mine wars, but illness stopped him short.
Tuberculosis gnawed away at his health, and by the 1940s, he had retreated to New Mexico with his wife, Janet. After her death in Albuquerque in 1960, Tom returned to Huntington, where his sisters cared for him until his own death in 1969.
Our Song about Tom
For decades, Tom Kromer’s name nearly vanished, even in his hometown of Huntington. But now, through the good works of Marshall University English professor Stefan Schöberlein and his Appalachian literature students, Tom’s work has been rediscovered and brought to a new generation of students.
Reading a recent reprint of Waiting for Nothing, we in The Flood were struck by how Tom’s unsentimental eye fixed on the hungry and the forgotten of the Depression Era. Moved by the novel, the band decided to lend its hand in carrying on the Tom Kromer story by writing and recording this ballad to celebrate Huntington’s long-forgotten native son.
Following the lead of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger and Lead Belly, we set our lyrics to a traditional melody (in this case, a mashup of the thematically appropriate “Tramp on the Street” and the old hymn, “Farther Along”).
We hope the song encourages you to learn more about Kromer and his important work. A great way to start learning is to visit the new Thomas Kromer Digital Archive created by Schöberlein and his students, where you can read all of Waiting for Nothing online for free.
Click here to reach the archive. And if you’d like to own a printed copy of Tom’s novel, that reprint we read is available from Amazon.com.
However you choose read Tom Kromer, we think you’ll see for yourself that even in the darkest corners, someone can be compassionately paying attention.
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A lot of ghosts stalk our rehearsal room nowadays, but to a man they are a happy bunch of haunts.
We have table set aside for photos of all our band mates who have passed on. But more than mere pictures, it’s their music that keeps our old comrades alive.
Here, for example, from a recent rehearsal is our current take on one of the late David Peyton’s favorite tunes, with Charlie Bowen and Randy Hamilton handling the vocals and solos by Sam St. Clair, Jack Nuckols and Danny Cox.
The tune — “Georgie Buck” — has never left The Flood band room since Peyton first brought there 20 years ago.
About the Song
As reported earlier, “Georgie Buck” is one of the “play party” tunes that Dave learned from his old friend Aunt Jennie Wilson, the famed clawhammer banjo picker who was born in 1900 in Logan County, WV.
Jennie learned tunes from family members and other musicians in her coalfield community. David always theorized that she learned this one from African American musicians who came to Logan County in the 1920s to work on the railroad and in the coal mines.
Nowadays it is well-documented that “Georgie Buck” in particular — like other mountain music and dance — was influenced by black traditions of rhythmic dance and songs.
A version of the same song, for instance, found its way onto the 2006 debut album by The Carolina Chocolate Drops, whose members reported learning it from the great African-American string band fiddler Joe Thompson.
“Georgie Buck” also was in the repertoire of Chapel Hill, NC, guitarist and banjo player Elizabeth Cotten who, at 67, taught the same song to a 19-year-old Taj Mahal.
An earlier Flood Watch article provided a fuller backgrounder on this good old number. Click here to read that.
Now Let’s Hear from the Haunts!
Before we leave, we really need to give our spirited spirits a turn at the tune.
“Georgie Buck” was featured on Joe Dobbs’ last Flood album, Cleanup & Recovery, recorded in 2013 in Bud Carroll’s Live at Trackside Studios. It showcases Joe’s fiddling and Dave’s lead vocal and soloing, as well as solos by Doug Chaffin and Sam St. Clair. and Michele Hoge singing harmonies with Charlie. Click the button below for that track:
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The song that most defined the great Ray Charles’s life and career was written the same year in which he was born.
It was 1930 on cold, stormy night in New York City when “Georgia on My Mind” was written by Hoagy Carmichael and his roommate Stuart Gorrell.
“In a third-floor apartment overlooking 52nd Street,” Gorrell recalled, “with cold feet and warm hearts, we looked out the window, and, not liking what we saw, we turned our thoughts to the pleasant Southland.”
Carmichael later added to the story in his autobiography Sometimes I Wonder. As reported earlier, he got the idea for the tune from his friend saxophonist Frankie Trumbauer, who noted that songs about states were almost always marketable. “Nobody ever lost money writing songs about the South,” Frankie said. “Why don’t you write a song about Georgia? I’ll even give you the first line: ‘Georgia, Georgia….’”
The resulting song was immediately huge in the jazz world, a hit for Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday, for Gene Krupa and Jo Stafford, for Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, Kay Starr, Eddy Arnold and many more. But it was first recorded by Hoagy himself in October 1930 in the last studio session with his buddy and mentor, the legendary jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke.
Enter Brother Ray
Less than a month before Hoagy and Bix’s recording session — and a thousand miles away in southwest Georgia — Ray Charles Robinson was born in the town of Albany on the Flint River.
Today many fans associate “Georgia on My Mind” with Brother Ray’s iconic performance, but the song actually was rather late in coming into his life.
By 1960, Charles had been in show business for 15 years, rocking the world of rhythm and blues. Already he had recorded classics for Atlantic Records, legendary discs like “Mess Around,” “Midnight Hour” and “I’ve Got a Woman,” like “Drown in My Own Tears” and “Hallelujah I Love Her So.”
Whew! And all of those were recorded before his 30th birthday.
How “Georgia” Met Ray
What Ray didn’t have yet in 1960 was a No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100. But now the stage was set.
He had left Atlantic for ABC Records, at which Charles would be recorded and pitched for the burgeoning new crossover market, especially with albums like his two Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music discs. (In the process, Ray also became one of the first black musicians to be granted artistic control by a mainstream record company.)
Central to the start of this new chapter in the Ray Charles story was The Genius Hits the Road, a concept album that paid tribute to different destinations around the country.
Think “New York My Home” and “Blue Hawaii,” “Moon Over Miami” and “Alabamy Bound.” But of course, the cut that eclipsed all the other tracks on the album was Charles’s powerful, emotional interpretation of “Georgia on My Mind.”
And that song had an unusual trip to the studio. The idea of singing Carmichael’s classic came, not from A&R men or fellow musicians, but from Ray’s driver who all the time heard his boss humming the thing.
Jim Crow Ugliness
Charles' hit rendition of “Georgia on My Mind” — the first of his three career No. 1 hits — became the most widely-known version of the tune from that time on. But it came with racism and nasty politics getting into the mix.
Barely a year after his “Georgia” hit the airwaves, Ray was due to play in Augusta, Ga. It was 1961 and Jim Crow laws were still very much in effect in the segregated South. Activists warned the singer that the theater at which the show was booked was strictly reserved for a white-only audience.
Charles decided that no, he would not to play that night. As Elodie Maillot wrote recently in the online Pan African Music site, “Like Sam Cooke and others who refused to sing in front of all-white audiences, he was torn between his mainstream celebrity and his (being) kept in perpetual subjugation by segregationist laws.”
For canceling the Augusta gig, Ray was fined $700 by the show’s producer. After that, it would be years before he agreed to play in Georgia again, “but,” Maillot added, “‘Georgia on My Mind’ became the symbol of his activism.”
It took the state of Georgia nearly 20 years to finally apologize its native son, doing so when it chose Charles’s recording as the official state anthem. Ray returned to perform in Georgia on March 7, 1979, serenading the state’s General Assembly in Atlanta.
Meanwhile, nearly 30 after that and some 200 miles to the south, a bronze statue of Ray Charles was unveiled in his hometown of Albany in 2007 in the middle of a square named for him. But Ray didn’t live to see that; he died four years earlier in Los Angeles.
However, he did live to see Rolling Stone magazine choose his recording for its list of the 50 greatest songs of all times.
Our Take on the Tune
At last week’s rehearsal, Danny Cox and Randy Hamilton did some serious gold mining in this old sweet song.
This track opens with Charlie Bowen and Jack Nuckols laying down the basic melody and rhythm, then just listen as Danny starts spreading out all the riches he’s found in those lovely old chords.
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Generations have grown up watching television’s “Andy Griffith Show,” either the original broadcasts that aired from 1960 to 1968 or the infinite number of reruns that still are being broadcast around the world every day.
And for many of us, the best episodes are those in which the bluegrass-picking Darling family comes down from the hills to Mayberry to visit with Andy, Barney, Opie and Aunt Bee.
Most diehard fans know the boys playing and singing as the Darling brood actually were a real-life Ozark-bred band called The Dillards.
Built by brothers Doug and Rodney Dillard on banjo and guitar with Mitch Jayne on bass and Dean Webb on mandolin, the group hailed from Salem, MO, in the early ‘60s.
After some initial success in Missouri, the quartet moved to Los Angeles in 1962, quickly signing with Elektra Records. More importantly, the guys also became clients of the William Morris Agency, whose high-powered connections landed that lucrative Andy Griffith gig starting in 1963.
About the Song
That same year, Rodney Dillard and Mitch Jayne wrote the band’s best-known song. “Dooley” has become an undisputed standard in the string band world after it first appeared on the band’s debut album, Back Porch Bluegrass, release in May 1963.
But before that, the song was introduced nationally a few weeks earlier on the April 29, 1963, broadcast of "The Andy Griffith Show" in a scene showing it performed by the Dillards alongside Andy on guitar.
Recently, Rodney — today at 83, the only surviving member of the original four Dillards — took to Facebook to tell the story of how the song came to be.
“It’s about an old boy from Salem who made moonshine whiskey for 25 consecutive years,” Dillard wrote in his post.
“He would come into town in his pickup truck every Saturday and load five 100-pound sacks of sugar in the back of his truck. He never got caught, never went to jail, but everybody in town knew he was making whiskey. They knew he wasn’t making fudge up there on that ridge.”
“‘Dooley’ has been very, very good to us over the years,” Rodney added.
Following The Dilliards’ initial performance, “Dooley” right away got other high-profiled coverage, starting with The Kingston Trio and by Porter Wagoner, both in 1965.
Exploring Our Eclecticity
Meanwhile, as The Flood begins to think about going back into the studio later this year to record a new album, the guys are doing a lot of genre-hopping, blues one week, banjo the next, an old rock classic followed by some jazz standard from the rich pages of the Great American Songbook.
If you’d like to sample just how eclectic it has been lately, use the free Radio Floodango music streaming service to randomly stream tunes from the past seven months.
Or you can just visit the Podcast pages of The Flood website to scroll and check out recent podcasts from January forward.
And as you browse, if you come upon a tune you’d especially like to see on the new album, please drop us a line and let us know!
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When The Flood wanted a closing track for its second studio album in 2002, the guys turned to a tune that Charlie Bowen had just learned from listening to “Below the Salt,” Keith Newman’s legendary radio show on Ohio University’s public radio station, WOUB-FM.
From Athens, Ohio, for 35 years ending in 2012, Newman broadcast all manner of folk sounds, from roots music, old-time and blues to original songwriters and what he called “techno-Celtic.” And on most of those ear-opening Sunday mornings, Charlie was tuned in from the Bowens’ kitchen in Huntington.
It was on Keith’s show that he first heard a 1975 recording by Roy Book Binder and Fats Kaplin of the tune they called “Never Cried ’Til My Baby Got On the Train.”
Falling in love with the melody and those sassy lyrics, Charlie worked it up and bought it to the band, which had it well in hand by the time of its recording on The Flood’s Plays Up a Storm album in November 2002.
Later, when it came time to write the notes for the new album, the guys credited the song to Roy Book Binder, but they could find no further provenance for the tune.
After all, in 2002 Google was just four years old, and at any rate the World Wide Web was not yet all that worldly nor wide, nowhere near the data monster it is nowadays.
Digging up the Roots
Today, though, nearly a quarter of a century later, the web is an awesome thing and quite the boon to anyone eager to search out the genealogy of the songs the world sings.
It turns out that the tune we’re talking about here can be traced back to a blues singer named Blind Teddy Darby, who wrote and recorded it as "Built Right on the Ground," released from a September 1931 session for Victor Records.
Theodore Roosevelt Darby was born in Henderson, Ky., in 1906, though his family later moved to St. Louis when Teddy was 7. Between 1929 and 1937, Darby recorded 20 sides in Chicago under several names (Blind Teddy Darby, Blind Blues Darby, etc.) for labels such as Paramount, Victor, Bluebird, Vocalion and Decca.
Darby lived until 1975 and was “rediscovered” during the folk revival in the 1960s, when he was able to tell his story to song catchers and documentarians.
Darby’s Back Story
In notes for Darby’s collected sides on Documents records, for instance, Mike Row wrote that at 15 Teddy had his first taste of trouble when he “cut a boy with a razor” and was sent to a correctional institution.
Released after 14 months Teddy found work in a barrel factory until around 1926 when he lost his sight through glaucoma. Later an incident over a woman saw him incarcerated again, this time in the city workhouse where he learned to play guitar from one Jesse Riley.
“I really worked on the guitar,” Darby said. “Not much else a blind man could do then.”
Once released from the workhouse, Darby performed on the streets, at house-parties and at a gambling club. In 1929, a piano-playing friend introduced him to Jesse Johnson who was organizing a session for local talent to record for Paramount. That meeting led to eight years of recording sessions.
Johnson also promoted the 1931 Victor session at which Darby recorded “Built Right on the Ground.”
Slowing Down
Darby’s musical activities slowed down after he received his disablement pension in 1939; possibly recording opportunities were becoming fewer anyway. Finally, it was in the mid-1950s when a musician friend was stabbed to death during a fuss over a packet of cigarettes that Darby soured of the music business and that life.
His later years were quieter, as he spent his time as a deacon in his church. However, in 1964 he did record 15 tunes backed by Big Joe Williams. Sadly, though, that material apparently was never released.
Bit More Floodified Blues?
If you’d like a little something else from the band’s blues cabinet, remember the Blues Channel on the free Radio Floodango music streaming service.
Click here to give it a spin.
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“Spooky” is a rarity in 1960s pop tunes, because it charted on the Billboard Hot 100 three times in a dozen years with renditions by three different groups.
The song began life as an instrumental. With Harry Middlebrooks Jr., Atlanta saxophonist Mike Sharpe (Shapiro) wrote the song and made the 1967 pop charts with it in the U.S. and Canada.
Enter The Classics IV
But the song is much better known as a vocal by The Classics IV, whose James Cobb and producer Buddy Buie added lyrics about that “spooky little girl like you.”
It was their band’s first big hit, charting in February 1968, No. 3 in the U.S. and No. 1 in Canada.
The group had begun five years earlier in Jacksonville, Fla., as a cover band, playing Ventures numbers and instrumental takes on “Misty” and “Summertime.” After a while, fans started requesting vocals.
“I can sing,” said one of the founders, drummer Dennis Yost, and that led to a whole new chapter in the group’s story.
Relocating to Atlanta in the mid-’60s, The Classics IV landed a contract with Imperial Records. A trio of hit records followed, each with one-word titles, “Spooky,” then “Stormy” and “Traces,” all of which have since become popular cover standards.
The Third Charting
“Spooky” hit the charts for the third time in 1979 when J.R. Cobb and bandmate Dean Daughtry left The Classics IV to be part of the Southern rock band Atlanta Rhythm Section.
There Cobb and Daughtry helped ARS record “Spooky,” again with production assistance by Buie. It was the second of two singles released from Underdog, the group’s 8th studio album. ARS's version of the song hit No. 17 in the US on Billboard and No. 15 on Cash Box.
Gender Bending
But a decade before the ARS recording came Dusty Springfield’s 1968 version of “Spooky.”
Released as a single worldwide except in the U.S., this gender-flipped version was featured prominently in Guy Ritchie’s 1998 film, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Springfield's take on the tune was certified gold in 2024.
There were at least two other gender-bender versions. Lydia Lunch sang of a “spooky little boy” when she included the song on her 1980 Queen of Siam album; Martha Reeves inserted a similar rendering on her In the Midnight Hour album in 1986. The latter is especially fun. In her version, Martha also swapped the line "spooky little girl like you" line with "spooky old lady like me.”
Floodifying It
This song was born at jam sessions, with an infectious rhythm and a couple of funky chords that invite all kinds of improvisation, making it a fine fit for The Flood.
It’s the latest tune that Randy Hamilton and Danny have brought to the band room, complete with those Classics IV lyrics. Here’s a take from last week’s rehearsal.
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Jack Nuckols was heading off for a couple weeks of vacation and his band mates wanted to give him a proper sendoff. Pamela Bowen videoed it, the last tune of this week’s rehearsal, a saucy little number that rocked many a party back in Grandad’s day.
“Lulu’s Back in Town” — first performed by The Mills Brothers in 1935, the same year it also was recorded by Fats Waller — was written by Harry Warren. You’re right, that’s not a household name (journalist William Zinsser once called Warren the entertainment world’s “invisible man,” despite his million-dollar portfolio).
But in a career spanning six decades, Warren wrote more than 800 songs, primarily for films, including Oscar-winners like “Lullaby of Broadway” in 1935, “You’ll Never Know” in 1943 and “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” in 1946.
Warren’s better known pieces include novelty tunes like “Jeepers Creepers,” “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby” and “Chattanooga Choo Choo” (which was the first gold record in history). And ballads like “I Only Have Eyes for You” and “There Will Never Be Another You.”
He also penned signature tunes like “That’s Amore,” which Dean Martin claimed as his own, and — best of all! — “At Last,” which simply belonged to the great Etta James.
To learn more about this little-known American master, see our earlier Flood Watch article by clicking here.
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Country music legend Grandpa Jones’ signature song — “Eight More Miles to Louisville” — started out celebrating a journey that was nearly twice as long and to an entirely different city.
About a decade before Grandpa recorded his tune, Alton and Rabon Delmore of Alabama’s famed Delmore Brothers were playing their “Fifteen Miles from Birmingham” on live radio shows as the duo trekked across the South.
That song was never a big hit for the Delmores — by then, they had many hits, including “Got the Kansas City Blues” (1931), “Brown’s Ferry Blues” (1934), “I’m Alabama Bound” (1939), “Freight Train Boogie” (1946) — but the Birmingham tune strongly inspired Jones. He rewrote it into a song with similar themes of nostalgia, longing for home and the comfort of familiar surroundings, but with new lyrics that shifted the focus north to Louisville.
By the way, both Jones and the Delmores might have borrowed the tune from a third source. In 1927 the same melody was played on the fiddle and sung to entirely different lyrics by Virginia’s Shelor Family on their song "Big Bend Gal."
It's possible the Delmores and Jones both were influenced by that recording.
Kentucky Born and Bred
When Jones recorded his new tune in the spring of 1946, he was paying tribute his beloved home state. Born Louis Marshall Jones in 1913, he grew up in the tiny farming community of Niagara, Ky., in Henderson County, 130 miles west of Louisville.
His was a musical family — his father played old-time fiddle and his mother sang ballads —and young Louis’s first instrument was the guitar.
Jones spent his teenage years in Akron, Ohio, singing on country music shows on WJW Radio. In 1931, he joined the Pine Ridge String Band, which provided the musical accompaniment for the popular syndicated “Lum and Abner” comedy program in the NBC radio network.
“Grandpa” is Born
To grow his music career, Jones next moved to Boston in 1935 to work at WBZ Radio. It was in that studio’s band that he had a fateful meeting with singer/songwriter Bradley Kincaid. Famously, Kincaid used to tease the 22-year-old fellow Kentuckian for always being grumpy when he came to the studio to do the early morning broadcast, so Kincaid nicknamed him “Grandpa Jones.”
Louis liked the name and decided to create an entire stage persona based on it. The “grandpa” character served him for the remaining 60 years of his life, from his regular appearances on the Grand Ole Opry starting in 1946 to TV’s “Hee Haw” in the 1970s and ‘80s. Jones used to tell interviewers the only difference was that over the years he needed less and less makeup to achieve his signature look.
Enter the Banjo
Performing as Grandpa Jones, he played guitar, yodeled and sang mostly old-timey ballads. Then in 1937, Jones made another fateful trip, this time to Wheeling, WV, where he worked on WWVA Radio with Cousin Emmy (Cynthia May Carver).
It was she who taught Jones the clawhammer style of banjo playing, which gave him a rough backwoods flavor to his performances. That was Jones’ distinctive sound from then on.
In 1944, at age 31, Jones put his career on hold when he enlisted in the army during World War II. Discharged two years later, he was ready to resume recording with King Records.
All he needed was a theme song. That bill was filled by “Eight More Miles to Louisville,” which he released on May 28, 1946. After that, Grandpa Jones performed it at virtually every one of his shows for the next half century.
Our Take on the Tune
Sometimes the only thing that will fit bill is a song from your youth. All of us grew up hearing Grandpa’s famous theme song.
Here’s a take from this week’s rehearsal, with Randy Hamilton singing the lead and everybody joining in on the choruses.
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Turning to a tune from the late 1960s at the end of this week’s rehearsal, Randy Hamilton makes a solid case for the color blue.
His performance of Danny O’Keefe’s folk-rock classic “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues” also inspires Artie Fish, chief of our crack graphics department — The Floodoodlers — to come up with something appropriately moody to illustrate those moments in Pamela Bowen’s video.
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George Gershwin’s “Lady Be Good” has been in The Flood repertoire for more than a quarter century. And lately the song has taken on a whole new life, ever since Danny Cox brought ‘round a better bunch of chords. Listen to Dan and the guys just rocking the socks off the thing!
As reported earlier, Gershwin’s perennial 1924 party tune, “Lady Be Good” is a rarity among jazz standards in the Great American Songbook, surviving the transition from the loose Dixieland style of the “Roaring Twenties” to the smooth swing sound of the 1930s and beyond.
Jazz Connections
In fact, the song was the centerpiece for a remarkable pair of performances on Jan. 28, 1946.
The venue was Los Angeles’ Philharmonic Theater Auditorium and the “Jazz at the Philharmonic” concert series, created by famed producer Norman Granz to bring together prominent jazz musicians of the era onto a single platform.
Center stage that night were two musical legends poised at the intersection of shifting currents of jazz. Representing the waning days of swing was tenor saxophonist Lester Young; heralding the Next Big Thing — bebop — was altoist Charlie Parker.
Pres and Bird’s distinctive takes on the Gershwin standard that night would give the Philharmonic audience a memorable contrast.
As Brian Zimmerman wrote in Jazziz magazine, “Parker, soloing first, scribbles hard and fast outside the traditional jazz harmonic template, revealing a fleet mind and even fleeter fingers. Young, meanwhile, is cool and laconic, letting his deep-rooted sense of swing and seductive tone do the talking.”
Even before that night, “Lady Be Good” had figured prominently in the lives of both men. Young’s 1936 “Lady” solo, from his very first recording date, is one of the most celebrated tracks in jazz history.
Then four year later, when Parker recorded the same song on his very first recording date with Jay McShann, his opening phrase is a joyous acknowledgement of his debt to Young.
Flood Stages
The same song also has been witness to different stages of The Flood’s ebb and flow over the years.
For instance, back in 2002, Joe Dobbs brought the boys the tune, and it was a featured track on the band’s second studio album, with Chuck Romine, Sam St. Clair and Doug Chaffin joining Joe in carrying the water:
Flood love of the tune really began to blossom, though, when Doug switched from bass to guitar and took charge of the lead on the number. Right up to the end, whenever Floodsters got together with their tribal elder, “Lady Be Good” was going to be played.
Here, for example, from a January 2022 jam session at the Chaffin house in Ashland, Ky., you can hear Doug and Sam trading choruses with Vanessa Coffman’s tenor sax over Charlie Bowen’s chords:
Now flash forward 3 1/2 more years and imagine how the band’s earlier generations would appreciate the latest Flood class’s keeping their honored tune fresh. From last week’s rehearsal, here are Danny, Sam and Charlie rocking it with Randy Hamilton and Jack Nuckols:
More from Danny
And if this has you in the mood for more Dan Cox, just tune in the Danny Channel on the free Radio Floodango music streaming service.
Click here to give it a spin.
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When the Bowens’ new neighbor Baylee Parsons and her mom, Jill, heard that The Flood was rehearsing on Wednesday night, they dropped by to test the waters (ooo! See what we did there?)
The first tune the guys played for these lovely Flood first-timers illustrated the band’s longtime interest in old-time string band music. They turned to their usual go-to guy — Charlie Poole — and his “Leaving Home,” a 1927 winking, nodding retelling of the classic Frankie and Johnny story.
Pamela’s video of the tune is further enhanced here with vintage film footage from He Was Her Man, Dudley Murphy’s 1931 film starring Gilda Gray and Walter Fenner.
For the back story on this great old tune, check out this earlier Flood Watch article.
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The lyrics start like no song we’d ever heard back in the 1960s (or, well, since):
Where the Walker runs down to the Carson Valley plain…
The words also speak of pretty lights at nights “in Yerington town” and about a young woman whose beauty was toasted by strangers “where the Truckee runs through … (and) in Virginia City too…”
Magical were all those names of Nevada rivers and tiny towns on the range. They were especially evocative to a bunch of teen-aged Easterners who had grown up watching cowboys on television and in the movies, but who had been not farther west than, say, Louisville.
When eager young folkies first heard the song — on Ian & Sylvia’s classic 1965 Early Morning Rain album — Californians Steve Gillette and Tom Campbell’s “Darcy Farrow” also came with a to-die-for back story.
The Legend
The original story came from the album’s liner notes, written by Lee Hays of The Weavers. Citing Sylvia Fricker as his source, Hays wrote that one of the songwriters “had considerable experience as a student of an eminent folklorist where much effort was given to writing songs that would fool the teachers and pass as authentic.
“Ian feels that this is no less authentic,” Hays added, “for it was written in the tradition of old-time cowboy tunes — just sentimental enough — and mighty convincing in its mention of names and places.”
Hays’ spare little origin story spread from coffeehouse to coffeehouse across the country, regularly embellished with each re-telling until it became something of “an urban legend,” folk musician Jim Moran recently noted on his website “Comparative Video 101.”
By the time Moran heard it, the story had grown to relate how Gillette and Campbell had been two enterprising young men who had been given “what they regarded as an impossible assignment in a class in the UCLA department of folklore, one of the most distinguished of such university departments in the world.
“The assignment was to do some field work in folk music,” Moran writes, “to go off into a rural section of the Mountain West and find either a traditional song that had been as of then undiscovered, or a significant variant of a song already known.”
However, the story went, after covering hundreds of miles over spring break, visiting dozens of small towns in the rural Nevada/California border country in the shadows of the Eastern Sierra and along the Walker River, the two found nothing.
“In desperate fear of failure on the assignment and perhaps in the class,” Moran says, “the two decided to write an original song in a traditional ballad mode about a pair of ill-fated young lovers in the Old West and submit it as a ‘discovery.’ The song sounded so convincingly authentic that the professor of the class awarded them an A for the project.”
Great story, but — now, isn’t there just always a “but”? — the real roots of “Darcy Farrow” are at least as interesting as the myth, and we’ve got Steve Gillette himself to tell the real tale.
Darcy Farrow’s Real Story
As he tells it on his own website, Gillette met Tom Campbell in the early 1960s. “My mom liked Tom a lot and encouraged him to be a part of our family, which he did. My sisters, Darcy and Karen, and my brother Jeff all adored Tom.”
A pair of incidents in the Gillette household made a big impression on Campbell. “One night,” Steve writes, “Karen was driving home from a friend's wedding. She had a cold and had taken some cold medication, which combined with a little champagne at the wedding caused her to fall asleep at the wheel. She was lucky to escape with only a broken arm and some bruises.
“That same weekend, Darcy, just 12 years old, was kicked by her horse and suffered a concussion and a broken cheekbone.
“Tom was very moved by the twin tragedies, and came up with the whole saga of our song, ‘Darcy Farrow’ set to a tune that I had adapted from a piece by Pete Seeger called ‘Living' In the Country.’”
Gillette said he was initially reluctant to accept Campbell’s lyrics, “because the story was so dark and my sister's name was used. My mom was the one who encouraged me to give it a chance. Both the lyrics and the music underwent substantial change as we worked on the song together. We drew on the traditional cowboy songs, many of which come down to us from the British Isles.”
Meanwhile, sister Darcy “has been pretty good about the whole thing,” Gillette writes, “maybe a little embarrassed to be injured by a horse. (She admitted years later that she was trying to encourage the horse to buck.) But she has carried it well, and I think she even enjoys being a part of the story.”
And About That UCLA Connection?
Gillette also acknowledges that he and Tom were the ones who provided the seed for the urban legend about the song’s origin.
“When we had finished the song in the summer of 1964,” Steve says, “we had a chance to sing it for Ian & Sylvia. … Tom had taken a folklore class with D.K. Wilgus at UCLA and mentioned to Ian that he used to turn in songs he had written or added to and claimed he had collected them from his grandfather.”
Ian Tyson got a big kick out of that idea, Gillette said, “and incorporated it into his introduction to the song. In their travels, Ian and Sylvia spread that story to lots of people around the country. Of course, they introduced the song to all those people at the same time. But we still have people ask if we wrote it for a college class.”
Meanwhile, Back in West Virginia…
In the Floodisphere, tunes like “Darcy Farrow” bring back lots of sweet memories. In the world of the Bowen Bash music parties in the 1970s where The Flood was born, the foremost performers of just about any Ian & Sylvia tune you could think of were the members in the wonderful Samples Brothers Band.
Want a sample from The Samples? Click the Play button on the video above for the brothers’ version of “Darcy Farrow,” recorded at a bash in the spring of 1979. That’s Mack singing the rock-solid lead, Roger on the close harmony and Ted playing those sweet solos (with, as a bonus, a little soft background fiddling by The Flood’s Joe Dobbs).
Our Take on the Tune
This old tune hadn’t been played in The Flood band room in more than a decade, but when “Darcy Farrow” dropped in at last week’s rehearsal, it fit the moment as comfortably as a good old shoe.
More Song Stories?
If you enjoy our historical research on the songs The Flood plays, you can browse an archive of earlier articles in the Song Stories section.
Click here to check it out.
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Folklorist John A. Lomax found this song in 1909 when he made his first field trip to the Brazos area of Texas for Harvard University.
“I found Dink scrubbing her man's clothes in the shade of their tent across the Brazos River from the A. & M. College,” Lomax wrote when he and his son Alan published the song 25 years later in their seminal 1934 work, American Ballads and Folk Songs.
Harvest Professor James C. Nagle had been the supervising engineer of a levee-building company during that first trip, and he invited the senior Lomax to come along and bring his new Edison recording machine.
Among the levee workers who had traveled from Mississippi to work on the Brazos, Lomax found one who pointed out Dink, saying she “knows all the songs.”
But Dink was uninterested in helping — “'Today ain't my singin' day,” she said — until “I walked a mile to a farm commissary,” Lomax wrote, “and bought her a pint of gin. As she drank the gin, the sounds from her scrubbing board increased in intensity and in volume. She worked as she talked.”
“That little boy there ain't got no daddy an' he ain't got no name,” Dink told Lomax. “I comes from Mississippi and I brung along my little boy. My man drives a four-wheel scraper down there where you see the dust risin'. I keeps his tent, cooks his vittles and washes his clothes. Some day I gonna wrap up his wet breeches and shirts, roll 'em up in a knot, put 'em in the middle of the bed and tuck down the covers right nice. Then I'm going on up the river where I belong.”
The Tune
Lomax’s original record of “Dink’s Song” — which the storyteller eventually sang for him — got broken long ago, but not before John, Alan and others in the Lomax family all learned the words and melody.
Poet Carl Sandburg, who included the song in his New American Songbag in 1950, compared Dink’s lyrics to the best fragments from the Greek poetess Sappho. “As you might expect,” Lomax commented, “Carl prefers Dink to Sappho.”
The elder Lomax lost track of Dink after his 1909 field trip. "When I went to find her in Yazoo, Mississippi, some years later,” he wrote, “her women friends, pointing to a nearby graveyard, told me, ‘Dink's done planted up there.' I could find no trace of her little son.”
The first commercial recording of “Dink’s Song” came eight years after the Lomaxes published it in their songbook, when Libby Holman waxed it as “Fare Thee Well” in a recording with Josh White for Decca Records.
Oh? You say you don’t know who Libby Holman was? Oh boy, do we have a story for you!
Libby’s Life
A Cincinnati-born actress and singer — her career began as a torch singer on Broadway in the 1920s and ‘30s — Libby Holman was a controversial figure, known for her turbulent personal life as well as for her activism, which included unstinting support for civil rights.
When she was in her late 20s, Holman was at the center of a highly publicized case surrounding the death of her first husband. Zachary Smith Reynolds, heir to the R.J. Reynolds tobacco fortune, who died of a gunshot wound at their estate in 1932.
Initially, Libby was accused of murder, but the charges eventually were dropped. The coroner ruled Smith’s death a suicide. For her part, Holman said she couldn’t remember exactly what happened, telling a friend, “I was so drunk last night I don't know whether I shot him or not.”
Relationships
Holman was known for her intimate affairs with both men and women, including a significant relationship with DuPont heiress Louisa d'Andelot Carpenter. The tabloids of the day had a ball with Libby’s openness about her bisexuality.
Folk/blues artist Josh White also has a significant professional and personal connection with Holman. In the 1940s they became the first mixed-race male and female artists to perform together, to record together and to tour throughout the United States.
Together they challenged segregationist policies in the entertainment industry, breaking down racial barriers in many previously segregated venues. During World War II, the two tried to organize performances for servicemen, but they were rejected due to the prevailing segregation in the U.S. Armed Forces, despite a recommendation from Eleanor Roosevelt.
As “Fare Thee Well,” “Dink’s Song” was among a half dozen songs Holman and White recorded for Decca in 1942. Three years later, White recorded the tune again on his first solo album, Songs by Josh White, for Asch Records, a predecessor of Folkways. He recorded it at least once more later in his career, on the 1957 Mercury album called Josh White's Blues.
Our Take on the Tune
In the Floodisphere, Randy Hamilton has reinvented this century-old tune into something as fresh and sweet as a summer breeze.
And if listening to it has you hankering for more music from Randy, just swing on by the free Radio Floodango music streaming service and tune in the Randy 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
It is always a party when Michelle Hoge — the Floodster whom the late Joe Dobbs years ago lovingly dubbed “Duh Chick Singer”— is in the room, and she was very much in the room Thursday evening for the band’s latest visit to Huntington’s Bahnhof WVrsthaus & Biergarten.
Actually this wasn’t Michelle first time to perform at the wonderful 7th Avenue venue. Back in 2017, she was among the Floodsters who played in the beer garden on a spring evening soon after the cool cafe open.
But this week’s performance was her first time since the band has recently started regular visits to the South Side’s favorite spot, and it was an epic evening as Pamela’s video above illustrates.
About the Song
Michelle’s song in the video is the jazz standard “My Blue Heaven,” which Walter Donaldson wrote one afternoon in 1927 at New York’s Friars Club while he was waiting for his turn at the pool table. Later George A. Whiting wrote those clever lyrics just so he could perform it in his vaudeville act with Sadie Burt.
It was a big number in 1935 for Jimmie Lunceford and a huge hit in 1956 for New Orleans’ Fats Domino. In fact, in the near century since it was written, “My Blue Heaven” has been recorded by everyone from Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra to Coleman Hawkins to Leon Redbone.
For more about the song’s history, check out this earlier Flood Watch article.
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There are few sure things nowadays, but one thing we can guarantee is that today somewhere in the Mountain State this song is being sung, whistled, hummed or at least thought of about every 15 minutes.
The truth is that The Flood has avoided doing ”Take Me Home, Country Roads” for about a half century now. It’s not that the guys don’t like it; on the contrary, just the opening line (Al-most heeeeaven, West Virginnnnia….) will always tease out a smile in our band room.
But, well, gee, it just seemed almost like a cliché, you know? A bunch of West Virginians singing it was kind of like the boys down in San Antone doing “Home on the Range” or “Deep in the Heart of Texas” or a Crescent City crew doing “Saints Go Marching In.”
That all changed, though, earlier this year. When everybody watched a stadium full of people at the Super Bowl in New Orleans spontaneously joining in on “Country Roads” following that Rocket Mortgage commercial, band manager Pamela Bowen looked at Charlie and said, “It might be time….”
It is. The instrumentation is right nowadays. Jack Nuckols has dusted off his fiddle. Bowen has learned enough banjo to contribute something. Randy Hamilton has just the right voice for the lead. Danny Cox and Sam St. Clair grew up knowing that harmony.
It was just a matter of getting it together in time for today. Happy West Virginia Day, y’all!
About The Song
“Take Me Home, Country Roads” was born, not in West Virginia, but in neighboring Maryland. Its first public performance was on New Year’s weekend 1970 at the tiny Cellar Door coffeehouse in the Georgetown section of Washington, DC.
The idea for tune started a few weeks earlier when songwriters Bill Danoff and his girlfriend Taffy Nivert — who performed together as “Fat City” — were driving to a family reunion in Massachusetts, Neal Augenstein writes in Washington’s WTOP.com. (Incidentally, if Danoff and Nivert’s names are familiar it might be because they later renamed their group “Starland Vocal Band,” known for the 1976 hit “Afternoon Delight.”)
For the “Country Roads” debut, Len Jaffe, a D.C. area singer/songwriter, was at the Cellar Door and later told Augenstein, “The road they were actually on was Clopper Road, in Gaithersburg, a little two-lane blacktop” at the time, but now an exit off Interstate 270.
“When they got to the ‘Almost heaven …’ part,” Jaffe added, “at first it was going to be ‘Massachusetts,’ because that’s where Bill was from. But they didn’t like the vibe, so they used 'West Virginia.’ They had never been to West Virginia.”
That was the same weekend that John Denver would hear the song which would become his first platinum single. On Dec. 29, 1970, Denver played the first of a string of solo shows at the Cellar Door, where Danoff and Nivert were the opening act. Later that evening in the couple’s Georgetown home, Denver asked if they had any new songs he could hear.
“Get out that song you’re writing for Johnny Cash,” Taffy said, and Danoff pulled out what at that point consisted of only the chorus and a single verse. Denver loved it immediately and helped Danoff and Nivert complete the lyrics and arrangement overnight. Then that very evening, Denver played the new song at the coffeehouse.
“We just finished a brand new song,” Denver said on stage, “and I haven’t even learned the words yet.” He taped the lyrics to the mic stand and, as an encore, the three of them did the song cold.
“It was a five-minute standing ovation,” Jaffe told Augenstein. “The walls were vibrating. I thought the club was going to implode.”
The following month in New York, as part of his Poems, Prayers & Promises album, Denver recorded the song with Danoff and Nivert doing the harmony vocals.
West Virginia Connections
Okay, now, wait a minute. So the song debuted in D.C. after being written in Maryland by folks whose minds were set traveling to New England. Where the heck does West Virginia come into this story? Actually, Danoff says that from the start there were Mountain State connections to “Country Roads.”
The portion of the lyric’s bridge says “the radio reminds me of my home far away," a line he says is quintessentially West Virginian. That’s because it is an allusion to his Springfield, Mass., childhood when he grew up in the ‘50s listening to “Saturday Night Jamboree” broadcasts each week from Wheeling’s WWVA.
“It was a powerful station,” he said, “and we got it clearly in Springfield at nighttime.”
Danoff also had other West Virginia associations to draw from. For instance, he was a good friend of actor Chris Sarandon, a Beckley native who was once married to actress Susan Sarandon.
But even more than that, Danoff recalled a group of hippies from a West Virginia commune who used to sit in the front row of the little clubs in which his and Taffy’s band used to play.
“They brought their dogs and were a very colorful group of folks; that’s how West Virginia began creeping into the song,” he said.
Mountain Mama’s Reception
In the Mountain State, "Take Me Home, Country Roads” has, of course, received an enthusiastic response for more than 50 years now.
In 2017, the state’s tourism office announced it had obtained the rights to use the song in its marketing efforts. "'Country Roads' has become synonymous with West Virginia all over the world," said tourism commissioner Chelsea Ruby.
"It highlights everything we love about our state: scenic beauty, majestic mountains, a timeless way of life, and most of all, the warmth of a place that feels like home whether you've lived here forever or are just coming to visit." The opening "Almost heaven" phrase became a primary tourism slogan.
The song is the theme song of West Virginia University. Since 1972 it has been performed during every home football pregame show. It also is played after every home victory when fans are encouraged to stay in the stands and sing along with the team.
On Sept. 6, 1980, at the invitation of then-Gov. Jay Rockefeller, Danoff, Nivert and Denver performed it to a sold-out crowd of Mountaineer fans at the dedication of WVU’s Mountaineer Field.
In 2014, the state legislature adopted it one of four official state songs (along with "West Virginia Hills," "This Is My West Virginia" and "West Virginia, My Home Sweet Home”).
But About That Geography
From the start, however, some West Virginians have groused about the lyrics’ sketchy geography. Blue Ridge Mountains? Shenandoah River? To local folks, that sounded a bit more like western East Virginia than their home turf.
Some, with a grin, even propose a little judicious editing, maybe something like:
Almost heaven, West Virginia, Snowshoe Mountain, Monongahela River….
In the end, though, most mountaineers choose to love the song anyway, and, if anyone asked, they just say the song cleverly refers to the state’s historical rather than contemporary geography.
Still, those dicey directions always supply an easy punchline for smart-alecky Virginians: “Why, son, that’s why West Virginia is just almost heaven.…”
More Tunes for Mountain Mama Day?
Finally, if you need more extensive soundtrack for today’s West Virginia Day celebrations, remember the “Special Blends” section of the free Radio Floodango music streaming service includes a selection of Flood-centric Mountain State tunes. Click below for details:
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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 Recording
On 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.
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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 Songs
If 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.
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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 Story
Van 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 Chandler
But 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 Kaufman
But 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.’”
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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 Plebeian
The 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 Mitch
Cool 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 Songwriter
Still 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.
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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 Songs
A 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 Song
As 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 Table
By 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:
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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 Controversy
In 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 Folksinger
As 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 Tune
Pamela 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 Danny
Finally, 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!
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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:
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“I Wonder Where My Easy Rider’s Gone”
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“Opus One”
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“Didn’t He Ramble?”
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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 Names
Some 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 Fav
Meanwhile, 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.
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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 Song
As 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 Tune
Around 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.
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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.
Whither
This 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 Tune
Maybe 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.
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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 Song
As 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.
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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 Be
Years 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 Connection
Later 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 Performances
Back 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 Tune
Thirty 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.
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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 Contribution
In 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 Up
Emmylou 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 Tune
Fifty 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:
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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:
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“Peggy Day”
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“My Blue Heaven”
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“All of Me”
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“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.
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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 Influence
Incidentally, 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 Music
The 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 Tune
The 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.
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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 Be
Years 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 Gold
Walker’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 Tune
Michelle 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 Michelle
Finally, 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.
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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 Heat
As 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.
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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 Song
A 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 Infusion
But 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.
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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 Trail
Speaking 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 Tune
So 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.
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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.”
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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 Song
In 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 Swing
Finally, 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.
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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 Tune
The 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 Angelina
As 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.
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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.
Stepchild
Still, "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 Flood
No 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 Vault
Actually, 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 Tune
So, this bit of fluff from Bob’s fat and happy country squire days of the late 1960sis 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!
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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 Tunes
The 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 Doctors
Speaking 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.”
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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 Roots
Only 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 Tune
At 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.
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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 Song
Charlie 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 Mortality
Later 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 Forward
We 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 Song
As 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 Video
The 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 Tune
On 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 Bob
Meanwhile, 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 Graphics
Finally, 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 Song
Nonetheless, 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 Strelau
The 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 Ed
Quickly 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 Jam
The 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 Today
Ed 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.
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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 Song
This 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 Histories
If 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 Rainey
Dorsey’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 Song
Dorsey 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 Alley
Which 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 Tune
Meanwhile 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.
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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?
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Well, for starters, this is a song that has been recorded as an instrumental or a vocal more than 1,500 times.
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Forty years after its publication in 1928, it was still earning more than $50,000 annually in royalties.
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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 Song
Late 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 Widens
West 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 Version
In 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 Tune
Since 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!
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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 I
The 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 II
The 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 Tune
Purists 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.
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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 Histories
Incidentally, 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”
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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 Tune
This 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.
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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 Shel
But 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 Song
A 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 Tune
For 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.
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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 Adoption
As 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 Song
One 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 Others
Presley 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 Tuned
Meanwhile, 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 Murder
The 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.
Recordings
The 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 Tune
Recently 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 Song
Among 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 Tune
Charlie 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.
Joelessness
The 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 Night
Carter 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 Song
The 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 Red
Hokum’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 Tom
Red’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 Song
Tampa 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 Tune
If 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.
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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 Song
One 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 It
After 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 Watson
The 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 Tune
It'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 Extra
Oh, 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:
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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 Song
As 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.
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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 Tune
Whenever 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.
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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 Song
As 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.
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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.”
Europe
In 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.”
Performances
In 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 Tune
Flood 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.
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Before Floodster Emerita Vanessa Coffman left the band, she taught the guys her mom’s favorite tune, a 1948 jazz standard.
Everyone fully expected when the talented young saxophonist drifted away last year to pursue other interested that the song — “Black Coffee” — would go with her. However, then Danny Cox took up the tune and, with his guitar, gave it a new chapter in the Floodisphere.
In fact, nowadays that same song often is an especially tasty way to start a Flood rehearsal, as this track from a week or so ago demonstrates.
Incidentally, the song has an interesting history — a hit for both Sarah Vaughn and Peggy Lee — which was explored in an earlier issue of Flood Watch. Click here to read it.
Pour Ya Another?
If you’d like more from The Flood’s jazzier jaunts, visit the band’s free Radio Floodango music streaming feature on the website and tune in the Swing Channel. To give it a listen, click here.
And while you’re there, give the Danny Cox channel a spin too. It’s a playlist of all Dan-centric tunes.
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Fifteen years ago this week, The Flood was back at a favorite venue — Huntington’s Harris Riverfront Park — to celebrate the visit by a beautiful riverboat, the Belle of Cincinnati, and to entertain her passengers.
It was a return engagement for both the boat and the band. Hospice of Huntington was so pleased with The Flood’s performance the previous year when it entertained those who came out for a sold-out fund-raising dinner cruise that the folks hired everyone back for a repeat performance.
As with the earlier show, the weather was perfect for this October 2009 afternoon, and a lot of people who weren’t actually going on the cruise came down by the riverside just to spend a little time with the band.
And band manager Pamela Bowen again demonstrated her mad videographic skills, filming her boys’ version of a great hokum music standard made famous in 1930 by Whistler's Jug Band of Louisville.
(Incidentally, the band has NO COMMENT on the police car in the background of this video... The less said, as usual, the better...)
Jacob’s New Do
The gig was the band’s first public job since 16-year-old Jacob Scarr officially joined up seven months earlier, and he was already generating his own bits of Flood lore.
For instance, click the button below to hear the jolly chatter among his band mates at a Flood jam a week or so after the riverfront, all centered on when and why Youngblood cut his hair.
And About That Song
By the way, if you’d like to know more about tune in the video — “Tear It Down” — check the earlier Flood Watch article on the song’s history. Click here to read it.
There you’ll find out that the song actually has roots right here in the Huntington area, starting with Ashland, Ky., native trumpeter Clyde McCoy.
Meanwhile, Want a Second Helping?
Here’s another tune from that afternoon on the riverbank, with the guys rocking “Wade in the Water,” a song that also has strong ties in Floodlandia.
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In the mid-1960s, the young British songwriter Barry Gibb was in New York City for the first time when he was visited at the Waldorf Astoria by one of his musical heroes: soul/R&B superstar Otis Redding.
Redding reportedly loved Gibb’s work and came to urge him to write a song for him to record. Legend has it that immediately after they met, Gibb went downstairs and, on a hotel piano, thrashed out “To Love Somebody,” rushing back to offer it to Otis.
Sadly, before getting the opportunity to sing Gibb's ode, Otis Redding was gone. Just months after that happy encounter, Redding was dead at 26, killed in a plane crash in Lake Monona near Madison, WI. The music world still mourns that lose.
The Bee Gees
The song ultimately was introduced by Gibb himself, along with brothers Robin and Maurice, on their international debut album, Bee Gees 1st.
Curiously, the tune — which years later Barry Gibb called his favorite of everything he had written — initially enjoyed only a lukewarm reception. As The Bee Gees’ second single, it reached only No. 17 in the U.S. and a humbling No. 41 on Britain’s own charts.
However, the song became ever-more popular as it was covered by other artists — more than 200 renditions have been recorded to date — and initially, some of the best versions were by top female artists of the day.
Nina Simone and Janis Joplin each recorded “To Love Somebody” within the first year and half of its debut. Roberta Flack waxxed a beautiful re-imagining of the song on her lovely Quiet Fire album in 1971. A decade and a half later, Bonnie Taylor was revisiting the song in the studio and in her live shows around the world.
Perhaps the song’s most popular cover came in 1992 when Michael Bolton released it as a single from his Timeless: The Classics album. His version reached No. 11 in the US and No. 2 in Canada.
“To Love Somebody” even has also had currency in country corners after Hank Williams Jr. put it on his 1979 Family Tradition album.
Our Take on the Tune
In the Floodisphere, it was a quarter of a century ago when Joe Dobbs’ son, Dale, first used the word “eclectic” to describe The Flood’s diverse musical tastes.
True, that. The Floodery does tap a wide variety of sources for its tunes, from blues and old-time string band numbers to jazz, jug band and classic rock.
But even the guys themselves didn’t see this one coming (though you diehard Bee Gees probably knew they’d get to you sooner or later). Here’s Randy Hamilton leading the way on Barry Gibb’s best composition.
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A Flood Watch reader last week wrote, “Hey, recently y’all did a new song about the Ohio River, but I can’t remember what it was called. Can you help me?”
Charlie Bowen gave her directions to last summer’s podcast that featured the song she was thinking of — it’s called “Shawneetown” — but her note was still on his mind when the band gathered later that evening for its weekly rehearsal.
That’s why, when manager/videographer Pamela Bowen filmed a few tunes from the session, this song was one she captured.
By the way, if you’d like to read the back story on this old/new tune, see our earlier newsletter article on “Shawneetown” by clicking right here.
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Earning their chops in medicine shows and with minstrel troupes in the late 1890s, brothers Frank and Bert Leighton wrote and/or arranged many ragtime pieces for use in vaudeville.
Among their work was a 1912 version of “Frankie and Johnny,” penned with partner Ren Shields, that would set the tone for many future renditions of the song, including a monster hit a decade and half later for Charlie Poole and his North Carolina Ramblers.
The song that Poole and his pals released as “Leaving Home” on Columbia Records in May 1927 already was pretty well known by musicians of the day.
For instance, on the same label in the same year, popular band leader Ted Lewis recorded the same song with the title "Frankie and Johnny: You'll Miss Me in the Days to Come.” Lewis included only the chorus and not the verses.
But it was a half dozen years before that that the first American recording of “Frankie and Johnny” was made by New Orleans-born Al Bernard, one of the first white singers to record blues tunes. (W.C. Handy credited Bernard, in fact, with helping his own career by recording a number of his songs, notably “St. Louis Blues.”)
Whew! That’s a lot of intersecting stories here, but let’s roll it back to Charlie Poole and the Leighton boys.
Kinney Rorer, in his seminal biography Rambling Blues: the Life & Songs of Charlie Poole, notes that the banjoist closely follows the version of “Leaving Home” that the Leighton brothers created, though there are some differences in Charlie’s chorus.
About the Leightons
Now, no one knows just how Poole learned that rendition, but the Leightons were pretty influential. Among the ragtime pieces they wrote was "There's A Dark Man Coming With A Bundle” and "Far Sway in Honolulu (They've got the tango craze).”
Their most memorable and influential song was "Steamboat Bill" in 1910, a parody of best-selling “Ballad of Casey Jones,” which had itself been based on a song from the Leightons' vaudeville routine.
Arthur Collins recorded “Steamboat Bill” in 1911, which would inspire Charles Reisner to write a movie for comedian Buster Keaton called “Steamboat Bill Jr.,” which released as a silent film in 1928.
That same year, Walt Disney found inspiration in the movie and in the song to create the first synchronized cartoon with sound, Steamboat Willie.
Back to Johnny and His Murderous Mistress
All the Frankie and Johnny variations were based on an actual murder. Here are the facts of the case:
At 2 in the morning of Oct. 15, 1899, at an apartment building located at 212 Targee Street in St. Louis, 22-year-old Frankie Baker encountered her 17-year-old Allen (Albert) Britt as he stumbled back from a cakewalk in the company of a prostitute named Nelly Bly.
Albert and Nellie had just won a prize in a slow-dancing contest, but Frankie didn’t feel like celebrating. On the contrary, she felt like shooting her lover in the stomach, which she did. Albert died in City Hospital four days later.
At trial, Frankie pleaded self-defense at her trial — she claimed Britt had attacked her with a knife prior to the shooting — and she was found not guilty.
Weeks after the murder, St. Louis songwriter Bill Dooley composed “Frankie Killed Allen,” a tune that gained some currency. The first published version appeared in 1904, credited to Hughie Cannon (also remembered for his better-known composition “Won’t You Come Home Bill Bailey”).
That brings up to 1912 and the Frank and Bert Leighton version entitled “Frankie and Johnny” (because, well, “Johnny” apparently flowed better than “Allen” or “Albert”). Since then, there have been more than 250 versions of “Frankie and Johnny” recorded, not to mention several film adaptation over the years.
Our Take on the Tune
When Jack Nuckols switches from drums to fiddle, it often brings back lots of old memories of music parties 50 years ago.
This is another song that Dave Peyton, Joe Dobbs and Charlie Bowen first heard at those parties when the good old Kentucky Foothill Ramblers, led by H. David Holbrook, could play a whole evening full of string band songs from the 1920s and ‘30s.
This track is from last week’s Flood affair, when the group’s old band mate Paul Martin and his mandolin sat in with current Floodsters Charlie and Jack, Danny Cox, Randy Hamilton and Sam St. Clair.
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A surprise visit from Floodster Emeritus Paul Martin turned this week’s rehearsal into a happy reunion.
Paul became active with the band nearly a decade ago. He was fundamental in recording and engineering The Flood’s two most recent albums (Live in Concert and Speechless).
He also played a huge part in the guys’ several years as the house band in the good ol’ Route 60 Saturday Night music variety shows starting in 2017.
But in 2021, demands of work and family required Paul to greatly reduce his Floodery. Since then, his old band mates see him only occasionally, but it’s always a special evening when he is in the room.
Paul — with mandolin, guitar and beautiful vocals — made sweet memories last New Year’s Eve at the big “Flood at 50” birthday bash at Alchemy Theatre
Since that night, though, it had been more than nine months since he had been back in the Flood fold. No wonder, then — as illustrated in Pamela Bowen’s video — that everyone felt festive when he suddenly walked into the Bowen house on Thursday night.
About the Song
Paul’s arrival had the rest of the Family Flood a bit nostalgic, reaching back to tunes the band hadn’t trotted out in a while.
It had been almost a year, for example, since the guys had played the old John Stewart tune, “July, You’re a Woman,” but it seemed to fit the evening’s mood perfectly.
If you’d like a history of the song — and The Flood’s association with this tune goes back to the band’s earliest days — check out this Flood Watch entry.
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A decade after what fans feared would be the last flight of The Eagles — SoCal’s ultimate 1970s soft rockers — band mates Timothy Schmit and Don Felder teamed up with friends to try to create a new band, one they wanted to call “The Malibu Men’s Choir.”
Well, that effort failed — the new group never got off the ground — but their songwriting collaboration with Jim Capaldi and Paul Carrack did produce a hit for a re-energized Eagles when the band rebounded for its 1994-96 “Hell Freezes Over” Tour.
As diehard Eagles enthusiasts know, the tour’s name hearkened back a dozen years. Asked in 1982 by People magazine if he’d ever get the band back together, Don Henley was snide. Sure, he said, “When hell freezes over."
When the reunion did come to pass — with a lineup of Henley, Felder, Schmit, Glenn Frey and Joe Walsh performing live in April 1994 at Warner Bros. Studios for an MTV special — Frey quipped, "For the record, we never broke up. We just took a 14-year vacation."
Here Comes The Song
However, The Eagles didn’t have much new material for the subsequent tour and accompanying album.
That brings us to “Love Will Keep Us Alive.” Schmit already knew this song, because Capaldi and Carrack wrote it a few years earlier during that ill-fated Malibu Men’s Choir project.
On The Eagles’ tour album, the song reached No. 1 on the Adult Contemporary chart despite not being released as a single. Critics noted that Schmit’s rare lead vocal gave the ballad a tender fragility.
The song was nominated at the Grammy Awards for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals.
Meanwhile, Carrack — who may have had his own voice in mind when he co-wrote it — also recorded song on his 1996 album, Blue Views. Then 15 years later, he and Schmit recorded it together in London with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra for a release on the Carrack label.
Our Take on the Tune
Back in June, rolling into Huntington’s West End to play at a picnic to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the city’s beloved Sacred Heart Catholic Church, the band played its then-new cover of The Eagles’ first big hit, “Peaceful Easy Feeling.”
“That was great!” the hostess said. “Play another Eagles tune.”
Uh-oh, there wasn’t another Eagles song in the Flood repertoire. Well, not yet, anyway. Then Randy Hamilton stepped up.
“I think I got one,” Randy said at a later band rehearsal. It turned out that for years Randy had been singing “Love Will Keep Us Alive,” ever since he had performed it at his sister’s wedding. “It’s her favorite song,” he added.
When he started singing for his Flood brothers, the tune just naturally slipped into a groove. Here from last week’s rehearsal is Randy leading the way!
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It all began toward the end of a rollicking rehearsal when between songs the guys started talking about what they planned to do in the week ahead.
Danny mentioned that lately he had been getting out early to take his walks in the morning before the heat set in. That prompted Charlie to start singing that Fats Domino song, “I’m walkin’, yes, indeed, and I’m talkin’ ‘bout you ‘n’ me…”.
Well, Danny — who by anybody’s definition is a walking jukebox — started playing the old tune.
Sam and Jack quickly picked up the vibe. Charlie reached for the banjo to add a little pepper to the pot while Randy searched his memory bank for the words and melody.
Suddenly the song just started arranging itself. Click here to give it a spin.
About the Song
Fats Domino wrote “I’m Walkin’” in 1957, working with his frequent collaborator Dave Bartholomew.
It became Domino's third release in a row to reach No. 1 on the R&B chart, where it stayed for six weeks.
Flashback: How Fats Became Fats
Down in New Orleans in 1947, bandleader Billy Diamond heard a stocky 19-year-old French Creole lad named Antoine Dominique Domino playing at a backyard barbecue.
Diamond was so impressed with the pianist that he hired him for his band, The Solid Senders, booking him to play with his crew at the Hideaway Club in the Crescent Club’s Ninth Ward, where he would earn the princely sum of $3 a week.
Two years later, Antoine — whom by then Diamond had christened “Fats” — was still at the Hideaway when he was discovered by former trumpeter Dave Bartholomew, the New Orleans A&R man for Imperial Records, a fledgling independent label out of Los Angeles.
The Partnership
The two partnered up and started working together. Soon, they had refashioned a number called “Junker’s Blues” (an old New Orleans song about heroin addiction) into a tune they called “The Fat Man.”
Initially, folks at Imperial hated it; however, they warmed to it considerably when it became an immediate hit, selling a million copies after its December 1949 release.
Today "The Fat Man" often is called the very first rock ’n’ roll record. Musicologist Ned Sublette says the song in fact was rock and roll before that term was even coined.
Critics say Domino staked out new musical territory by playing a stripped-down and more aggressive boogie-woogie piano with a series of hot triplets and snare-like backbeats.
Curiously, Fats himself, though, was not convinced that his work was of a new genre. Years later — in 1956 — he commented, “What they call ‘rock and roll’ is rhythm and blues, and I've been playing it for 15 years in New Orleans."
Meanwhile, “The Fat Man” was the beginning of a beautiful friendship with Bartholomew. In the mid-1950s, Dave and Fats wrote more than 40 hits for Imperial, including the Billboard No. 1 pop chart hit “Ain’t That a Shame,” as well as “Blue Monday,” “I’m In Love Again” and “Whole Lotta’ Loving.”
And of course — eight years into their collaboration — came that kicky “I’m Walkin’.”
Crossing Over
That particular song also solidified Fats Domino's crossover appeal when it peaked at No. 4 on the pop singles chart.
Later that same year, Ricky Nelson covered it on an episode of his mom and dad’s hit television series, The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet. Subsequently, Rick’s 1957 single also reached No. 4 on the pop chart as well as No. 10 on the R&B chart.
Sixty-two years later, Fats’ original Imperial Records release was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
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For dozens of years, a favorite annual event in the Floodisphere has been playing each September at the Fraley Festival at Carter Caves State Park in Olive Hill, Ky.
Floodster Emeritus Doug Chaffin — who for decades played bass behind festival founders Annadeene and J.P. Fraley — was a fixture at the yearly gathering almost since its beginning in 1976.
A quarter of a century ago when Doug joined The Flood, he saw to it that his new band mates were regulars too.
Well, everyone knew the September 2024 Fraley Festival would be a challenge, because it would be the first one since Doug’s death last November.
Honestly, unable to imagine the event without the sight of Doug’s grin and the sound of his infectious laugh, The Family Flood even considered opting out of the festival this year.
But then Barb Kuhns reached out to the guys.
Barb, the beloved and tireless coordinator of all things Fraley each year, said she planned a tribute to Doug at the opening night. Donna Chaffin planned to attend, along with the kids and grandchildren.
“Will The Flood join us,” Barb said, “and maybe say a few words?”
“Well, of course!”
Barb — who’s also a founding member of the 50-year-old Corndrinkers old-time string band of Dayton, Ohio — also agreed to sit in on fiddle on The Flood’s set. Well, that cinched it!
Barb even managed to get the guys on stage last night before the rains came. In fact, The Flood was the last group at the old amphitheater before the storm chased everyone inside.
Here’s the video built around the band’s last tune of the Doug Chaffin tribute.
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The first time Charlie Poole and his North Carolina Ramblers walked into a recording studio in New York City, they blew the doors off the place.
It was July 27, 1925, and the first record by the three of them — banjoist Poole, fiddler Posey Rorer, whom he had met in West Virginia eight years earlier, and guitarist Norman Woodlief — sold more than 100,000 copies.
That was raging success in anyone’s book. It is especially true, considering that at the time there were only about 6,000 phonographs in the entire American South, the intended market for what Columbia Records called its “Hillbilly series.”
It didn’t make Charlie and guys rich, though. Alas, in 1925, artists were paid by the song recorded, not by the copies sold. The Ramblers got $75 for the session.
About the Song
The song that made all those wave — “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down” — was an old blues that was a favorite of Piedmont pickers from Virginia down to Georgia.
A year after Poole’s waxing of it, Ernest Stoneman recorded a version. So did Vernon Dalhart. West Virginia singer/guitar Frank Hutchison did it as “The Deal” in 1929.
Thirty years later, bluegrass pickers were loving on it. Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs recorded a rendition in August 1957.
Since then there have been tasty takes by Doc Watson, The New Lost City Ramblers, The Grateful Dead, David Bromberg, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Bob Wills and many others.
The song apparently has deep roots — a man named Tyler Meeks once told a folklorist that he learned the song in 1911 from a guitarist named Charlie Blackstock — and while “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down” is often referred to a “white blues,” Black Piedmont artists like Etta Baker and John Jackson also have taken swings at the song.
The Deal? What Deal?
But what “deal” are we supposed to not let go down? The song’s title seemed to refer to card playing, but what game?
Author Zora Neale Hurston, who beautifully documented much 20th Century culture, recorded in her 1935 book Mules and Men that “Let the deal go down" was a chant associated with what card fanciers used to call “The Georgia Skin Game.”
Of this largely forgotten game, Hurston wrote:
Any number of “pikers” can play at a time, but there are two principals who do the dealing. Both of them are not dealing at the same time, however. When the first one who deals “falls,” the other principal takes the deal. If he in turn falls, it goes back to the first dealer. The principals draw the first two cards. The pikers draw from the third card on. Unless a player or players want to “scoop one in the rough,” he can choose his own card which can be any card in the deck except the card on top of the deck and that one goes to the dealer. The dealer charges anything he pleases for the privilege of “scooping,” the money being put in sight. It is the player's bet.
After the ones who wish to have scooped, then the dealer begins to “turn” the cards. That is, flipping them off the deck face upwards and the pikers choose a card each from among those turned off to bet on. Sometimes several pikers are on the same card. When all have selected their cards and have their bets down, they begin to chant “Turn 'em” to the dealer. He turns them until a player falls. That is, a card like the one he is holding falls. For instance, one hold the 10 of Hearts. When another 10 falls he loses. Then the players cry “hold 'em” until the player selects another clean card, one that has not fallen. The fresh side bets are down and the chant “turn 'em” and the singing “Let de deal go down” [continue] until the deck is run out."
Whew! That’s a long trip to take to a title, but, hey, now you know….
Our Take On the Tune
Dave Peyton and Charlie Bowen first heard this song back in the mid-1970s when they were lucky enough to regularly sit in with the good folks of The Kentucky Foothill Rambler.
Band founder H. David Holbrook already was a walking/talking encyclopedia of all-things Charlie Poole — he still is! — and taught the fledgling Flood so many of those good old tunes.
So it was only natural when The Flood got re-energized 30 years ago, this old tune was on the playlist. And it still here, as you can hear in this track from last week’s rehearsal.
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The Roarin’ Twenties were in full swing and the stock market was reaching new record highs a hundred years ago when vaudevillian Jimmy Cox wrote his cautionary tale about the fickleness of fortune and friendship.
“Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out" was copyrighted in 1923, but it was another four years before the first known publication appeared, with the 1927 recording by a little known jazzman named Bobby Leecan.
Two others — an obscure vocal quartet called The Aunt Jemima Novelty Four and boogie-woogie pianist Pinetop Smith — also gave it a spin, but it was Bessie Smith’s rendition in 1929 that made the song legendary.
Predicting the Future
As noted here earlier, Smith’s treatment of the tune also was oddly prophetic.
Columbia released Smith’s record on Sept. 13, 1929. Two weeks earlier, The New York stock market had reached an all-time high; two weeks later, it took its most perilous plunge, beginning 10 years of The Great Depression. No song ever seemed more stunningly relevant than this one.
"Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out" became one of Smith’s biggest hits. In fact, the song was so identified with “The Empress of the Blues” that for another generation or so other female singers were reluctant to record it.
By the 1950s, though, it was a blues standard. A version by Nina Simone reached No. 23 on Billboard’s R&B charts. Odetta tackled it. So did Janis Joplin.
Men also found the song a great vehicle. Louis Jordan and Josh White both had versions. So did Lead Belly and Eric Von Schmidt, Chad Mitchell, Otis Redding and Sam Cooke.
The Brit Bit
Meanwhile, in English, when Eric Clapton was an art student in the early 1960s, he was attracted to the finger-picking acoustic guitar-stylings of bluesman Big Bill Broonzy. "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out" was one of the first songs Clapton learned to play that way.
In 1970, he recorded a group version with his band Derek and the Dominos for the debut album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. (Also on that album, incidentally, on slide guitar, was Duane Allman, who also recorded the song with his brother Greg.)
Our Take on the Tune
Some nights are just magical, when everything we do — even this hundred-year-old song — seems suddenly fresh and new.
Click here to check it out.
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Having known each other since high school, Randy Hamilton and Danny Cox have bonds and shared musical instincts that bring lots of riches to our room.
Whenever Randy and Dan put a song on the table — as they did with “Deep River Blues” and “Sunny,” as they did with “Ready for the Times to Get Better,” “Windy and Warm” and “When You Say Nothing at All” — they usually already have an arrangement started. It’s ready for the rest of us to just jump on board and ride!
That certainly was the case last week when they arrived at the rehearsal ready to share the latest tune they were woodshedding on: Neil Young’s gorgeous composition, “Harvest Moon.” As you’ll hear in this track, as soon as Danny started playing it and Randy hit the first lines, the band dropped right into their groove.
About the Song
Considered one of his all-time best songs, Neil Young released “Harvest Moon” in 1992 as the title tune of his 19th album, written in honor of his second wife, Pegi, whom he had married a dozen years earlier.
The song quickly drew praise from the music press. AllMusic’s Matthew Greenwald, for instance, said the song epitomized "the power of nature and music, as well as a feeling of celebrating lifetime love.”
Calling the melody “positively gorgeous,” he added, “It’s one that could have easily framed a heavier song."
Joining the jubilation, music critic Alexis Petridis wrote that “Harvest Moon” is a "genuinely beautiful hymn to marriage and enduring love."
Some see the Harvest Moon album, which went multi-platinum in 1997, as a kind of an unofficial sequel to Young's Harvest album of 20 years earlier, noting the two discs even share many of the same guest musicians.
The Moon
Meanwhile, the moon is a big deal in the Neil Young oeuvre; lunar imagery show up in no fewer than 28 of his compositions.
"Before there was organized religion, there was the moon,” Young told Harp magazine back in 2005. “The Indians knew about the moon. Pagans followed the moon. I've followed it for as long as I can remember, and that's just my religion.”
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Here’s a tune that has touched the hearts and minds of more than a hundred years’ worth of Flood heroes.
At the very start of the 20th century, it was one of the best-loved numbers in the repertoire of jazz legend Buddy Bolden down in the hot, dark streets of New Orleans.
A couple decades later up in Memphis, W.C. Handy co-opted it, copyrighting a variation after he heard an old guy singing it in a railroad station.
It was one of the first songs waxxed when the recording revolution began in the 1920s. Bessie Smith and a kid named Louis Armstrong had a huge hit with it in 1925.
After that, it was recorded by … well, by everybody from Lula Jackson and Lonnie Johnson to Jack Teagarden and The Mills Brothers, from Kid Ory and Baby Dodds to Bunk Johnson and George Lewis.
Country versions were done by The Texas Rangers, The Dixie Ramblers and by Riley Puckett, blues versions by Big Joe Turner and Josh White, straight-up jazz takes by Sidney Bechet and Billie Holiday, early rock and pop renditions by Fats Domino and Elvis Presley, Ray Charles and Nat “King” Cole, earnest folk treatments by Jean Ritchie and Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and Dave Van Ronk.
The Song’s Origins
The origins of “Careless Love” are obscure indeed, though it is thought to be essentially British, re-made in America with new stylistic influences. In the US, for instance, folklorist Vance Randolph collected a version in 1948 that he was told was learned in 1880.
In Father of the Blues, W.C. Handy’s 1941 autobiography, the composer acknowledged that the song he copyrighted as “Loveless Love” was “based on the ‘Careless Love’ melody that I had played first in Bessemer (Ala.) in 1892 and that has since become popular all over the South.”
Meanwhile, uh, What About the Murders? ...
Handy’s autobiography also introduced a curious twist when a notorious double-murder case glommed onto the “Careless Love” story.
While living in Henderson, Ky., with his new wife, Elizabeth, “I was told that the words of ‘Careless Love’ were based on a tragedy in a local family,” Hardy wrote, “and one night a gentleman of that city's tobacco-planter aristocracy requested our band to play and sing this folk melody.”
The tragedy in question was the April 1895 shooting death of one Archibald Dixon Brown, who happened to be the 32-year-old son of Kentucky Gov. John Young Brown.
Newspapers across the country reported the scandal, how the jealous husband of Archie’s 28-year-old lover, Nellie Gordon, caught the two of them in a bedroom in a disreputable neighborhood in Louisville and shot each of them to death. Fulton Gordon was captured by police several blocks away, where he confessed to the murders. Soon balladeers were hard at work, singing the news.
Our Take on the Tune
“Man, I love those chords you found!” Joe Dobbs used to say whenever The Flood played “Careless Love.” It’s true that the country version of the song Joe grew up hearing — with its simple I-IV-V structure — made for a pretty boring tune to solo on.
That’s why when The Flood started doing the tune a couple of decades ago, Charlie Bowen dug around to find what Joe like to call “those Nawlins chords,” the changes favored by early jazz bands when they performed the song.
And since then, each iteration of the band over the years has found lots of space for ad-libbing in those roomy chords inherited from the song’s sweet Dixieland roots.
Just listen, for instance, to all the ideas that Sam St. Clair, Danny Cox and Randy Hamilton come up with in this latest rendition from last week’s rehearsal.
The Fakebook
Oh, and by the way, if you’d like to pick along on this or other songs in The Flood catalog, visit the band’s Fakebook section on its website.
There you’ll find chord charts for dozens of tunes in The Flood songbag, along with links to the band’s renditions over the years. Click here to check it out.
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Dave Peyton and Charlie Bowen could not know it, of course, but 11 years ago this week the pair of them spent their last afternoon with the man who had been their dear friend for nearly a half century, fellow Flood founder Roger Samples.
On a perfectly suitable-for-framing Saturday in the summer of 2013, the Peytons and the Bowens trekked from their Huntington homes to Mount Sterling, Ky., to be with Roger and his wife, Tammy.
They would always remember it as a day of laughs and food, of stories and, of course, music. And Pamela Bowen was wise enough to capture videos of some of the tunes they played that joyous day. Most of them were songs that dated all the way back to the very beginning of the band in the mid-1970s.
The Demon at the Door
It was impossible, of course, to know that this would the last time the Samples, Peytons and Bowens would all be together; however, a suspicion surely lurked in the background, unspoken. After all, by then Roger was mid-way through what turned out to be a five-year battle with cancer.
Good days and bad days for him were the new normal in 2013, and, sadly, after that sweet summer, it was more bad than good.
But Aug. 17, 2013, was a decidedly good day.
At the end of a particularly fine music session, Roger often liked to quote the opening lines of a favorite old Ian Tyson song:
Play one more and then I'm leaving, boys. Pick one more — let those guitars ring ….
And ring they did on that sunny day in Kentucky.
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Chatter is everywhere when the band gathers each week for rehearsal at the Bowen House. News, gossip, jokes. But the best conversations usually don’t involve words at all.
The Flood Zone — like most tight-knit groups of friends — has developed its own language. It is a shorthand in which a grin and a nod could mean, “Wow — great solo. Cool new stuff!” while a shrug and a chuckle could tell everyone, “Oops — sorry about that, guys. Coulda sworn I knew what key we’re in!”
But beyond gestures and facial expressions, the nouns and verbs of this wordless patter are notes and chords, rhythms and rests. This track from last week’s practice session is a perfect example.
Anatomy of a Groove
Regularly proclaiming rehearsal as the best night of the week, Charlie Bowen usually tries to help things along with his choice of the opening warmup tune of the evening. His selection this time was a jaunty old jazz standard.
Immediately, Danny Cox responds. Listen closely and you might hear the grins sailing around the room as his band mates enjoy the guitarist’s finding cool new twists in the nooks and crannies of the old familiar tune.
Jack Nuckols is the first to pick up on it, and right away he answers with innovations of his own, accents with his snare and high-hat cymbals that give the song a fresh shuffle.
Meanwhile, Randy Hamilton, whose solid bass line is the reliably rich and warm current under all the Flood repertoire, replies with a wink and nod — uh-huh — when asked if he’d that like a turn at the solos.
The infectious joy of this frolic in the Floodisphere is summed up in Bowen’s laughing out loud at himself when he grandly muffs the lyrics at one turn in the tune.
The point of it all is that, as in the spoken world, the best musical conversationalists are those who also know how to listen.
About the Song
The vehicle for this outing is Walter Donaldson’s jazz classic “My Blue Heaven,” which was introduced to the world by Eddie Cantor in the Ziegfeld Follies back in 1927, a year before it was a hit for crooner Gene Austin who sold a whopping five million copies of his rendition.
For the story behind this fascinating old tune, see our earlier Flood Watch report by clicking here.
More from This Year?
Finally, if you’d like to hear more of the musical conversations emanating from the Bowen House nowadays, check the 2024 edition of the Radio Floodango free music streaming service.
Click here to dial in.
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In 1938, three years before his death, the legendary Jelly Roll Morton sat down to record a series of Library of Congress interviews with noted folklorist Alan Lomax, who called the results “a virtual history of the birth pangs of jazz as it happened in the New Orleans of the turn of the century.”
Along the way, Morton elaborated on his narrative with various songs, including one he called “Winin’ Boy Blues,” a tune that contains more anomalies than a Salvador Dali canvas.
You can start with the song’s authorship. Some credit Morton as its composer, perhaps as a musical tribute to himself. Others believe Jelly Roll heard it in his youth as a folk tune about the sportin’ life in his native Crescent City.
What About the Title?
Then there are the questions about that title. Transcripts of the original Lomax interviews preserve the song as “Winin’ Boy Blues.” Subsequent recordings, however, have called it “Whinin’ Boy,” based on what later listeners think they hear Morton actually saying in the audio of those interviews.
Each opinion has its advocates.
The “Winin’ Boy” school of thought contends “winin’” is a double contraction of the word winding, the term presumably meant to celebrates the sexual dexterity of the song’s protagonist.
A smaller — and perhaps less convincing — class of followers in this same group think “winin’” refers instead to the boy’s love of wines. Some even go so far as to suggest the song’s boy got his name from his habit of collecting all the near-empty wine bottles after a night's debauchery, pouring them together into one glass and drinking it down.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the debate, commentators contend the word is “whine” because a whining boy, they say, is old New Orleans slang for a pimp. Or, in a variation, that he was a youngster who sat outside a brothel with his guitar and/or harmonica or just his voice; then when he saw police coming, he would "whine" a specific song/tune as an alert to the people inside the house.
Take your pick. Wind, wine or whine.
Don’t Deny
The music’s mysteries don’t stop there. Morton’s opening lyric is:
I'm the W(h)inin' Boy, don't deny my name.
How does a name get denied? And why? And by whom? The good folks over at the Internet’s fun Mudcat Cafe (mudcat.org) have had wonderful discussions on this bit of verse.
A contributor known only as “Amos” noted, “Having your name ‘denied’ (denigrated or made nothing of) is part of the general burden of debasement that blues like these are born in.
“Similar complaints from other parts of the forest,” he added, include: “Just 'cuz I'm a stranger, everybody wanna dog me around…” (e.g. Howlin’ Wolf).
Stavin’ What?
At least one more of the song’s curiosities calls for exegesis. Lower in the same opening verse, Jelly Roll growled:
Pick it up and shake it like sweet Stavin' Chain.
Like, uh, say what?
Well, let’s start with the fact that there was an actual tool called a “staving chain” used in the old days of barrel-making. It was a length of chain with a loop on one end (like a dog choker collar) used to pull the staves of a barrel together so that the hoops could be driven in.
“Stavin' chain” also popped up in prison culture as the name of a similar chain pulled around inmates’ ankles to hold chain gangs together.
And, as you might imagine, we once again are not far from sex in this search. A much smaller stavin’ chain — made of little smooth links — was said to be used as a sexual aid to help a man "stave off" ejaculation during a frolic. (We’ll just leave it at that and let you and your vivid, virile imagination take it from there.)
Stavin’ Who?
By the way, in the Lomax interviews, Morton noted that “Stavin’ Chain” was not only a what but a who. “Stavin’ Chain” was the name of a pimp, he said, who was “supposed to have more women in this district than any other pimp.”
As a trickster in African American legend, “Stavin’ Chain” figures prominently in later recordings by Lil Johnson and by Big Joe Williams.
A 1937 Johnson recording, for example, identified “Stavin’ Chain” as the chief engineer on a train, a big, strong man who could make love all night long. In 1939 when John and Ruby Lomax were recording songs by prisoners at Ramsey State Farm in Brazoria County, Texas, they found at least two different inmates claiming to be the original “Stavin’ Chain.”
Footnote: Oh Mary…
Oh, and if you remember our earlier discussion of Kentucky-born musicologist Mary Guthrie Wheeler, who wrote 1944’s Steamboatin’ Days: Folk Songs of the River Packet Era, you might get a kick out of knowing of her unintentionally hilarious difficulties in trying to collect a version of "Stavin' Chain" for her book.
You got to wonder what wizened old stevedores thought when she approached, in all innocence, asking them to sing to her about this “stavin’ chain” she had heard so much about.
Our Take on the Tune
Whatever its mysteries, Jelly Roll Morton’s tune has always resonated with us.
We love how this century-old song just eases on down and settles into a groove on any sultry summer night.
And, hey, here’s a shout-out to Floodster Sam St. Clair. We seldom can accompany these weekly podcasts with video, like the one that tops this report. We’re grateful that Sam happened to have his camera running when this tune got played at a recent rehearsal.
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So much of the band’s repertoire these days is jazzed by Jack Nuckols’ dynamic drumming. Tunes that were thought to be retired from The Flood set lists suddenly are back with a whole new burst of verve.
Meanwhile, certain musical muscles that Jack thought were long retired also are being reawakened. That is because The Flood has got Nuckols fiddling again.
In the Old Days…
Back in the 1970s, when he was a regular at the Bowen Bashes where The Flood was born, Jack was part of the parties’ circle of fiddlers, joining the likes of Joe Dobbs and Mack Samples, Jim Strother, Buddy Griffin and others.
But then 20 years ago, dust started gathering on the Jack Nuckols fiddle case.
And Now…
Last year when Jack brought his brushes, snare and high-hat to the band room, he noticed that not all of of the group’s eclectic repertoire needed rhythmic additions.
“I’ll just sit out on those tunes,” he said.
Whoa, buddy, not so fast, his new band mates said. The Flood’s folkier stuff, they said, are perfectly fit for a bit of fiddling. In other words, Jack, ahem… open the fiddle case.
So, lately to the weekly rehearsals Nuckols has been bringing his fiddle, which is finding its way into more and more Flood songs.
Last weekend saw the instrument’s debut at a show at Woodlands during the band’s performance of Walt Aldridge’s beautiful ballad, “No Ash Will Burn.” Check it out in the Pamela Bowen’s video at the top of this article.
Jack’s fiddle is now a Flood fixture.
About That Song
As we wrote in a Flood Watch article last spring, we learned “No Ash Will Burn” from another veteran of those long-ago Bowen Bashes, late Floodster Emeritus Bill Hoke.
Only later did we find out that “No Ash Will Burn” is the work of Muscle Shoals singer/songwriter Walt Aldridge, an Alabaman whose songs over the past 60 years have been recorded by artists from Lou Reed to Reba McEntire. For more about the song’s history, click here.
Meanwhile, if you’d like to see/hear more from last weekend’s show, check out this earlier report.
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In our circle of talented friends back in the 1970s, whenever the moment called for a Charlie Poole song, we knew exactly on whom to call.
H. David Holbrook and his powerful, popular Kentucky Foothill Ramblers string band covered the best of the Charlie Poole North Carolina Ramblers songbook, introducing so many of us to that marvelous old-time music of the 1920s.
And despite KFR’s pronounced Poole supremacy in our extended musical family, the fledgling Flood occasionally could swipe a tune off that same table.
In fact, in the antediluvian era before The Flood was even a gleam in our eye, band progenitors David Peyton and Roger Samples — playing as a duet in the late-’60s — already had worked up a version of the 1928 Poole novelty number called “Took My Gal a-Walking.” Dave and Rog regularly played in coffeehouses at Marshall University and elsewhere around the region.
Flash Forward to 1975
The tune was still bobbing to the surface a few years later when The Flood began. That was in those halcyon days after Peyton teamed up with Charlie Bowen, after the two of them met Joe Dobbs and interested him in jamming with them, after Roger was drawn back into the mix following his brief sojourn in the eastern part of the state.
The summer of 1975, then, was fertile period for the guys. They gathered almost every week — usually an evening at Peyton Place, Dave and Susan’s beautiful Mount Union Road home just outside Huntington — to work out new tunes.
On those summer nights, everybody brought songs to suggest; many of them got their first public performances at the next Bowen Bash that autumn. In the short film at the top of this report, the pictures and audio are from the Sept. 5-6, 1975, do, the first bash attended by fiddlin’ Joe, incidentally.
About That Song
“Took My Gal a-Walkin’” came late in Charlie Poole’s remarkable career. When Poole and his North Carolina Ramblers — with Roy Harvey on guitar and Lonnie Austin on fiddle — entered the Columbia Records studios in New York on July 23, 1928, the band already was nationally known.
The group by then had had a half dozen recording sessions — two thirds of those that would produce its 60 sides over five years — and already had waxed their best seller. “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down Blues,” recorded in 1925, sold more than 106,000 copies at a time when there were estimated to be only 6,000 phonographs in the entire southern U.S.
The Summer 1928 session was a marathon — in the single day, Poole, Harvey and Austin recorded a dozen sides — but it also was a lackluster one. None of the monsters hits of Poole’s earlier days emerged from this outing, no "Good-Bye Booze" or "Leaving Home,” no "White House Blues" or "Hungry Hash House.”
Instead, most of the tunes on the set list this time were old folk songs (such as “Hangman, Hangman”) and highly forgettable ballads (like "A Young Boy Left His Home One Day").
The exception was the happy novelty tune that Peyton and Samples later sampled. “Took My Gal a-Walkin’” has some of the better, most ironic lyrics in the Poole catalog:
I ain't got nobody, I′m just as blue as can be I ain′t got nobody to make a big fuss over me If I don't get somebody I′ll go back to the farm Milk the cows and chickens, I don't give a golly gosh darn
Poole's biographer and great-nephew Kinney Rorrer, who wrote Rambling Blues: The Life and Songs of Charlie Poole in 1982, has found no source for this tune, leading many to speculate that Poole might have created the piece himself.
Footnote
As noted, Peyton, Samples, Dobbs and Bowen rolled out their rendition of the tune at the September 1975 edition of the Bowen Bashes. That magical weekend is commemorated in a full-length hour-long episode of the Flood’s “Legacy Films” series, viewable for free on YouTube:
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A standing joke in our world is that the band makes The Big Bucks from grant money scored by the Flood Education Department, mainly when we tell stories and history of the songs during our shows.
That’s a lie, of course. There are not even little bucks in such blather, but we still like to rattle on about what we’ve found in our song research.
Last night’s show at Woodlands, for instance, afforded us a lovely opportunity to discuss the connection we’ve discovered between three of our favorite early 20th tunes. Call it, oh, “The Yellow Dog Dissertation,” captured above in Pamela Bowen’s video from ringside.
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Eighty-nine years ago this week, a young North Carolinian walked into a New York recording studio as Fulton Allen and, after recording a few tunes, walked out again as “Blind Boy Fuller.”
On the recording of his composition “Rag Mama” and two other songs pressed that day, the young man was accompanied by his mentor and blues tutor, the legendary Rev. Gary Davis.
“When I first run across him,” Davis said years later, “he didn't know how to play but one piece and that was with a knife.”
But with Davis’ guidance, Allen’s playing had improved dramatically by the time he came to the attention of James Baxter Long, a record store manager and talent scout in Burlington, NC.
“I saw this blind fellow, colored man. He had on a blanket-lined overall jumper,” Long later recounted, “but I heard him sing. He could sing. Anyway, I told him, 'I'm down here at the United Dollar Store. Come by and see me.’”
Well, Fulton did, and a short time later, in July 1935, Long, Allen and Davis set off for New York City, bound for American Recording Co. (ARC), which manufactured disks for many companies, including Columbia. Over the next five years Fulton Allen — as Blind Boy Fuller — recorded 120 sides, which were released by several different labels.
Oh, and about the name on the label. Earlier when Allen started to sing on the street corners of Durham, NC, outside factories and tobacco warehouses, people called him “Blind Boy Fulton.” Eventually it was corrupted to “Blind Boy Fuller,” which was to be the name Allen provided to folks at the New York recording studio.
How the Tune Came Down to Us
Thirty years later, “Rag Mama” came down to the 1960s folk music crowd as a signature sound for the era’s jug band music revival. It was first picked up by Stefan Grossman and Peter Siegel’s Even Dozen Jug Band, then by the even better-known Jim Kweskin Jug Band.
In their seminal 1979 book Baby, Let Me Follow You Down, Eric Von Schmidt and Jim Rooney quoted Kweskin as relating how he traveled across the country in the early 1960s developing his musical chops by performing with an array of musicians in local music stores, coffeehouses and bars.
“In Berkeley, California,” Kweskin told them, “I met a guy named Steve Talbott, who adapted an old Blind Boy Fuller tune, and I learned it from him. The song was ‘Rag Mama’ and it became my theme song.”
Enter The Flood
It was Kweskin’s rendition on his 1965 Jug Band Music album that inspired The Flood a decade later as the guys were expanding their repertoire into hokum music.
“Rag Mama” even played an important role in the early 1980s when Joe Dobbs pitched his idea to West Virginia Public Radio for a new weekly music show. When Joe asked his band mates to help him create a demo of his dream for “Music from the Mountains,” he wanted to illustrate the diversity of musical styles the show could celebrate.
Click the button below for a rather manic 1983 version of the tune offered up by Joe and his fellow Floodsters Dave Peyton, Charlie Bowen, Roger Samples and Bill Hoke:
Gimme Dat Ding
Few things stand still in the Floodisphere. That includes songs in the band’s repertoire. “Rag Mama” was still with the guys when they rolled into the 21st century, but by then the song had picked up new ornamentation.
It’s unclear just who first suggested it — might have been Peyton, might have been Bowen — but by the time the tune made it onto the band’s second studio album in 2002, “Rag Mama” had been been further fortified with a bit of 1970s folkie foolishness.
Britain’s novelty group The Pipkins hit the charts in 1970 with a little earworm that was written by Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood. The Family Flood found "Gimme Dat Ding” to be a perfect ending for its ever-evolving version of “Rag Mama.”
Today’s Take on the Tune
So, this song has been floating around in the Floodisphere for nearly 50 years. Nowadays, it is not often on the set list at the band’s shows, but it almost always comes back at Flood reunion, and we had a wonderful reunion last week.
Michelle Hoge, “the chick singer,” drove in from Cincinnati. Bub — Dave Ball — was up from Florida. Old friends like Jim Rumbaugh, Karen Combs and Doug Imbrogno came by.
Everybody was singing and playing along with this one from last week’s rehearsal.
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It was 19 years ago this week when The Flood met its den mother/soul sister. The irrepressible Rose Marie Riter hired the band to play at her 70th birthday party.
The boys in the band knew they were in for something different when she told them the venue for the afternoon’s party: The Lawrence County Airpark, near Chesapeake, Ohio.
“The, uh … why?” they asked.
Rose intended, she told them, to celebrate her seven decades on the planet by leaping from an airplane.
Planning Ahead
Arrive early, she told the Floodsters, and play before the jump, just in case .... "Well, you know, if things don't go well, I want to know that folks at least got to hear the music and have something to eat!”
The party was catered by the famed Hillbilly Hot Dogs, and, Rose added, if she survived the leap, there would be more food and champagne afterward.
The jump did go well, as reported by the local TV reporters in the above video.
And years later, when Rose’s 79th birthday approached, she asked if The Flood might play at her next party, which led to an exchange by Rose with Joe Dobbs and Charlie Bowen that you can hear by pressing the button below:
When We Say “Kazoo,” We Think “Rose”
Since the July 2005 afternoon of Rose’s bold birthday leap, The Flood has enjoyed decades of partying with Mrs. Riter, often with jokes and stories that have carried over week to week, evolving in many editions of the band’s weekly rehearsals at the Bowen House.
For instance, in the audio clip above did you happen to catch Joe’s reference to kazoos? Particularly joyful has been the ongoing saga of Rose’s love/hate of the band’s kazoo culture:
The above short video documents how for years, whenever Flood kazoo guru Dave Peyton played a real hummer of a solo, while everyone else was whooping and cheering, Rose would make of a show — and sound — of dissent.
Oh, how cleverly has Rose hidden her love of fine kazoory…
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When Elvis Presley recorded “Just Because” in 1954 in Memphis’s Sun Studio, the 19-year-old rocker was revisiting a saucy novelty tune that was a monster hit five years earlier for a West Virginian known as “America’s Polka King.”
Accordionist Frankie Yankovic — a native of Davis, WV, in Tucker County who recorded more than 200 songs and sold 30 million records — had just returned to his new home in Cleveland after four years of Army service in World War II, eager to resume what would be his 70-year career as a musician.
One night in the bar he operated, Yankovic visited with an old war buddy, polka pal Johnny Pecon, who played the tune for him, a song that Pecon had picked in the Pacific while serving with the Seabees.
What Pecon described as an old country and western number, “Just Because” had been written by Texas’s Shelton Brothers, Bob and Joe, in 1929 and released by their band a few years later by Decca Records.
Another version of the song was done in 1935 by Les Paul, the guitar great who still called himself “Rhubarb Red” in those days before hitting it big in the 1950s.
Both the Shelton and Les Paul records flopped. But Yankovic liked the song’s simple lyrics, which tell the story of a man breaking up with his gold-digging girlfriend. Frankie knew it would be easy for fans to learn the words. He asked Pecon and arranger Joe Trolli to create a polka-ish bridge for the song. Soon “Just Because” was a big hit with the folks who came to Yankovic’s dance gigs in Cleveland.
Yankovic Stands Up to Columbia
A few years later, when he signed a contract with the Columbia — the recording company he would work with for the next 26 years — Yankovic wanted to record “Just Because” on the B side of his “That Night in May.” However, he ran into resistance.
“Why go again with that turkey?” said the Columbia executive in charge of the session.
Yankovic pushed back, telling him how popular it was with his audiences back home. When the exec wouldn’t budge, the two got into a shouting match. Columbia’s new polka star threw sheet music on the floor and kicked a chair.
“No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get through to this guy,” Yankovic recalled years later. “Finally, I said, 'Look, I'll make a deal with you. I'll buy the first 10,000 records myself.’ I knew I could sell them off the bandstand. That convinced him. Columbia wasn't taking the chance anymore; I was. He gave us the go-ahead.”
Even in Boston…
You know what they say about the rest of the story: pure history. His “Just Because” skyrocketed in the late 1940s.
For instance, in Boston — not actually known as a polka town — disc jockey Bob Clayton played the song on the air and within two minutes 60 phone callers requested an encore. Clayton played it six times that first day. By next week 25,000 copies of the disc were sold in Boston alone.
Before long, sales of the record hit the million mark. Eventually it sold about two million, including reissues.
Bash Fun from ‘81
Now flash forward 30 years or so. In the Floodisphere, the song always conjures up memories of a hot, sweet night in the fall of 1981 when The Samples Brothers (Mack, Ted and Roger) brought down the house at a Bowen Bash. Here’s that moment in a clip from the band’s Bowen Bashes legacy film series:
As you’ll hear, the brothers are joined by Mack’s long-time buddy, guitarist Frank Beal, who takes the first solo, leading to six-string replies by both Ted and Rog. Also on the bandstand is Flood kazoo guru Dave Peyton and his latest creation at the time, “Wallace the Washboard.”
(Incidentally, the occasion of this recording was the last of nearly a decade of “Bowen Bash” music parties. A 90-minute tribute to that final Bash go-round can be viewed for free on YouTube by clicking right here.)
Meanwhile, 30 years later, the Samples Brothers were still doing their rocking version of “Just Because,” as demonstrated in this Flood Watch report about a gathering at Tammy and Roger Samples’ Mount Sterling, Ky., house in Janaury 2011.
Our Take on the Tune
As you can tell, this wonderfully zany old tune from the late Roarin’ Twenties is a song in search of a comedy routine, and in this track from last week’s rehearsal, The Flood certainly tries to do its part.
Right from the start, Danny Cox adds guitar accents that would be at home in a Spike Jones arrangement, then Jack Nuckols switches from his usual cool brushes and snare to those funky old wooden spoons, and suddenly the joint is jumpin’.
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Often a song has a special meaning that has absolutely nothing to do with either its lyrics or its melody.
The Flood’s tight connection to W.C. Handy’s 100-year-old “Yellow Dog Blues,” for instance, dates back to 2020 and the deep, dark days of the Covid-19 epidemic.
With the whole world was masked and distanced, the band couldn’t get together for its weekly gatherings. It was during the loneliness of that seemingly endless quarantine that Charlie Bowen got obsessed with trying to learn that song.
Woodshedding
It wasn’t his first time to try. Far from it. Bowen seemed to have always loved Bessie Smith’s 1925 original recording, but he had found her classic vocal on that old Columbia recording darn-near impossible to copy.
Then one bright morning, while tooling around YouTube, Charlie discovered a video of a wonderful 2010 rendition of the song by Tuba Skinny. Recorded on Royal Street in New Orleans’ French Quarter, it featured the fabulous Erika Lewis just killing it. And her approach — perhaps because it was on video — seemed more approachable.
Today the video has more than a million views; Charlie probably contributed about 10,000 of them himself as he painstakingly worked through the song, slowly picking up Erika’s brilliant nuance and style on each line.
“Poor Pamela!” Sam St. Clair once quipped.
Sam could just picture it: The Bowens were Covid-trapped together for who-knows-how-long, and there was Charlie doggedly singing those same damn lines over and over again. A patient woman, is our Pamela.
Anyway, by the following spring Charlie finally had the tune ready for a special public debut.
Playing in the Parks
It was the during that same Covid Winter that Floodster Emerita Veezy Coffman came up with an idea for the venue.
"Once spring comes," she said one night, "what if we had some public jam sessions out in the park?" People were really eager to get out again, she noted, and probably would appreciate hearing some free music.
One of the outings that followed that suggestion found the Family Flood jamming in Central Park in Ashland, Ky., on a happy Sunday afternoon.
Today that public jam is recorded as a red-letter day in The Flood’s scrapbook. That’s because it not only finally got the Family Flood back out into the fresh air, but also inspired bassist Randy Hamilton to return to the fold.
For the previous two years, Randy had put his Floodishness on the shelf in order to pursue other interests. However, by May 2021, he was ready to wade back in, and that lovely Sunday in the park was the catalyst. Randy had such a good time — and his old band mates were so thrilled to hear him again — that he immediately accepted the invitation to join back up.
“Yellow Dog Blues,” as illustrated in Pamela’s video above, captured Randy’s first solo of the afternoon. (An extra treat is watching Doug Chaffin pull his chair a little bit closer to better hear his old buddy play.)
Doug’s Last Favorite New Flood Tune
Oh, Doug.
Covid had been especially hard on him. Four months before the video shot, Doug had spent more than two weeks in the hospital. Doctors later said that had it not been for the vaccine and booster shots he and Donna got, the virus almost surely would have taken him.
Doug survived, but he was never back to his full strength. Further complicating matters, he also was fighting cancer by then. Those treatments lowered his immune system so much that from then on he needed to avoid being around more than a few people at a time.
In the last two years of his life, Doug did have some good days among the bad, especially when music was involved. Masked and diligently distanced, small groups of Floodsters made regular treks to see him and try to boost his spirits. Here’s such a joyful moment celebrated in a May 2022 podcast:
In almost all of those final sessions at the Chaffin house, Doug would call for “Yellow Dog Blues” as the last tune of the night.
As Charlie said recently:
Interested in the Song’s History?
Of course, as Doug well knew, there’s no canine anywhere near that song.
If you’d like to find our what the “yellow dog” really was — and to read the rest of the curious history of this great old W.C. Handy standard — check out earlier Flood Watch report by clicking here.
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The Flood is thrilled to be featured in the latest installment of Armstrong Neighborhood Channel’s Press Room Recordings series of award-winning music videos.
Douglas K. Morris and Shane Finster came by the Bowen House on June 27 to take in one of the band’s weekly rehearsals and to chat with Charlie Bowen about the group’s half-century history.
The resulting half-hour film — released this morning — showcases The Flood’s eclectic mix of old and new tunes, ranging from swing pieces (“Ain’t Misbehavin’,” “Sunny Side of the Street,” “Am I Blue?”) to folk "(“I Am a Pilgrim,” “Peaceful Easy Feeling”), blues (“Deep River Blues”) to old rock (“When She Wants Good Lovin’”).
Esteem
We were so honored to have Doug and Shane’s Armstrong Neighborhood van roll into the Bowen House neighborhood.
Press Room Recordings is now in its fifth season, and Doug, who is Armstrong’s producer of local programming, already has created more than 100 beautiful local videos featuring area musicians.
And they have been attracting serious national attention. Last May, for instance, Press Room Recordings won its fifth Telly Award since 2019 against stiff competition.
The Telly Awards is the world's largest honor for video and television across all screens. This year is the 45th annual Telly and saw a record-breaking 13,000 entries from across the globe.
Thanks, guys, for letting The Flood be part of your remarkable journey!
From the Archives
By the way, this wasn’t The Flood’s first visit with Doug Morris. He and the good Armstrong crew came by from their South Point, Ohio, offices 11 years ago on the late winter evening in 2013 to produce a fun, hour-long video feature on the band.
For years afterward, the video still regularly popped up on local cable stations occasionally. Here is Doug's recording of that evening:
It was made, incidentally, just days before we went into the studio to begin work on our fifth album, "Cleanup & Recovery."
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Rehearsals are not parties. They can be fun and satisfying, but the bottom line is that rehearsals are work sessions.
The Flood is always trying to learn new songs, and since that’s where the songs are worked out, some rehearsals are just more fun than others. So the band usually try to end the evening on a high note.
At one such rehearsal recently, Charlie Bowen asked if anybody had a tune in mind to end with.
“How about something we know?” said Danny Cox with a chuckle and a grin.
In a minute the band had rolled into the 1930s standard “Moonglow” and it turned into the best moment of the whole night.
The Song History
As reported here earlier, "Moonglow" was first recorded by Joe Venuti in 1933, with subsequent recordings by Benny Goodman and Ethel Waters.
Penned by Eddie DeLange and Will Hudson, the tune has since become a jazz standard, performed and recorded numerous times by a wide array of musical talents.
The Jazz Discography estimates that by 2016, the song had been recored 572 times, including in studio sessions, unreleased masters, live performances and radio transcriptions.
For more about the song’s creation and its history, click here.
Finding Other Tunes
By the way, if you have a specific tune you like to hear Floodified, drop by the Song Index on the band’s web site. More than 700 weekly episodes of the Flood podcast since its launch in late 2008 are linked from there.
On the page, you can browse the alphabetized list and click on the underlined date on the song you want to hear; then on the subsequent page, click on the title of the song and the audio will start.
A few words about the Song Index’s organization:
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The first of the links with a specific tune is always the most recent performance, followed by earlier renditions.
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Most of the links connect to audio, though some are to videos of performances, which are indicated with the *v designation.
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Occasionally links lead to audio or video of multiple songs; in that case, a time designation (such as "08:22") indicates where your selected song begins.
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Some songs also include a “Flood Watch” and/or a “Story” reference. Clicking either of those links takes you to further information about the tune, perhaps a Flood Watch newsletter article about the song’s history or maybe just a brief comment or discussion about it recorded at a jam session, rehearsal or performance.
Click here to reach the web site’s Song Index. Enjoy!
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The love affair began on a summer night down by the riverside.
It was June 2002 and The Flood was already there to make a memory, having been invited to perform as the guest artists with the Huntington Symphony Orchestra as part of its “Picnic with the Pops” series.
Listening that night from the orchestra’s string section was a 30-year-old violinist named Noel Sayre, who was making memories of his own.
Tickled that night by The Flood’s eclectic mix of folk, swing and hokum tunes, Noel took pains after the show — that ended with fireworks over the Ohio — to seek out Floodsters and compliment the band’s two sets.
Later Noel even confessed he still had one of the kazoos that The Flood handed out that night for its weird/wonderful sing/hum-along orchestrated by our kazoo guru, Dave Peyton. (Click the button below to relive that particular moment of Floodishness:)
Fast Forward
Now flash forward 15 months to the autumn of 2003. Noel ran into harmonicat Sam St. Clair somewhere and Sam invited him to The Flood’s next get-together at the Bowen House.
“Noel call here and asked for directions,” Charlie Bowen told his mom in an email the next day, “and then came on by. What an outstanding musician! He was able to improvise right along with us. His fiddling and Joe's complimented each other so well.”
A Huntington native, Noel lived in Columbus during his college days when he earned his degree in music, and still he played with a band there called The Black Swans.
Before that, Noel also was celebrated for his work as a member of Pretty Mighty Mighty, one of Columbus’s best-known indie rock act, which toured throughout the United States in the 1990s. He also played locally with a group called Good Ol’ Boys and A Girl.
"Well, he must have had a good time with The Flood," Charlie told his mom, "because he was the last guy to leave last night. We're hoping he comes back regularly. Fun!”
Shocking News
Noel did come back regularly. He jammed with The Flood dozens of times over the next five years, right up until the time of shocking death on July 3, 2008.
Sixteen years ago tomorrow, Noel Sayre passed away in a Portsmouth hospital a day after almost drowning in a community pool in nearby Wheelersburg, Ohio. He was 37.
Lifeguards discovered Sayre's body on the bottom of the deep end of the Porter Township Community Pool, according to a report from the Scioto County Sheriff's Department.
Two young lifeguards dove into the pool, recovered him and performed CPR before he was transported to the Southern Ohio Medical Center.
“It appeared to be a massive heart attack,” detective Jodi Conkel of the sheriff's department told The Columbus Dispatch.
Tributes and Memorials
A few days after Noel’s death, columnist Dave Lavender published a tribute in Huntington’s Herald-Dispatch, calling Sayre a “top-shelf fiddler/violinist and Grade A human being.”
Recalling the last time he saw Noel, Dave wrote, “Both of us, running late to go see The Bing Brothers on Marshall University’s campus a couple of months back, stood outside for a good half hour getting updates on this beautiful, crazy thing called life.
“Sayre was fresh back from a West Coast tour with The Black Swans,” Dave added, “and was filled with the joy of discovery and music and seeing this great country and its splendor.”
Later that month, the Bowens attended Noel’s memorial service at the First Presbyterian Church, highlighted by a display of the young man’s violin and by the performance of a trio of musicians from the Huntington Symphony.
"It was sad and sweet," Charlie wrote in an email to his mom.
Noel, son of the late Paul A. and Genevieve Darden Sayre, had no immediate family left. In fact, the only family there were two out-of-town cousins, one of whom admitted she'd never met him. Noel’s obituary listed among his survivors his loving girlfriend, Christy Turvey, and her children.
“What was especially touching,” Charlie’s note continued, “was the presence all the young friends who had come, some from as far away as New York. Many — most, even — were musicians who had played with Noel in various groups. Others were some of his young violin students and their parents.”
About Today’s Video
One of The Flood’s lasting regrets is that all of Noel's jams with the band pre-dated the guys’ starting to regularly record the sessions for its weekly podcasts, so there is no audio or video of his visits to the Floodisphere.
However, we did locate a September 2006 video of Noel playing with The Black Swans in a radio station studio in Portland, Maine. Here you see him accompanying his long-time friend and bandmate Jerry DeClicca, whom he had performed with since a 1995 New Year’s Eve show they played together in Columbus.
We're pleased to use a portion of that video in today’s memory of this dear old friend.
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This raucous David Bromberg composition that The Flood has covered since the song’s release in the early 1970s opens with a stream of similes worthy of any precocious English major:
She's got eyes like crystal water, Lips like cherry wine, A body like fine brandy, … And a soul like turpentine
But the best bit — the capper for the song — is a borrowed line, in fact, one of the greatest lines in the entire blues oeuvre:
When I ask for water she brings me gasoline!
In other words, Bromberg used “Jug Band Song” — released on his Demon in Disguise album, his second for Columbia — to pay tribute to one of his idols.
Or maybe more than one idol, actually.
So Where Did That Wild Line Come From?
Most of us who have mucked about in the midnight milieu of blues and hokum think the line is obviously from The Wolf, Mister HOWLIN’ Wolf. And that’s true. But only up to a point.
The fact is that in 1956, with the great Willie Dixon at his side on bass, Howlin’ Wolf recorded “I Asked For Water (She Gave Me Gasoline)” for Chess Records. The disc is considered by many to be a defining moment in a remarkable career.
However, dig a little deeper — as we usually try to do around here — and you find that Howlin’ Wolf was honoring one of his own heroes with that line.
Almost 30 years before Wolf, Delta blues innovator Tommy Johnson of Crystal Springs, Mississippi, opened his 1928 recording of “Cool Drink of Water Blues” for Victor with:
I asked her for water, and she gave me gasoline.
As near as we can tell, that is where the line was born.
Tommy in Rock
Tommy Johnson made a habit, incidentally, of contemplating unconventional brews. Remember Alan Wilson and Bob Hite’s rocking 1960s blues band Canned Heat?
Well, they took their name from a Johnson song, one that was recorded at that same 1928 Victor session in Memphis, in fact. Singing about drinking methanol from the fuel Sterno, Johnson recorded, “canned heat, mama, sure, Lord, killing me!…”)
Tommy on the Screen
In popular culture, Johnson was enshrined in the year 2000 when the Coen Brothers included a character named Tommy Johnson in their film, O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Portrayed by Chris Thomas King, the character at one point memorably tells The Soggy Bottom Boys how he sold his soul to the devil in exchange for killer blues guitar chops. (“Oh, son, for that you traded your everlasting soul? / Well, I wasn’t using it.”)
Props to the Coens for including that bit of music lore. The story of Johnson's dealing his soul to the devil was first told by his brother, LaDell Johnson, and was reported in David Evans’ seminal 1971 biography of the artist.
(This legend was subsequently attributed to the unrelated blues musician, Robert Johnson, but in fact the story started with Tommy.)
Our Take on the Tune
In our world, some songs turn up at the beginning of a Flood night and gauge the energy in the room. Others — like this one — come at the end of the evening and give everybody one last blast before they pack up and head for home.
Oh, and be sure listen to the end of this track to catch Sam St. Clair’s special sound effects. We think you’ll agree they’re right on the nose!
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Jack Nuckols, our newest band mate, brought us this song, a wonderful reflection on the early history of boating up and down the Ohio River, which flows by the communities in our valley.
Hearing it, it would be natural for you to assume that “Shawneetown” is a old traditional tune. Actually, though, it is largely a 1970s composition by folk artist Dillon Bustin.
The Song’s Roots
True, Bustin based his first verse and chorus on fragments published in 1828, which he found quoted in Leland D. Baldwin’s 1941 book, The Keelboat Age on Western Waters.
Some rows up, but we rows down, All the way to Shawneetown, Pull away — pull away!
Hard upon the beech oar!— She moves too slow!— All the way to Shawneetown, Long while ago.
But then, combining these bits and pieces, Bustin composed the tune and several additional verses for the song we have now.
The Composer
Besides being a folklorist, singer and songwriter, Bustin is an accomplished filmmaker and playwright.
He has made four films in collaboration with Kane-Lewis Productions: Tough, Pretty or Smart: A Portrait of the Patoka Valley Boys (1981); Water from Another Time (1982); Add & Mabel’s Punkin Center (1984), and The Pearl Fisher (1985). Each depicts whimsical creativity and quality of life in rural Indiana.
After obtaining a degree in folklore and anthropology at Indiana University, Bustin returned to his native Massachusetts to be program coordinator at the state’s council on the arts.
Recordings
Jack learned the Bustin song from the new Voyage album by the British folk group called The Longest Johns, known especially for their performances of sea shanties.
But “Shawneetown” has a much older studio history. In the fact, the first recording of it — made shortly after its composition — probably was the 1978 rendering by American folk duo Malcolm Dalglish and Grey Larsen on their First of Autumn album.
Meanwhile, in the Floodisphere, the song has even closer ties. Our dear friends Dave Para and his late wife Cathy Barton included “Shawneetown” on their 10th studio album — our all-time favorite — their delightful Living on the River disc, which they released in 2000.
But Wait …. Uh, Where’s That Again?
We assume that folks who live on our river, the beautiful Ohio, all know where Shawneetown is. In case you don’t, though, here’s an important footnote on the song.
Shawneetown is in southern Illinois, just beyond where the Ohio River meets the Wabash. As the first Anglo settlement on the Ohio, it was a major trade center for settlers and Native Americans in the 1820s. Nearby salt mines provided Gallatin County's major commodity.
Keelboats were the most efficient commercial boats in those days, but the vessels had to be pulled back upriver against the current on the return trips, grueling work for the strong, often rowdy crews. Floating downriver, a long oar (“the beach oar” referred to in the song’s chorus) was used to guide the craft as well as to maneuver it off mud slicks and snags.
Shawneetown served as a government administrative center for the Northwest Territory in the early 19th century.
The area is subject to frequent flooding. After being completely inundated in the 1937 Flood (the natural disaster, not the band), the town was moved three miles inland to its current location; however, today a small village — called Old Shawneetown — remains on the original site.
Our Take on the Tune
When Jack Nuckols joined the band late last year, we knew his dynamic drumming would bring spark and sparkling to our jazzy repertoire, but we had a secret agenda as well.
We hoped we could also persuade Jack to dust off that fiddle he last played… oh, 20 years ago? … so he could bring it to the mix on our folkier numbers.
Well, not only has he done that, Jack has started suggesting tunes — like this one — that would fit his fiddling.
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In the middle of a busy rehearsal last night, we just had to take a moment out to prepare this little birthday sing-along to our beautiful hilltop homeland. Happy 161st, Mountain Mama! Shoot, gurl, you don’t look a day over a 150!
By the way, if you’d like more Floodishness to help you celebrate this West Virginia Day, drop by our free West Virginia Blend playlist in the Radio Floodango music streaming service. Here’s the link.
And remember, Montani Semper Liberi, y’all!
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 Flood rolled into Huntington’s West End last Sunday to enjoy a simply perfect June afternoon, performing at a picnic to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the city’s beloved Sacred Heart Catholic Church.
What memories were made! Children and parents playing in the grassy field. Fun competitions for the kids, such as donut-eating contests. Old friends visiting and story-telling over hot food and cold drinks.
For its part, the band wanted to augment its usual sets of rowdy party tunes with a respectable mix of religious numbers. Topping the list was one of the oldest songs in the repertoire. For this week’s podcast, here from The Flood’s first set of the afternoon is “Wade in the Water.”
The Song’s Long History
This old spiritual — one of what W. E. B. Du Bois called “sorrow songs” (because they were associated with songs of the Underground Railroad) — was first published in 1901 in Jubilee Songs as Sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers by John Wesley Work II and his brother, Frederick J. Work, an educator at Nashville’s historically black college, Fisk University.
The Sunset Four Jubilee Singers made the first commercial recording of "Wade in the Water" in 1925 for Paramount Records.
Since then, numerous recordings and publications of it have appeared with variations on the lyrics, including both secular and religious renderings. Even pop and jazz artists have taken turns with the tune.
In 1966, for instance, “Wade in the Water” was a popular instrumental hit for The Ramsey Lewis Trio, which prompted further instrumental recordings by other artists. The Flood’s favorite version, however, is that of the late, great folksinger Odetta in 1954.
The Song’s Meaning
Over the years, much discussion has centered on the source of the lyric “God's gonna trouble the water.” Perhaps the most learned interpretation of its meaning comes from professor Howard Thurman of Howard and Boston universities, who said he believed the line refers to a Bible story about a healing by Jesus (Book of John, chapter 5, verses 1-9).
In that story, a sick man tells Jesus he is unable to get cured in the pool of Bethesda because he cannot get into the water quickly enough when it is "troubled," that is, stirred up or agitated.
Verse 4 tells of an angel going down into the pool and stirring the water, adding, “Whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had."
Said Thurman, “This is the message of the spiritual. Do not shrink from moving confidently out into choppy seas. Wade in the water, because God is troubling the water."
Okay, but what about the Underground Railroad’s connection with “Wade in the Water”?
Civil War freedom fighter Harriet Tubman, who made 13 trips to the South and helped free more than 70 people, used the song, Thurman said, to tell escaping slaves “to get off the trail and into the water to make sure the dogs slave catchers used couldn’t sniff out their trail.”
In the Floodisphere
As reported earlier in Flood Watch, The Flood’s connection to the song starts with the band’s fourth studio album, on which “Wade in the Water” is the title track.
As noted recently, the song also led in 2012 to the band’s debut on Canadian television. Click here to read that story.
Finally, playing the song over the years sometimes has led to rare bits of religious reflections. Here’s a favorite chunk of Flood chatter from a 2011 jam session. Click the button below to hear the late Dave Peyton tell how his Methodist mother was persuaded to cover all her bases with a little secret wading in the water of her own:
You Want More Church-y Tunes?
By the way, The Flood’s eclectic repertoire includes a right reverent set of religious songs, as you can hear in the “Gospel Hour” show in the “Special Blends” playlists built into the free Radio Floodango music streaming service.
Click here to read all about it.
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A signature tune from the late David Peyton — the song he called “Furniture Man” — entered the Floodisphere 45 years ago as a wild and crazy sing-along for the folks who attended the latter years of the Bowen Bashes.
In fact, the song helped to make memories at the very last of those semiannual music parties at which The Flood was born.
Here, from that evening (Sept. 19, 1981), the rocking rendition by Dave, accompanied by his original Flood band mates, Charlie Bowen and Roger Samples, Joe Dobbs and Bill Hoke is The Flood’s first recording of the song.
Still with us two decades later, the song — which Dave knew had strong ties to his beloved Mountain State — also was featured on The Flood’s first studio album in 2001, which you can hear it for free online in our Radio Floodango music streaming service. Click here to give the album a spin.
We Started with Dick Justice …
We learned this song from a 1929 recording by a West Virginia original, Dick Justice, a Logan County coal miner and a white blues singer who was heavily influenced by black musicians, especially Luke Jordan who was living at the same time in the hills of neighboring Virginia.
Peyton found this great old tune on an anthology of little known recordings by West Virginians in the early 20th Century.
Dick's single recording session took place at Brunswick’s Chicago studio May 20 and 21, 1929. In addition to his six solo released numbers (plus two unreleased vocal songs), he also furnished guitar backup for Clendenin, WV, fiddler Reese Jarvis, who placed four traditional tunes on disc. (Ironically, the two West Virginians first met at the Chicago studio and never saw each other again afterward.)
One of Justice’s six sides recorded that spring was released the following April as "Cocaine,” though that isn’t the name Dick usually gave it.
In his web newsletter Old Friends: A Songobiography, Elijah Wald quotes one of Justice’s old buddies as saying Dick “could get on the piano and play blues like crazy, you know. He used to do a song called ‘Cocaine,’ but it had a verse in it about the furniture man, so he liked to the call it ‘The Furniture Man’. And he would just do it like a comedy skit, and just crack everybody up.”
After his Chicago recording adventure, Justice resumed digging coal in the Eagle Mines in Logan County, where he died in 1962 at age 59.
… But We Need to Give Luke Jordan His Props
We wrote above that Justice was “heavily influenced” by black blues singers. Yeah, well, that’s putting it mildly. If you listen to Luke Jordan’s 1927 “Cocaine Blues” for Victor, it’s clear that Justice copied — verse for verse — Jordan’s work for his own Brunswick recording two years later.
Some believe Jordan was also a West Virginian, born in Bluefield, WV, in 1892. However, the birthplace of the bluesman is something of a dispute. (Some folks will tell you he was from Virginia, perhaps Lynchburg or Appomattox County.)
We do know that at the time of his World War I draft registration on June 5, 1917, the 25-year-old Jordan was living in Bluefield, working as a delivery man and janitor. Later he served as a private in the army’s 7th Development Battalion.
His gravestone — erected by the military following his death in 1952 at age 60 — lists West Virginia as his home.
Recordings and Afterward
Jordan’s brief recording career — he waxxed 12 sides — started at age 35, when he was brought to Charlotte, NC, by Victor in 1927. The several records Jordan made sold moderately well, and Victor took him to New York in 1929 for two more sessions.
The Depression ended his recording career, and Jordan eventually drifted to Lynchburg, where he was often found playing on the street outside the Craddock Terry Shoe Co. building. By the 1940s, Jordan had lost his voice and had stopped singing.
Jordan is buried in Lynchburg’s Forest Hill Cemetery. Today, through the help of the James River Blues Society, he is honored with a Virginia historical highway marker erected in 2000 on the corner of Lynchburg’s Jefferson and Horseford streets, near an old apartment where he stayed.
In Flood Lore
It probably isn’t surprising for a song that has been with us so long to have deep roots in Flood lore.
At a 2010 jam session at the Bowen House, for instance, Dave, Joe, Sam and Charlie stopped between tunes to share funny stories about the far-reaching impact of “Furniture Man.” Click the button below to hear them:
And while we’re at it, here from13 years earlier is another bit of conversation about the song, this one during a 1997 Flood visit to Joe’s “Music from the Mountains” radio show on West Virginia Public Radio:
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Some songs have very deep roots in the Floodisphere. For instance, the late Joe Dobbs loved this song.
In fact, we can remember Dave Peyton and Charlie Bowen jamming on this one with Joe and his brother Dennis at their Fret ‘n Fiddle music shop in its original Huntington West 14th Street location in the mid-1970s. (The song might even have been in the set list when the four opened for Little Jimmy Dickens’ concert at the old Memorial Field House in 1977.)
The tune also was the first song that the great Doug Chaffin played with us when we met up with him at a Nancy McClellan New Year’s Eve party a quarter of a century ago.
And Sam St. Clair still talks about Chuck Romine loving that melody; oh, how Doctor Jazz could tear it up on his tenor banjo.
These days Sam and Charlie have introduced the song to a whole new generation of Floodsters. Just listen to Randy Hamilton and Danny Cox and Jack Nuckols rocking on “Somebody Stole My Gal!”
About the Song
“Somebody Stole My Gal” already was an old-timer by the time it reached Floodlandia.
Written in 1918 by San Francisco songwriter Leo Wood, the song was first recorded by Ted Weems and His Orchestra. In 1924, that group’s version sold a million copies and spent a full five weeks at No. 1 on the charts in The Roarin’ Twenties.
Over the decades, the song also has been recorded by so many of our heroes, folks like Bix Beiderbecke (1928), Cab Calloway (1931), Fats Waller (1935), both Count Basie and Benny Goodman (1940), Johnny Ray (1952) and Jim Kweskin (1965).
In the Movies
The song has even gotten its share of screen time, starting in a cartoon of all things in 1931 from Fleischer Studios, the famed creators of Betty Boop and Koko the Clown.
Its best known Big Screen moments, though, were in Peter O’Toole’s 1982 comedy My Favorite Year, in the Sissy Spacek-Piper Laurie comedy The Grass Harp in 1995 and in the 2004 epic bio-pic The Aviator about Howard Hughes, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
On a Flood Album
When The Flood went into the studio in November 2002, this was one of the song the guys recorded for the album to be released as The 1937 Flood Plays Up a Storm. Just listen to Joe, Chuck and Doug rocking the introduction. (Oh, and how we love hearing Joe’s comment midway through Romine’s solo: “Sounds like New Orleans!…)
Nowadays you can hear that disc — and all the other Flood albums — for free on the Floodango music streaming service. Click here to give the album a spin.
More History?
Finally, if you’d like more history on the tunes we play, check out Flood Watch’s ever-growing Song Stories section.
Click here to start your browsing.
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We have always found this song incredibly moving, due in no small part to memories of the place and time when we played it in public for the first time.
It was seven years ago at our favorite Charleston, WV, venue — Taylor Books — on the evening of Saturday, Aug. 12, 2017.
Honestly, had the gig not already been booked for months in advance, we probably would not have wanted to perform that evening.
That’s because for us — and for most of the people in the audience that night — images from the previous 24 hours were too fresh, too raw: hateful scenes of white supremacists and neo-Nazis rioting in the streets of the sweet, beautiful town of Charlottesville, Va.
In that context, the poignant lyrics we sang at the show took on an even greater resonance.
Chris Stapleton’s Song
Set in the Civil War, Chris Stapleton’s haunting “Can You Run?” tells the story of a young slave pleading with his lover to join him for a dangerous dash to the Union line so that he can fight alongside “the freedom line of the Lincoln soldiers.”
At one point in the song, he tells her:
You know I hate to ask so late But the moment's finally come, And there won't be time to change your mind. Can you run?
We still remember tears in the eyes of two old friends at the front table as they listened to our rendering of the song that Stapleton created at the very beginning of his rich and prolific career.
About the Composer
Our region is so proud of Chris Stapleton. The 46-year-old Lexington, Ky., native grew up not far from us in the tiny Johnson County town of Staffordsville in Eastern Kentucky. To date, Chris has won 10 Grammys, 11 Academy of Country Music Awards and 15 Country Music Association Awards.
Besides that, he also has been named the ACM's Artist-Songwriter of the Decade, and last year Rolling Stone magazine included Stapleton among the “200 Greatest Singers of All Time.”
Stapleton had written and/or co-written nearly 200 songs. He has six No. 1 country songs to his credit, including Kenny Chesney’s “Never Wanted Nothing More,” Josh Turner’s “Your Man,” George Strait’s “Love’s Gonna Make It Alright” and Luke Bryan’s “Drink a Beer.” His work has appeared on albums by Adele, Kelly Clarkson, Brad Paisley, Taylor Swift and so many others.
As noted, “Can You Run?” emerged in the early days of Stapleton’s career, appearing in 2010 on Reckless, the second album of The SteelDrivers, the Nashville-based band in which he was the lead singer.
Our Take on the Tune
Our Randy Hamilton brought us this song about seven years ago.
Lately it’s been back in the repertoire, with Danny Cox doing double duty, singing harmony to Randy’s great lead vocal and trading solos with Sam St. Clair, all framed by Jack Nuckols’ tasteful drumming and Charlie Bowen’s little bit of banjo. Take a listen.
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Charlie Bowen wrote this song about 30 years ago with the idea that The Flood would perform it some day, even though at that particular moment, the future seemed rather uncertain for the band he had helped create two decades earlier.
As reported earlier, in the period between the mid-1980s and the early ‘90s, life had started interfering with Flood dreams.
As band members began drifting off in different directions, pursuing the interests of family and new jobs, The Flood had started being just a sometimes-kind-of jam session/reunion thing.
Bowen’s new tune actually got its first public performance at a seminal party that winter at Cathie and Bob Toothman’s house in Ironton, Ohio.
Regular readers might recall an earlier Flood Watch report that singled out that January 1996 party as a major chapter in The Flood story. That’s because it was the event at which fiddler Joe Dobbs finally reunited with his old band mates Bowen and Dave Peyton. After that wonderful evening, Joe was drawn back into The Flood fold where he played for the remaining 20 years of his life.
Song Reborn
Meanwhile, Charlie’s song followed a twistier path. In its original form, the tune didn’t really hook the band; oh, Doug Chaffin and Sam St. Clair always enjoyed jamming on it, but the song didn’t catch fire with Chuck Romine, nor with Joe or Dave.
However, the Bowen melody got a curious rebirth. As we have reported, in 2002 George Walker — producer of Joe’s beloved “Music from the Mountains” radio show on West Virginia Public Radio — wanted an original theme song for the weekly broadcast.
For George, the mission seemed clear: “Joe’s band oughta make up Joe’s theme song,” he said.
So, to answer the call that summer the guys re-purposed Charlie’s old melody, Peyton wrote snazzy new lyrics, they named it “Music from the Mountains Sets You Free” and headed for the studio.
Actually, we told the full story on a fun episode of our podcast three years ago. Click the button below to hear all about it:
Faithful Flood followers also know “Music form the Mountains Sets You Free” as the opening track of the band’s 2002 album, The 1937 Flood Plays Up a Storm.
The Song Today
In many ways, the original song has just waiting for the current incarnation of The Flood.
It is the 2024 version of the band — with the Randy Hamilton and Jack Nuckols’ driving rhythm and with Danny Cox and Sam St. Clair’s imaginative solos — that provides what Brother Peyton used to call “that high energy” that the song has been craving.
Meanwhile, Happy Dylan Day!
On a separate note, hey, today’s Bob Dylan’s 83rd birthday! If you’d like a little Flood-centric soundtrack for celebrating this joyous occasion, drop by our free Radio Floodango music streaming feature and fire up the Bob Dylan playlist. Here’s a story that tells you all about it:
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At this week’s rehearsal, Pamela Bowen, our manager/videographer, captured a couple more of the tunes that we are considering for inclusion in that new album we hope to start working on later this year.
And, without our intending it, the two songs she videoed just happened to share the theme of rainy days and sunny days. That’s a hoot, even if it was unplanned.
About the Songs
The first song on today’s “video extra” is The Flood’s take on Bob Dylan’s composition “Make You Feel My Love,” which debuted on Bob’s Time Out of Mind album in 1997. As we reported earlier, this tune attracted a celebrated following, with covers by Billy Joel, Garth Brooks, Neil Diamond and Adele.
It also has a prominent position in “Girl from the North Country,” the Tony-award-winning musical that currently is touring the U.S. The play centers on the music and lyrics of 28 songs Dylan wrote over the past 60 years.
The second song on Pamela’s video is Randy Hamilton’s treatment of the Bobby Hebb classic, “Sunny.”
As we wrote earlier, the song that Hebb wrote on that cold November night in 1963 not only sustained his career for a lifetime, but has become one of the world’s most beloved jazzy anthems to optimism and joy. Its back story is fascinating.
About the Graphics
By the way, the graphics used throughout today’s video are products of Charlie Bowen’s new online toy. Have you heard about Google’s new ImageFX software?
ImageFX is new standalone artificial intelligence image generator that Google released three months ago as part of its AI Test Kitchen. It creates graphics from simple text phrased entered at the prompt, and it’s all free.
It’s a ball to play with. Just type in ideas for a picture and see what it comes up with. For instance, we typed in “heart drawn on a rain-streaked window” and got four variations on this:
All the pictures used to illustrate the two songs in Pamela’s video were generated by ImageFX.
But Back to the Songs….
Back to The Flood’s studio project, this will be our first new album since Paul Martin put together Speechless in 2021, and it will be the first to feature our newest Floodsters, Danny Cox and Jack Nuckols.
We’d love to have your help to planning it. Send us your suggestions — just drop an email to Charlie at designbybowen@gmail.com — and we’ll keep you posted as the work continues.
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Rehearsal is always important, of course, but sometimes leaving a song alone for a while also has interesting effects.
For instance, it’s been probably a year or more since the Ray Charles classic “Hard Times (Who Knows Better Than I)” has made an appearance at a Flood rehearsal. It’s a great tune, but for some reason it just didn’t come to mind for while.
However, the song hasn’t been stagnating, as it turns out. When the tune finally did roll around again at last week’s gathering, it had been percolating in everyone’s memory. That was obvious, because all kind of exciting new ideas came out as the solos went around the room.
About the Song
As reported earlier, in 1961 Atlanta Records commemorated Ray Charles’s near-decade of dedication to that label with the release of an album called The Genius Sings The Blues.
It was a welcome compilation of some of Brother Ray’s earlier singles, plus some previously unreleased stuff, like this perfect Ray Charles composition.
“Hard Times” had the distinction of being the A-side of the only single released to promote that album. It also is the standout number in the entire collection. The tune has gone on to be covered by everybody from David Clayton-Thomas to Eric Clapton. Here’s The Flood’s 2024 rendition of it.
More? Gotcha Covered
If you’d like more from the blues column on our menu, just click the “Blues” button on our free Radio Floodango music streaming service.
Click here to give it a spin.
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Canada’s folk music scene in the 1960s produced legends — from Gordon Lightfoot and Ian Tyson to Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen and Neil Young — and that remarkable community also nurtured a whole world of talented acolytes.
One such folkie follower was British-born David Wiffen. Growing up singing skiffle with the Kingston-upon-Thames-based Black Cat group, Wiffen at age 16 moved from Claygate, Surrey, England, to Canada, where he became something of a rambling man.
Initially part of Toronto’s burgeoning folk music scene, Wiffen hitchhiked to Edmonton in 1964 and later managed a Calgary folk club called “The Depression.”
The following year he moved again, this time to Vancouver, where he was invited to perform at The Bunkhouse club on what was intended to be a live ensemble album. However, when the other invited musicians failed to show up, the gig became 23-year-old Wiffen's first solo album. David Wiffen at the Bunkhouse Coffeehouse, Vancouver BC was released on the Universal International label.
By 1970, Wiffen had written what was to become his best known song. “Driving Wheel” was included on his self-titled first album for Fantasy Records.
However, David Wiffen, the album, received such spotty promotion that the song was not widely known until it also appeared on Tom Rush's own self-titled 1970 album, his first for Columbia Records.
Since then, “Driving Wheel” has become something of a signature song for Rush, still today often making it onto the set list for his shows around the country.
Other artists also have covered the song over the years, notably David Bromberg (who 50 years ago played dobro on Rush’s classic rendition) as well as Roger McGuinn and The Cowboy Junkies.
About Driving Wheels
While Wiffen’s lyric contains a memorable automotive reference (My car broke down in Texas, stopped dead in its tracks…), the “wheel” in “Driving Wheel” actually is locomotive in nature.
When the chorus says, I feel like some ol’ engine that’s lost its driving wheel, the “engine” in question is a stream engine.
In that context, we’re talking about a powered wheel that is driven by the locomotive's pistons…
… or turbine, in the case of a steam turbine locomotive. Uh, class dismissed.
Our Take on the Tune
It’s funny sometimes how songs come to us. A while back Charlie was just noodling with his new resonator guitar while waiting for a phone call, when suddenly he landed on chords from this song, which he’d not even heard for decades, much less played.
A week later he was sharing it with the guys at a rehearsal, and they latched on to the sound too. Just like that, the song comes soaring in from the Seventies.
More from This Year
By the way, if you’d like to hear more songs that have popped up at practices this year, be sure to check out the 2024 playlist in our free Radio Floodango music streaming service.
Click here to give it a spin. Everything in that randomized rotation has been recorded since January.
Note that other buttons in that section of Radio Floodango let you zero in on different specific years of Floodishness, from the present all the way back to 2009.
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Here’s another tune that is campaigning to be included on the new album we hope to start recording later this year. We’d like to hear what you think about it.
As we noted earlier, we’ve loved “Peaceful Easy Feeling” ever since the late Roger Samples taught it to us back in the early 1970s when he joined Dave Peyton and Charlie Bowen to help start The Flood.
But it now being a new century and all, we wanted to give the song a new sound. That’s why the guys are letting Charlie’s banjo happily trot alongside Jack Nuckols’ drum and Randy Hamilton’s bass, ready to frame the vocal harmonies and those sweet solos by Danny Cox and Sam St. Clair.
The arrangement got a warm reception when it made its debut at last month’s Spring Floodango at the wonderful Alchemy Theatre. (Listeners seemed especially charmed by the surprise ending. We’re not sure Johann Pachelbel ever met a banjo. And yes, we do get a charge outa ourselves…)
So Whaddaya Think?
Our manager/videographer Pamela Bowen shot the “video extra” at this week’s rehearsal so we could ask you: Should this tune be on the new album?
This will be our first studio effort since Paul Martin put together Speechless in 2021, and it will be the first to feature our newest Floodsters, Danny and Jack.
We appreciate having your help in planning the album. Send us your suggestions to Charlie at designbybowen@gmail.com, and we’ll keep you posted as the work continues. Thanks, friends.
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Today most of us don’t know the name Marion Harris, but Grandma probably did when she was a teen-ager listening to that new-fangled radio in the parlor.
Songs that summed up the transition from the stodgy, gaudy Gilded Age to the brave new world of The Jazz Age were often the recordings of Marion Harris. Her tunes like “Jazz Baby” and “They Go Wild, Simply Wild, Over Me,” “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Take Me to the Land of Jazz” were a soundtrack of the changing times.
Her most enduring legacy? It was a 22-year-old Marion Harris who introduced the world to “After You’ve Gone,” 1919’s bestselling American tune, written by the African-American vaudeville duo of Turner Layton and Henry Creamer.
The pair wrote the song to bring some life to a failing road show called “So Long, Letty.” The road show continued to fail, but the song hooked audiences, taking off with a life of its own.
Their Hits
One of the most frequently recorded pre-1920s jazz standards, “After You’ve Gone” appeared on the Top 20 charts on at least nine different occasions between 1919 and 1937. Highlighting them all were the 1927 recordings by Sophie Tucker and by Bessie Smith.
And Layton and Creamer weren’t finished. Three years later, they penned another beloved early-jazz standard, “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans,” which they advertised as "A Southern Song, without A Mammy, A Mule, Or A Moon." (What a dandy dig at some of the Tin Pan Alley clichés of the era!)
One of that song’s earliest recordings was 1927’s signature rendition by Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Trumbauer.
The Turner Layton Odyssey
Turner Layton worked as a singer and dancer in vaudeville using original material. A Washington D.C. native, he received musical training from his father, a bass singer, music educator and hymn composer.
The young man attended Howard University Dental School, then moved to New York, where he met Henry Creamer, with whom he wrote several Broadway musicals, the most successful being something called “Strut Miss Lizzie” in 1922.
That same year, Layton left his partnership with Creamer to form a high-rolling cabaret act with Clarence “Tandy” Johnstone, performing in Harlem and at private parties for monied patrons like the Astor and Vanderbilt families. The pair followed their ritzy clientele from Newport in the summer to Palm Beach in the winter.
It was in Florida in 1924 that the two met Lord and Lady Mountbatton, who persuaded them to move to England, where Edward, Prince of Wales, became one of their fans. Layton and Johnstone sold more than 10 million records between 1924 and 1935. Layton stayed in England until his death in 1978.
Meanwhile, Marion….
Marion Harris also moved to England, and the Prince of Wales became one of her fans too, especially enjoying her sets at the Café de Paris.
But tragedy loomed. During World War II, the home she shared with her third husband was destroyed in 1944 by a German V1 rocket, a disaster that triggered in her a neurological disorder. Later that year while in New York to seek treatment, Harris died in a hotel room fire. She had fallen asleep while holding a lit cigarette. She was 48.
Meanwhile, the song that linked their lives lives on. It became so popular, in fact, that years after its composition, the sheet music for “After You’ve Gone” was decorated with tiny photographs of the 45 performers who made the song famous, everyone from Paul Whiteman and Rudy Valle to Guy Lombardo and Louis Armstrong.
Our Take on the Tune
This is a tune that our Flood brother Danny Cox brought to the mix.
In fact, with a chuckle, he said, “I can’t believe y’all weren’t already doing this one.”
True enough. “After You’ve Gone” was one that got away … until recently, when Danny corralled it and brought it to the table.
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A third of a millennium ago, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary about a New Year’s party at which he hear the “little Scotch song of Barbary Allen….”
Scholars often cite that Jan. 2, 1666, entry as evidence that this famous ballad — which tells the tale of a beautiful woman who denies a dying man's love, then dies of grief soon after his untimely demise — already was hundreds of years old by the time Francis Child collected it in the late 19th century.
Barbara’s Other Life
In fact, ethnomusicologists Steve Roud and Julia Bishop described it as "far and away the most widely collected song in the English language — equally popular in England, Scotland and Ireland — with hundreds of versions collected over the years in North America.”
Roud and Bishop wondered if the ballad was originally written for a stage performance.
Supported that, they point out that Pepys’ diary entry mentions hearing a professional actress name Elizabeth Knepp singing the song at that notable New Year’s party.
However, folklorists Phillips Barry and Fannie Hardy Eckstorm dispute that idea.
The ballad "was not a stage song at all,” they say, “but a libel on Barbara Villiers and her well-publicized adulteries with King Charles II.” Fellow folkie Charles Seeger liked that theory, adding that Pepys' delight at hearing a libelous song about the king's mistress would be perfectly in character for him.
Print and Recordings
“Barbara Allen” was frequently published in Britain throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, but it was not until 1836 that it appeared in America. After that, many variations were printed in broadsides in the United States through the 19th and 20th centuries.
The earliest recording of the song probably was a 1907 wax cylinder made by Lincolnshire folk singer Joseph Taylor. The first vinyl recordings were Vernon Dalhart’s in 1927 and Bradley Kincaid’s the following year.
Since then, some 500 traditional recordings have been indexed by the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library.
Where, Oh Where?
The song usually begins with a variation on the line, “In Scarlet Town where I was born there was a fair maid dwelling….”
Don’t bother looking; there is no such place as Scarlet Town, at least not in the geographical world recorded in the Britannica Atlas or in Google Maps. An invented name, it might be, some speculate, an ancient metaphor for a home of scarlet women.
However, Wikipedia is curious if “Scarlet Town" might be a punning reference to Reading, the town on the Thames and Kennet rivers in southern England. Supporting that theory is the fact that a 1790 version of the song has a reference to “in Reading town, where I was bound.”
Folk Revivalists
In the 1950s and ‘60s, most folk revivalists — Pete Seeger, Jean Ritchie and Joan Baez leading the list — recorded versions of the ballad.
Famously, Bob Dylan noted that folk songs are highly influential in his work. As he wrote in a poem, “Without ‘Barbara Allen’ there'd be no ‘Girl from the North Country.’” Early on, Bob performed an eight-minute rendition of the original ballad, which was subsequently released on his Live at The Gaslight 1962 album.
Our Take on the Tune
Charlie Bowen brought us our version recently after revisiting his own favorite rendition, Tom Rush’s 1963 pressing of the song (calling it “Barb’ry Ellen”) on Prestige/Folklore.
Like Rush, Charlie cultivates a slightly different melody line. He also brings in his resonator guitar and slide to give the tune a slightly bluesy quality. Then Danny Cox and Sam St. Clair add beautiful solos and Randy Hamilton provides the perfect subtle vocal harmonies along with his bass lines. Here’s the result.
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What a wonderful time we had yesterday afternoon with our friends at Alchemy Theatre when we launched the Spring Floodango. The stage was full. All five Floodsters — Charlie, Sam, Randy, Dan and Jack — were on hand.
Joining them was the band’s beloved “chick singer,” Floodster Emerita Michelle Hoge, who drove in with her husband Rich from their Loveland, Ohio, home near Cincinnati just for the gig.
Righteously augmenting The Flood fare were tasteful offerings by guest artist Douglas Eye (a/k/a Doug Imbrogno), who performed original tunes as well as richly innovative interpretations of traditional works.
And not to be left academically wanting, the audience was treated to kazoo instruction by our visiting professor. Ed Light traveled in from the Washington D.C. area to be the day’s hoodoo guru of kazoo. Ed actually did double duty, sitting in on tenor banjo on The Flood’s closing jug band number.
Today’s film, constructed from videos that manager/videographer Pamela Bowen shot from her ringside table, gives a sample of the Sunday fun.
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The afternoon we have been waiting for has finally arrived. The Spring Floodango hits the stage at Alchemy Theatre today.
The show starts at 2:30. Tickets are $20 and and all the proceeds go to support the wonderful work of Alchemy Theatre.
As noted earlier, tickets will be available at the door OR you can order them online. Here’s the link for online ordering.
Location, Location, Location
If you have not been to the Alchemy venue yet and need help locating it, just put the address — 68 Holley Ave, Huntington, WV — into your phone’s navigation software.
Or if you prefer old-school Googlizing, click the button below to let Google Maps pinpoint it for you. (For customized directions, just click the resulting Google display’s “Direction” link and, when prompted, type in your starting address.)
Guests, We’ve Got Guests!
We’ll have a whole slew of guest artists on stage with us this afternoon.
Floodster Emerita Michelle Hoge is driving in from Loveland, Ohio, near Cincinnati to sing with her old band mates. You know a room just can’t help but rock whenever Da Chick Singer is on the premises.
Our old buddy singer/songwriter Douglas Eye (aka Doug Imbrogno) also will be helping us. We in The Flood’ve been digging Doug for … what? Decades!
We’ve shared the stage with him at more shows than we can remember, and last week, Doug joined Charlie and Alchemy’s Mike Murdock to chat about the show on WSAZ-TV. For today’s show, Doug has crafted a 30-minute set, a show-within-a-show, as it were.
And that’s not all! Also on hand will be our visiting hoodoo guru of kazoo. Ed Light is coming in from the Washington, D.C., area with a whole bag of tricks.
As you’ll recall, Ed sat in with us last month at the Bowen House, and we knew right away we were going to have to introduce him to the wider Family Flood. Ed will this afternoon’s visiting professor of kazoory. You don’t want to miss this.
Check Out the Website
You can read all about it on our website: Floodat50.com. Take a look, then come out to Alchemy Theatre this afternoon. We’re going share memories and make a whole bunch of new ones!
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Ours is a band that was born at a party and born TO party.
Whether we’re at home in our band room at the Bowen House, settled in the living room of somebody else’s house or on stage at a gig, the party tradition that started more than a half century ago continues today.
And our next opportunity for a public party will be this very weekend when we launch the Spring Floodango this Sunday afternoon at Huntington’s Alchemy Theater.
Here’s a tune we have on tap for the afternoon. Take a listen and you’ll be ready for the sing-along when you join us at Alchemy Theater!
About the Song
It was 50 years ago when we first heard “Didn’t He Ramble?” Dave Peyton and Charlie Bowen learned it from the great local string band, The Kentucky Foothill Ramblers, whose leader, banjoist H. David Holbrook, seemed to know the entire Charlie Poole songbook.
Bowen and Peyton started doing their own version of the song, teaching it to Roger Samples and Joe Dobbs and giving “Didn’t He Ramble?” a decidedly jug band spin.
After that, whenever the band played the song — which was just about every time they got together — they called it their Charlie Poole song, just assuming the song originated with that 1920s North Carolina superstar.
Actually, though, the song has a longer history, as we reported in a Flood Watch article last year. Click here for a deeper dive into the song’s story.
Our Latest Take on the Tune
If you want to hear a “live” take on the tune, join us this Sunday afternoon at Alchemy Theater, 68 Holley Ave, in the beautiful hills of Huntington.
The fun starts at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $20 and all the proceeds go to support the good work of Alchemy Theater.
Guests, We’ve Got Guests!
We’ll have a whole slew of guest artists on stage with us Sunday.
Floodster Emerita Michelle Hoge is driving in from Loveland, Ohio, near Cincinnati to sing with her old band mates. You know a room just can’t help but rock whenever Da Chick Singer is on the premises.
And our old buddy singer/songwriter Douglas Eye (aka Doug Imbrogno) will be helping us. We in The Flood’ve been digging Doug for … what? Decades!
We’ve shared the stage with him at more shows than we can remember, and earlier this week, Doug joined Charlie and Alchemy’s Mike Murdock to chat about the show on WSAZ-TV. For Sunday, Doug has crafted a 30-minute set, a show-within-a-show, as it were.
And that’s not all! Also on hand will be our visiting hoodoo guru of kazoo. Ed Light is coming in from the Washington, D.C., area with a whole bag of tricks.
As you’ll recall, Ed sat in with us last month at the Bowen House, and we knew right away we were going to have to introduce him to the wider Family Flood. Ed will Sunday afternoon’s visiting professor of kazoory. You don’t want to miss this.
Get You Tickets Online!
So come on out to the Spring Floodango. Tickets will be available at the door or you can order them right here online. Here’s the link for online ordering.
For more information, visit our web site at Floodat50.com. See ya Sunday!
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
Floodango fever swept back into the WSAZ-TV studio this afternoon.
On the heels of Monday morning’s visit to the station’s Studio 3 show, Flood and Alchemy Theatre folks were back in front of the cameras there this afternoon to talk with Tim Irr and Susan Nicholas about our big Spring Floodango show set for 2:30 p.m. this Sunday.
As you’ll see in the above video, these First Look at 4 anchors sat down with Floodsters Charlie Bowen and Sam St. Clair and Alchemy’s Michael Murdock to discuss what folks expect at Sunday’s show.
Come to the Show!
As we’ve said, we are so thrilled that our friends at Alchemy want us back for an encore to our fun New Year Eve’s 50th birthday bash at their house.
Mark your calendar — this Sunday afternoon, April 21 — we’re going to welcome Spring 2024 with a whole afternoon of songs and stories. We’re calling it The Spring Floodango!
In case you missed it, here’s our Floodango preview, a little film we built around Pamela Bowen’s videos from the New Year’s Eve bash:
Supporting Alchemy Theatre
Sunday’s show starts at 2:30. Tickets are $20 and include all the live music you can handle, and all the proceeds go to support the wonderful work of Alchemy Theatre.
This community theater company, based in Huntington and Barboursville, is intent on making the world better place by providing year-round professional entertainment and by empowering local artisans.
Get You Tickets Online!
Tickets will be available at the door OR you can order them online. Here’s the link for online ordering.
Check Out the Website
You can read all about it on our website: Floodat50.com.
Take a look, then come out Sunday afternoon to Alchemy Theatre, 68 Holley Ave. in the beautiful hills of Huntington. We’re going share memories and make a whole bunch of new ones!
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
Susan Nicholas and Taylor Eaton and all the good folks at WSAZ-TV’s Studio 3 this morning gave some sweet attention to our Spring Floodango show set for 2:30 p.m. this Sunday at Alchemy Theatre.
As you’ll see in the above video, the anchors sat down with Charlie Bowen of The Flood, Michael Murdock of Alchemy and Douglas Imbrogno, Sunday’s special guest artist, to talk about what folks can expect to hear and see at the show.
Also, the broadcast gave us an opportunity to congratulate Mike on the first anniversary of the new Geneva Kent Center of the Arts, Alchemy’s wonderful venue at 68 Holley Avenue in Huntington’s beautiful hills.
Come to the Show!
As we’ve said, we are thrilled that our friends at Alchemy want us back for an encore to our fun New Year Eve’s 50th birthday bash at their house.
Mark your calendar — this Sunday afternoon, April 21 — we’re going to welcome Spring 2024 with a whole afternoon of songs and stories. We’re calling it The Spring Floodango!
In case you missed it, here’s our Floodango preview, a little film we built around Pamela Bowen’s videos from the New Year’s Eve bash:
Supporting Alchemy Theatre
Sunday’s show starts at 2:30. Tickets are $20 and include all the live music you can handle, and all the proceeds go to support the wonderful work of Alchemy Theatre.
This community theater company, based in Huntington and Barboursville, is intent on making the world better place by providing year-round professional entertainment and by empowering local artisans.
Get You Tickets Online!
Tickets will be available at the door OR you can order them online. Here’s the link for online ordering.
Check Out the Website
You can read all about it on our website: Floodat50.com. Take a look, then come out to Alchemy Theatre Sunday afternoon. We’re going share memories and make a whole bunch of new ones!
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 learned this tune from the late Floodster Emeritus Bill Hoke, who — like many other people — said he first heard it at a folk festival some time in the early 1990s.
It has been about 25 years ago now. Bill stopped off to visit at the Bowen House while on a trek from his Abingdon, Va., home to Dayton, Ohio, to see his dad. We can still picture him there in The Flood band room, picking up Charlie Bowen’s guitar and strumming a chord or two.
“You guys ought to do this song,” he said softly, and started singing:
I have seen rain on a cloudless day,I have see snows that fell in May ….
We were hooked before he even got to the chorus. “No Ash Will Burn” has been in The Flood’s repertoire ever since.
Empathy
That memory came rushing back to us last week when our friend David Click mentioned on Facebook how much he has enjoyed the band’s performance of that song over the years.
In a later message to Charlie, David added that while the song is sad, he found a kind of commiseration in the lyrics, an empathy that touched him especially in times of loss and grief.
We understand; the song moves us that way too. For instance, the performance featured in this week’s podcast comes from back in mid-November of last year. It was the first rehearsal we had in the days after we learned of the death of our old buddy and band mate Doug Chaffin.
Doug absolutely loved this song ever since we included it on our 2011 Wade in the Water album. In this track you might hear how we felt a little closer to our dear companion as we sang it in his memory on that cold November night.
About the Song
When Bill Hoke taught us the song a quarter of a century ago, we didn’t even know who wrote it. It was the mid-1990s and the World Wide Web wasn’t yet the thing it is today, so we couldn’t so easily find out such basic facts as writing credits.
Only later did we learn that “No Ash Will Burn” is the work of Muscle Shoals singer/songwriter Walt Aldridge, an Alabaman whose songs over the past 60 years have been recorded by a diverse group of artists, from Lou Reed to Reba McEntire.
Inducted into both the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Alabama Music Hall of Fame, Aldridge has written chart-busting hits for Ronnie Milsap ("No Gettin' Over Me," 1981), Earl Thomas Conley ("Holding Her and Loving You," 1982), Travis Tritt ("Modern Day Bonnie and Clyde," 2000), and Heartland ("I Loved Her First," 2006).
In the late 1980s, Aldridge also sang lead vocals in the band The Shooters, a country band which charted with seven singles for Epic Records. It was during this creative period that he penned “No Ash Will Burn.”
The song was first recorded on Western Dream, the 1989 debut album of Ranch Romance, a Seattle-based western swing, alternative country and bluegrass band.
Versions of the tune quickly began circulating in folk music circles after Alice Gerrard recorded it in 1994 and Molly O’Brien released it four years later.
A particular favorite of ours is the 2009 rendition by our friend Sallie Sublette and her Idaho-based band, Wild Coyotes, on their Coyote Tracks album.
Our Take on the Tune
Like a long-time running buddy, “No Ash Will Burn” has been with us for so long that it has generated its own store of Flood lore. One of the best “No Ash” stories comes from about 10 years ago at one of our stranger gigs.
It was late May 2013 — about a week before Memorial Day — and after days in the 70s and 80s, the temperature suddenly plunged as we drove north to Fairmont, WV, for the Friday night concert.
It was down to the 50s when we took the stage at the amphitheater at Prickett's Fort State Park, and by the time the show was finished 90 minutes later, the mercury had dropped to 45. The cold, along with a brisk west wind, made for a fairly frigid Flood, but it also produced some laughs.
As we were shivering on stage and Charlie sang the opening lines -- I have seen rain on a cloudless day / I have seen snows that fell in May -- Dave Peyton leaned over and groaned, "Damn straight!" We cracked up and so did the audience.
In this cut, you can hear us rehearsing the song a few days before the big Fairmont Freeze.
More Folk Music?
Finally, if you’d like more tunes from The Flood’s folkier files, check out the Folk playlist on our 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
The legacy of a really good party ought to be another party!
And we had a really good party last New Year’s Eve at Alchemy Theatre when the good folks at the Geneva Kent Center for the Arts hosted The 1937 Flood’s 50th birthday bash.
We are thrilled that our friends at Alchemy want us back for an encore.
Mark your calendar — Sunday afternoon, April 21 — we’re going to welcome Spring 2024 with a whole afternoon of songs and stories. We’re calling it The Spring Floodango!
And Our Guest Artist…
And not only that, we have a special guest who will join us for the day.
Douglas Eye — singer/songwriter Doug Imbrogno — who rocked the night at our birthday bash on New Year’s Eve will be back to do a full set. That’s going to be a ball. This day will be fun for the whole family.
Supporting Alchemy Theatre
The show starts at 2:30. Tickets are $20 and include all the live music you can handle, and all the proceeds go to support the wonderful work of Alchemy Theatre.
This community theatre company, based in Huntington and Barboursville, West Virginia, is intent on making the world better place by providing year-round professional entertainment and by empowering local artisans.
We absolutely love what Alchemy does — everything from Shakespeare to contemporary drama, comedy and musicals — and we’re honored to be able to help out. So come to our show.
Get You Tickets Online!
Tickets will be available at the door OR you can order them online. Here’s the link for online ordering.
Check Out the Website
You can read all about it on our website: Floodat50.com. Take a look, then come out to Alchemy Theatre Sunday afternoon, April 21. We’re going share memories and make a whole bunch of new ones!
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 blues parlance, the term “easy rider” is code for … oh, well, for many things. Maybe a rovin’ gambler or a lover, maybe a pimp … (Y’all just talk among yourselves and let your imagination gallop away with ya.)
Easy riders started appearing in blues songs more than a century ago. W.C. Handy famously featured an easy rider in his great “Yellow Dog Blues” back in 1915.
But, as we noted in an earlier Flood Watch article, that great old blues — which Bessie Smith would memorialize with her classic 1925 Columbia recording of it — was written in answer to an earlier ragtimey blues called “I Wonder Where My Easy Rider’s Gone,” released in 1913 by its composer, Shelton Brooks.
Meet Shelton Brooks
Shelton Brooks was one of the most successful Black songwriters of the era before jazz. An African-Canadian, he had a recording career as an OKeh Records artist in the 1920s, but today he is better remembered for his songwriting chops.
His most successful songs were "Some of These Days" (1911), "All Night Long" (1912), "Walkin' the Dog" (1916) and especially "Darktown Strutters' Ball" (1917), which sold more than 3 million copies as sheet music.
About This Song
Brooks’ “I Wonder Where My Easy Rider’s Gone” was first popularized on the vaudeville stage by Sophie Tucker.
We base our version of the song on a July 9, 1929, recording by our hokum band heroes Tampa Red on guitar and Georgia Tom on piano, with jazz singer Frankie “Half Pint” Jaxon doing the vocals.
But perhaps the best known version of Brooks’ tune came four years after that, when film siren Mae West delivered a sultry performance of it in her 1933 movie She Done Him Wrong.
By the way, a legacy of Brooks’ song and Handy’s “Yellow Dog Blues” answer is that lines and melody from both songs started showing up in the 1920s and ‘30s in such songs as "E. Z. Rider," "See See Rider," "C. C. Rider" and "Easy Rider Blues.”
Our Take on the Tune
This is the kind of song that The Flood likes the start the evening with, as we did at last week’s rehearsal, because it has plenty of room for everyone to just stretch out and wail.
Listen as the solos pass from Danny Cox to Sam St. Clair to Randy Hamilton. And when it’s Jack Nuckols’ turn, he reaches for those wooden spoons he keeps near his drum kit. See if it doesn’t sound like a jazzy tap dancer has just shim-sham-shimmied into the room.
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
She promised meet him after work, but she never showed up. Disappointed, he did what you do if you’re an aspiring composer: He put it all down in a song.
A scene like that plays out every day somewhere in America. But it’s not every day that the resulting song becomes one of the most cherished tunes of the decade.
Coffeehouse Roots
“Peaceful Easy Feeling” began life on the cold linoleum floor of a coffeehouse after closing time. It was 1969 and a San Diego hippie by the name of Jack Tempchin was playing a gig in nearby El Centro.
“I was single, and I’d made it big with the waitress,” Tempchin recalled to Cathy Applefeld Olson in an article in Billboard a few years ago. “She was gonna take me to her place, so I told the guys I didn’t need a ride to the place we were staying. I was gonna be fine. But then she left and never came back.”
A stranger in town with no ride home, Tempchin crashed on the coffeehouse’s floor, but he couldn't sleep. To kill time, he grabbed his guitar and started composing, writing down some lyrics on the back of one of the flyers for his show.
Today that 50-year-old flyer is preserved in Los Angeles’s Grammy Museum.
Enter The Eagles
“Peaceful Easy Feeling” began that night, but it actually was finished in stages, during which time Tempchin made his way to L.A. where he hung out with up-and-coming stars-to-be of California’s music scene.
He was staying with Jackson Browne at one point when Glenn Frey dropped in and heard Tempchin playing that song. Frey asked if he could record it. “So he recorded it on a cassette,” Tempchin told Doug Burke of the Backstory Song newsletter recently.
“He came back the next day. They had already toured with Linda Ronstadt, and he said, ‘I’ve got a new band, Jack. We've been together eight days, and we worked up your song.’ And he played a cassette for me of The Eagles doing ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling.’”
It was the first time he heard vocal harmonization of his work. It certainly wouldn’t be the last. The third single from The Eagles’ 1972 debut album, “Peace Easy Feeling” reached No. 22 on the charts, and today it is still one of the band's most popular songs.
Our Takes on the Take
Meanwhile, when that tune hit the radio, Flood co-founder-to-be Roger Samples was just out of school and working at his first social studies teaching job in Pocahontas County, WV.
Lonely to be so far away from his own coffeehouse days back at Marshall University — and especially missing his old picking partner Dave Peyton — Rog worked out a tasty solo version of the song. He was still playing it when he came back to Huntington in 1974.
By the time of his debut at the Bowen Bashes that autumn, Roger was more than ready to share his arrangement, as you’ll hear on this track — with Bill Hoke on dobro and Peyton on Autoharp — recorded at that very party a half century ago:
Now Fast Forward 50 Years
These days to give the tune a new sound, The Flood last week let Charlie’s banjo happily trot alongside Jack’s drum and Randy’s bass, ready to frame the vocals and those sweet solos by Danny and Sam.
Oh, and, hey, be sure to listen to the whole track so you don’t miss our surprise ending. We wrap up with some old-time music, a little sumpin-sumpin circa 1680.
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 know precious little about pioneer bluesman James “Boodle It” Wiggins. We don’t know when or where he was born, or even precisely when in the 1930s that he died. No pictures of him are known to exist.
Some folks say he was “discovered” in Dallas by R. L. Ashford, a scout for Paramount Records. Fellow blues artist Big Bill Broonzy always said his friend Wiggins came from Louisiana.
We do know that Wiggins ended up in Chicago, where he recorded for Paramount between 1928 and 1929, including some pretty influential tracks. A whole new generation of music fans would hear Wiggins songs, albeit usually from somebody else’s lips.
For instance, if you like Little Richard’s 1957 recording of "Keep A-Knockin'“ (and who the hell doesn’t?!), give props to Wiggins, because he recorded that song five years before Little Richard was even born.
And about that nickname, "Boodle It" appears to come from the singer’s association with a style of dance (though a coy Wikipedia entry adds, “there was also an assumed sexual connotation.” Oh? You think?)
Anyway, if you also love all those rockin’ rendition of “Corrina, Corrina” that we talked about in an earlier article, thank Wiggins. He recorded that tune too. His 1929 pressing featured a powerful boogie-woogie piano accompaniment (though precisely who was pounding those keys is disputed. It was probably Bob Call, who later accompanied Broonzy and others).
That Other Song
Boodle It’s last session was in Grafton, WI, in October 1929, the fateful month when the stock market crash was fixing to sink so many recording companies. The session produced “Corrina, Corrina,” and one other song, which would be the flip side when Paramount released the disc the following spring.
Now, anyone who studies the blues and other music of the night knows that in some of its incarnations over the years, “Shave ‘Em Dry” is a pretty risqué number.
The phrase shave ‘em dry can be interpreted, as Wikipedia notes, as referring to “any aggressive action, alternatively (as here) as meaning sexual intercourse without any preliminary 'love-making’.”
Broonzy believed that. He once explained to an interviewer, “‘Shave 'em dry’ is what you call makin' it with a woman; you ain't doin' nothin', just makin' it."
However, the first recordings of the song — Ma Rainey’s original in 1924, Papa Charlie Jackson’s take on it the following year, Wiggins’ in 1929 — made no specific reference to the phrase’s meaning or content.
Getting Down and Dirty
It was not until 1935, in fact, that “Shave ‘Em Dry” turned X-rated. That is when blues singer Lucille Bogan — one of the “big three of blues,” along with Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith — took the tune on a wild ride.
Her original recording of it (with Walter Roland on piano and Josh White on guitar) was a cleaned-up version, but a more explicit alternative cut was issued 40 years after Bogan’s death, on a compilation album called Raunchy Business: Hot Nuts & Lollypops (1991).
That unexpurgated version “has explicit sexual references, a unique record of the lyrics sung in after-hours adult clubs,” Wikipedia observes. It may have been recorded either for the amusement of the recording engineers or for clandestine distribution as a “party record.”
“Bogan seems to be unfamiliar with the lyrics,” the encyclopedia says, “reading them as she sings them, potentially surprised by them herself.”
Ever since then, most mentions of “Shave ‘Em Dry” have made winking references to the raunchier Bogan version, rather than its PG- and R-rated predecessors.
Interestingly, a year after Bogan’s recording, Lil Johnson recorded "New Shave 'Em Dry,” in which “her lightness in voice and melodic sympathy did not disguise the relation to (the) Wiggins-styled tune,” Wikipedia comments.
Our Take on the Tune
Our own love for Wiggins’ version dates back to the 1990s. That is when the late Joe Dobbs gave Charlie Bowen a set of cassette tapes with a whole slew of roots music, including lots of country and urban blues recordings from the 1920s and ’30s.
Standing out in the bunch was Wiggins’ “Gotta Shave ‘Em Dry,” which has rattled around Bowen’s brain for, oh, a quarter of a century or so. But only recently did he work up an arrangement for the band.
We guess he was just waiting for the recent arrival of that raucous new resonator guitar.
More Song Histories?
By the way, if you enjoy these backgrounders on the songs we sing and want more, there’s a whole mess of ‘em in “Song Stories” archives. Click here to go browsing.
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 really appreciate the feedback and suggestions we’ve been getting so far from all y’all about some of the songs we’re considering for the new album. Here are a couple more we thinking about including. Whaddaya think?
At last week’s rehearsal, Pamela Bowen videoed two very different tunes. First is our take on the jazz standard “But Not for Me.”
As reported here earlier, George and Ira Gershwin penned this song in 1930 for the stage musical “Girl Crazy” (in which it was premiered by Ginger Rogers). The song didn’t take off right away, but later it became a darling of the new cool jazz cats in the 1950s.
After capturing that number, Pamela’s video makes a 180-degree pivot to something a bit more down home. Randy takes over the vocals and Charlie switches to banjo for “Ready for the Times to Get Better.”
This 1978 composition was one of songwriter Allen Reynolds’ contributions to the career of then-up-and-coming country star Crystal Gayle. As reported recently, the song went on to be covered by Marshall Chapman, Joe Sun, Cody Jinks, Billy Strings, and — most notably — by our hero, Doc Watson.
So, Whaddaya Think?
Should either or both be on the new album? This will be our first studio effort since Paul Martin put together Speechless in 2021, and it will be the first to feature our newest Floodsters, Danny Cox and Jack Nuckols.
We love having your help in planning it. Send us your suggestions about either or both of these latest nominated songs — just drop email to Charlie at designbybowen@gmail.com — and we’ll keep you posted as the work continues. Thanks, friends.
Meanwhile, Mark Your Calendar: April 21!
Hey, it’s the first day of Spring 2024! What a great day to announce the next public Flood gathering, a spring fling.
We're so thrilled to be invited by our dear friends at Alchemy Theatre to launch a new series of community music shows at their beautiful venue at Geneva Kent Arts Center, 68 Holley Ave. in the hills of Huntington. That, of course, is the same sweet spot that hosted our big “Flood at 50” birthday bash last New Year’s Eve.
The Family Flood is eager to do what we’re calling the “Floodango” as a fundraiser for this wonderful bunch.
We'll have more information about the April 21 show in the weeks ahead. For now, put us on your calendar, tell yer friends and plan to share a special spring Sunday afternoon with us at the coolest new spot in town.
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
St. Patrick’s Day has always been special to us, so it was particularly sweet six years ago tonight when the opening show for the 2018 season of “Route 60 Saturday Night” — the monthly musical variety bash for which The Flood was the house band — fell on March 17.
To put a Celtic curl on the night, we dusted off some favorite songs from The Old Sod. As you’ll see in the above video, we opened the show at the good ol’ Route 60 Music Co. with one of the greatest sing-along in the Irish catalog — “The Wild Rover” — which we learned years ago from our heroes, The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem.
Then 90 minutes later, we wrapped up the evening with one of the prettiest Irish tunes of all times.
“Down By the Salley Gardens,” with lyrics by William Butler Yeats, has been in The Flood repertoire for 25 or 30 years; in fact, it was on our first album in 2001. But as you hear in the second half of the video, the tune had a beautiful rebirth with the harmonies that Michelle Hoge brought to it.
The Indefatigable Mr. Dobbs
That fun night brought back memories of another special St. Pat’s. Seven years earlier, The Flood was chosen to launch the city’s first “Party on the Patio” of 2011 at Heritage Station’s gazebo downtown.
In those day, fiddler Joe Dobbs was front and center any time the band was stoking its Irish fires. In the following video from the March 17, 2011, show, Joe tears it up with his "Miss McLeod's Reel" for the dancers on the patio below the bandstand:
Ah, those McLeods and their reel! That tune also was a Flood favorite any time the extraordinary flutist Wendell Dobbs dropped in to jam with us.
Here, from a winter 2009 session, Wendell and Joe made the then-new weekly Flood podcast with their duet:
Encore
Anyway, the gazebo event went well. The city invited the band back the next year for a St. Pat encore, kicking off the 2012 "Party on the Patio” (or “Paddy on the Partio,” as Charlie dubbed it in a later email to his cousin Kathy).
“The gig was super!” he wrote. “We had a good gathering, the weather cooperated, the band sounded great and everyone seemed to have fun.”
The Mike Smith Connection
Meanwhile, at the Flood jam sessions in those days, Joe also often shared Irish tunes with Flood buddy Mike Smith, a regular at those weekly parties. In this moment from a summer evening in 2011, Pamela Bowen’s video captures Joe and Mike’s lovely twin fiddling:
About that tune, poet Patrick Kavanagh wrote the "On Raglan Road" in 1946 and it quickly became a beloved verse in his native Ireland. It didn't become internationally known, though, until years later when Kavanagh met The Dubliners’ Luke Kelly, who set the poem to a traditional melody, "The Dawning of the Day."
Joe’s Favorite Irish Fiddle Tune
Hands down, Joe Dobbs’ favorite Irish fiddle tune was one he often played with Mike, as we reported in this June 2009 podcast:
“Whiskey Before Breakfast” already had been with us a long time. It was a half century ago, in fact, that Joe taught that tune to his Flood family. And we actually have the tape!
Picture it. It was near St. Patrick’s Day 1977, and Joe and Flood co-founder Roger Samples had been wood-shedding together throughout the long, cold winter of 1976-77.
In spring, the two emerged from those winter nights with a whole slew of new duets; at the March 1977 Bowen Bash, they put them on display for us. Take a listen:
In the decades to come, Joe would always have that happy tune ready whenever someone wanted to dance with us, as you can see here:
“Star of the County Down”
Oh, and at a different Bowen Bash, Joe taught us another Celtic classic. This time it was his unique rendering of a beautiful Irish aire. Here’s that moment from an Autumn 1981 gathering:
Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
So, enjoy St. Patrick’s Day 2024. Erin Go Bragh, y’all!
And, hey, if your ears are still hungry for more Irish tunes, check out the virtual St. Patrick’s Day show on the band’s Radio Floodango free music streaming feature.
Click here for a free playlist of tunes that The Flood has recorded over the past dozen years at live shows, jam sessions, rehearsals and parties.
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
Before rock ’n’ roll was a thing, it was rhythm and blues that was perking up the ears of a generation of young radio listeners, and tops among the early R&B songwriters was Ivory Joe Hunter, the original “Baron of the Boogie.”
Ivory Joe — by the way, that wasn’t a nickname or a stage handle, but his given name (he always said that when he was born his parents thought he "looked just like the baby on the outside of the Castoria Ivory bottle, so they called me ‘Ivory’”— was born in Kirbyville, Texas, to a gospel-singing mother and a guitar-strumming daddy named Dave.
At 13, his piano-playing already was turning heads, and his first recording was for traveling folklorist Alan Lomax and the Library of Congress when Ivory Joe was still a teenager in 1933.
Hunter left Texas for the wilds of downtown Los Angeles in 1942, just as R&B was starting to attract legions of fans hungry for more tunes. He joined Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, with whom he wrote his first song, "Blues at Sunrise.” The group recorded it on his own label, Ivory Records, and it became a nationwide hit on the R&B chart in 1945.
The Song
On Oct. 1, 1949, Ivory Joe recorded a 12-bar blues that got into everybody’s head when it was released by MGM the following year as “I Almost Lost My Mind.” Topping the 1950 R&B charts, it had sold a million copies by 1956.
Later (in the wake of Hunter's 1956 success with his "Since I Met You Baby"), it was recorded by Pat Boone, whose version became a No. 1 pop hit.
Legacy
Hunter’s compositional output ranged from R&B to blues, boogie-woogie to country music, and he made a name in all of those genres. By 1954, he already had recorded more than 100 songs when he made a major move to Atlantic Records.
While visiting Memphis in the spring of 1957, Hunter spent a day at Graceland singing tunes with Elvis Presley, who was to record a number of Hunter songs, including "I Need You So", "My Wish Came True" and "Ain’t That Lovin’ You, Baby.”
Some estimate Hunter wrote more than 7,000 songs in the 60 years of his lifetime. Uniquely, he was honored at both the Monterey Jazz Festival and the Grand Ole Opry.
Our Take on the Tune
Some songs in our repertoire we do only when Floodster Emerita Michelle Hoge, the beloved “Chick Singer,” is in the room.
Our take on this good old Ivory classic is at the top of that list. This track is from last December, when Michelle had driven in from her Cincinnati area home to rehearse with us in preparation for the big “Flood at 50” gala at Alchemy Theatre last New Year’s Eve. Just listen to Michelle rocking the vocal harmonies, as always.
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When our friend Ed Light dropped in from the Baltimore area this week to sit in with The Flood for the very first time, he did something no one else has ever done: He wrote us a song!
And we were so…. uh, well, you know, “honored” is not exactly the word we’re probably looking for here. But, considering the text that Brother Ed chose for his sermon, we were certainly dumbstruck by his discernment and thoroughly gassed by his sagacity.
Playing on the 1951 Ernest Tubb/Red Foley classic “Too Old to Cut the Mustard,” Ed crafted new lyrics, with a verse about each member of the band, and our manager/videographer Pamela Bowen was right there to record the proceedings.
Thank you, Ed. Now, get off our lawn! It’s time for our nap…
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Otis Blackwell already was an established songwriter in June 1959 when he changed the life of a young doo-wop singer from Alabama.
One of the top 1950s songsmiths whose work influenced early rock and roll, Blackwell already had written the sultry “Fever,” which was to be the signature hit for Peggy Lee. He also had penned “Great Balls of Fire” for Jerry Lee Lewis, not to mention “Don’t Be Cruel,” which began his lucrative association with Elvis Presley through his followups like “All Shook Up” and “Return to Sender.”
By contrast, singer Jimmy Jones, though the same age as Blackwell, had had none of his success. Coming to New York from Birmingham as a teenager, Jones’ first gig in Gotham was as a tap dancer. Then he joined a doo-wop group in 1954, before going solo five years later.
How the Song Happened
That is when Jones connected with the MGM affiliate label Cub Records. There he met Blackwell with whom he wrote "Handy Man," the tune that would become the defining song of Jones’ life and career.
Blackwell produced the disc and also made an unplanned cameo appearance on the record: When a flute player hired for the session didn't show up, Blackwell stepped in to provide a whistling part that helped make the song a hit.
“Handy Man" became a million seller, climbing to No. 2 on the Cash Box pop charts of Feb. 27 and March 5, 1960. (It easily could have gone all the way to No. 1, except that 64 years ago this week was the start of the eight weeks in which it competed with the chart-topping “Theme From 'A Summer Place'" by Percy Faith and his orchestra.)
Other Covers
Jones could never quite repeat his “Handy Man” success, but his song did have some notable rebirths. Del Shannon had a hit with it in 1964; then more than a decade later, James Taylor charted with a slower, soulful rendition in 1977.
Comparing the Jimmy Jones original with James Taylor's work, AllMusic critic Jason Elias commented, "Where Jones’s version was chipper and a little obnoxious," Taylor's take was "so laid back it’s almost somnolent."
The Lawsuit
Jimmy Jones pretty much dropped from public view after the early 1960s. That is until a quarter of a century later, when he made headlines with a lawsuit. Jones sued British rocker Boy George, claiming that Culture Club plagiarized "Handy Man" with its hit "Karma Chameleon."
The suit claimed the "Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Chameleon" part of Culture Club’s tune was too similar to the "Come-a come-a come-a come-a come come a-come-a" part of “Handy Man.”
The parties settled out of court. Boy George always has insisted he did nothing wrong. "I might have heard it once, but it certainly wasn't something I sat down and said, 'Yeah, I want to copy this.’” The settlement with Jones, he added, consisted of "10 pence and an apple."
Our Take on the Tune
You never really forget the songs of your youth. Charlie was 10 years old in the summer of ‘59 when this tune hit the radio.
It was such a hoot when he brought the song to a joyous recent Flood rehearsal so we could all take it for a spin.
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When Adele recorded “Make You Feel My Love” in 2008 for her debut album 19, many of her fans assumed she wrote it. After all, the British superstar-to-be had written or co-written all the other songs on that disc.
However, more cosmopolitan ears in the crowd knew the truth, that this song had a distinguished pedigree all its own.
In fact, it was Bob Dylan who wrote “Make You Feel My Love” for his 1997 Time Out of Mind album, and immediately the song attracted an illustrious following.
Among the artists in the next decade to cover the tune on their own albums were Billy Joel (1997), Garth Brooks (1998), Trisha Yearwood (1998), Joan Osbourne (2000), Mary Black (2005), Maria Muldaur (2006), Bryan Ferry (2007) and Neil Diamond (2008).
Meanwhile, Bob himself performed the song live more than 300 times in concerts between 1997 and 2019 on his Never Ending Tour.
“It is one of the few songs,” says Wikipedia, “to have achieved the status of becoming a ‘standard’ in the 21st century, having been covered by more than 450 different artists.”
Our Take on the Tune
So, The Flood is pretty late to the party on this one. We didn’t start playing it until earlier this year.
It all began last fall, when Pamela and Charlie Bowen trekked to Cincinnati’s Aronoff Center to see a road company performance of Girl from the North Country. This Tony-award-winning musical centers on the music and lyrics of 28 Dylan songs written over the past 60 years.
The Bowens sat transfixed for the entire performance. Their ears especially perked up at the start of the second act when the characters of Mrs. Neilsen and Mrs. Burke stopped time in its tracks with their stunning rendition of “Make You Feel My Love.”
All the way home to Huntington the next day, Charlie simply couldn’t get the melody out of his mind. Within a week or so, he had roughed out an arrangement, knowing full well that it would be fleshed out as soon as he shared it with the guys. Here, from last week’s rehearsal, is where that work stands now.
More Dylan? Step Right This Way!
By the way, Bob’s tunes have been central to The Flood since its beginnings. If you’d like a deep dive into the band’s Dylan repertoire, check out this free Bob Dylan playlist in the Radio Floodango music streaming feature:
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Ah, memories. It was an autumn night 52 years ago, and Pamela and Charlie Bowen went to a theater in downtown Huntington is see the new Cicely Tyson/Paul Winfield movie called Sounder.
What a wonderful film, and Charlie especially loved the bluesy musical score performed by Taj Mahal, who also played the character “Ike” on screen.
Charlie loved it so much, in fact, that he started haunting Davidson Records Store down the street, just waiting to buy the soundtrack LP and learn some of the tunes.
Besides Taj Mahal’s excellent work, the real star of the soundtrack is legendary bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins doing the opening track: a gospel tune called “Needed Time.”
As reported in an earlier Flood Watch article, it was around this time that The Flood was just getting started. As soon as Charlie shared “Needed Time” with the band’s fellow founder Dave Peyton, the song quickly got played regularly at their fledgling jam sessions, especially after Roger Samples came along a short time later to sing the harmonies and add his tasty guitar solos.
About the Song
“Needed Time” — often called “Jesus Will You (or sometimes Won’t You) Come by Here” — seems to have first been collected by song catcher Robert W. Gordon in the 1920s (and later by John Lomax in 1937).
The Robert Gordon connection is particularly significant. That’s because Gordon’s main claim to fame among folkies today is that in 1926 he also collected an early version of “Kumbaya.” This African-American spiritual’s origin is unclear, but it is known to be sung in the Gullah culture of the islands off South Carolina and Georgia with ties to enslaved Central Africans. In the 1960s folk music revival, “Kumbaya” was regularly heard at coffeehouses across America (and later at any field trip that involved a campfire….)
Kim ba ya, which translates to “come by here,” might well have inspired “Needed Time,” which Lightnin’ Hopkins recorded in the early 1950s (and re-recording it many times later). It’s Hopkins’ original RPM track that is used in the opening moments of Sounder.
“I play it from my heart and soul,“ Hopkins once said. “The blues is something that the people can’t get rid of. And if you ever have the blues, remember what I tell you. You’re gonna hear this in your heart… slowly rough and delicately brutal, like stones being rattled in a can of ribbon cane syrup.”
Today the song has a particular strong connection with folksinger/blues artist Eric Bibb who performs at practically every concert. In fact, in the late 1990s, he even named his band “Needed Time” in recognition of the tune.
More recently, it came back to the fore when renowned country artist Hank Williams Jr. recorded “Jesus Won’t You Come By Here” for his 2022 Rich White Honky Blues album.
“It’s just perfect for an old southern hymnal,” Williams commented, “a reminder to slow down and enjoy ourselves.”
Our Take on the Tune
The Flood has done the song for a very long time, and it’s always different, depending on who is in the room.
In this rendition from a rehearsal a few weeks ago, our man Danny Cox makes it memorable with his signature guitar stylings.
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We thank all y’all for your feedback last week on our plans for the new album. Your thoughts and suggestions on the tune we asked you about — “(When She Wants Good Lovin’) Baby Comes to Me”— are so helpful. So, now can we get your thoughts on another song we’re considering?
“Am I Blue?”, featured in the video above, is a tune we often trot out at the start of a rehearsal so everyone can limber up for the evening.
Our manager, Pamela Bowen, who shot the video, says that, while she likes the song well enough, she thinks it probably isn’t lively enough for the new album. Perhaps you’ll agree. Or maybe you’ll think it could have a place as a little transition between more raucous numbers?
Do us a favorite. Take a listen and then give us your thoughts about that. Just drop an email to Charlie Bowen at designbybowen@gmail.com.
About the Song
As we reported in an earlier Flood Watch article, “Am I Blue?” was a 1929 composition by Harry Akst, who had already gained fame four years earlier when he wrote what became the great Louis Armstrong’s favorite tune: “Dinah.”
Jazz artists from Billie Holiday to Grant Green covered “Am I Blue?” over the past near-century. Proto-rockers Eddie Cochran and Rick Nelson also recorded renditions, both in 1957. Rhythm and blues versions were done by Ray Charles in 1959 and by Fat Domino in 1961.
Many women song stylists — Linda Ronstadt, Cher, Brenda Lee, Bette Midler, Dinah Washington, Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Rita Coolidge — have covered the song. George Strait even had a No. 1 country hit with it.
A lot of those renditions presented the tune slowly and deliberately. As listeners, we have no problem with that, but as players… well, that’s not our style. The Flood generally is not really dirge-friendly.
In fact, years ago, our beloved co-founder, the late Dave Peyton, said that if The Flood had a spirit animal, it probably would be Leon Redbone. So, our take on “Am I Blue?” is how we imagine Brother Redbone would do it.
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“They say life begins at 40,” composer W.C. Handy once said, “but I wouldn’t know.” Handy was 40 in 1914 when he wrote “St. Louis Blues,” and, he noted, “ever since, my life has revolved around that composition.”
Well, if you’re going to have a single song dominate your life, you could do much worse than have it be “St. Louis Blues.” Sometimes called “the jazzman’s ‘Hamlet,’” this composition is one of the most enduring and recognizable pieces in all of American music.
Classic versions of “St. Louis Blues” have been recorded by some of the world’s greatest performers, from Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong to Stevie Wonder and Herbie Hancock, from Fats Waller and Benny Goodman to Dizzy Gillespie and Dave Brubeck.
Origin Story
As a 19 year old, Handy arrived in St. Louis, Missouri, penniless and slept on the cobblestones of the levee until he finally found work as a musician.
Legend has it that his “St. Louis Blues” was inspired by his chance meeting with a woman who walked the city streets tormented by her husband’s absence, wailing “my man’s got a heart like a rock cast in the sea.” Handy’s work was to memorialize that summer night, right from his opening line: I hate to see the evening sun go down.
Handy, says jazz historian Tom Morgan, “drew inspiration for many of his songs from African-American words and music, so it is not surprising that he began to compose the theme to this woman’s anguish.”
His song touched people all around the world. In France, for instance, guitarist Django Reinhardt played and recorded the tune many times throughout the 1930s. (When Nazi Germany occupied France, American songs became frowned upon, if not banned outright. In order to play them, Reinhardt had to give them French names: “St. Louis Blues” became “La Tristesse du saint Louis.”)
Films
Two films — one in 1929 and one in 1958 — have made the song their title.
The first — a 16-minute two-reeler — presents the only footage we have of the foundational, legendary and essential blues singer Bessie Smith performing. Directed by Dudley Murphy, the film is unique for its all-Black cast, presented in a relatively unprejudiced light for that time period.
Its soundtrack featured Smith and her band made up of seminal early jazzmen, including pianist James P. Johnson, cornetists Thomas Morris and Joe Smith and guitarist Bernard Addison, along with the renowned choir led by Francis Hall Johnson.
Thirty years later, the 1958 film was a full-length biopic of the composer. In it, Handy was portrayed by popular jazz vocalist Nat “King” Cole. Sharing the screen with him were Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, Eartha Kitt, gospel icon Mahalia Jackson (and an 11-year-old Billy Preston, who would rock a later generation with tunes like “Nothing from Nothing” and “You Are So Beautiful”).
By the time of Handy’s death that same year, the songwriter was earning royalties upwards of $25,000 a year on that single composition.
Our Take on the Tune
The Flood has been doing versions of this song for decades. In fact, in 2008 it was the first song featured in The Flood’s inaugural episode of its weekly podcast.
Now this 2024 rendition — episode #710 in that same podcast — comes from the first song of the evening at a Flood rehearsal a few weeks ago. Riding on the infectious rhythm laid down by Randy Hamilton and Jack Nuckols and framing the solos by Danny Cox and Sam St. Clair, the number heralded a particularly fun night at the Bowen house.
Video Extra
For many years, The Flood played “St. Louis Blues” as an instrumental, but it took on a whole new life when Michelle Hoge later claimed it for her own, as she did on New Year’s Eve at our big “Flood at 50” birthday bash at Alchemy Theatre. Here’s the video of that wonderful moment, shot by our manager Pamela Bowen:
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We want your advice, friends. We’re in the early — EARLY! — stages of planning The Flood’s next album, which we hope to record later this year.
Right now we’re just starting to figure out what tunes we might want to record in the project, and we would really appreciate your thoughts and suggestions.
For instance, here’s a tune we like from last week’s rehearsal that our manager, Pamela Bowen, captured on video. What do you think? Is this one we should take to the studio?
About the Song
This great old Jerry Leiber-Mike Stoller composition, which The Coasters recorded in 1957, was featured in an earlier Flood Watch article. Click here if you want to read its backstory.
A minor hit for The Coasters, the tune was resurrected nine years later when a little-known group called The Chicago Loop took it to No. 37 on the Billboard charts. But in the Floodisphere, we were much more impressed with a different pressing of the song a year earlier.
Flood favorite folkie Tom Rush’s 1965 self-titled debut Elektra album included a rocking rendition accompanied by Bill Lee, John Sebastian (of The Lovin’ Spoonful) and Fritz Richmond (of The Jim Kweskin Jug Band.)
Anyway, Give Us Your Thoughts!
But back to The Flood’s studio project, this will be our first new album since Paul Martin put together Speechless in 2021, and it will be the first to feature our newest Floodsters, Danny Cox and Jack Nuckols.
We’d love to have your help to planning it. Send us your suggestions — just drop an email to Charlie at designbybowen@gmail.com — and we’ll keep you posted as the work continues.
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This song took a very long road on its journey to Floodlandia. The first time it was played in our band room was more than a dozen years ago on a mellow autumn night when our friends Randy Hamilton and Paul Martin dropped in to jam with us.
Neither was a member of The Flood yet — Randy would join the following year and Paul a few years after that — but their song was the hit of the evening. In fact, it was featured later in our weekly podcast.
However, “Ready for the Times to Get Better” didn’t work its way into our repertoire until now. A couple of weeks ago, Danny Cox happened to start picking the tune between songs on the night’s practice list, and that jaunty melody really jingled in our memory.
After that, Dan and Randy got together to woodshed a little, working out an arrangement, and then at last week’s rehearsal they popped it on the rest of us. With joy, everybody joined in.
About the Song
Arkansas native Allen Reynolds, who grew up in Memphis 85 years ago, already was an established songwriter in the early 1970s when he met the up-and-coming country singer Crystal Gayle.
His major credit before that was “Five O’Clock World,” which he wrote in 1965 for The Vogues to take to No. 1.
When Reynolds left Memphis for Nashville, he worked with artists like Don Williams and Waylon Jennings, but his most notable collaboration was with Gayle, including work on her hits “Wrong Road Again” and “Somebody Loves You.”
When Gayle left Decca in 1975, Reynolds followed her to UA Records where he helped develop her signature soft rock sound.
It was during this fertile period in the singer’s career that Reynolds wrote “Ready for the Times to Get Better,” which appeared on Crystal, Gayle’s third studio album in 1976.
Released as a single in January 1978, the song because her fourth No. 1 hit, spending 10 weeks on the Billboard Hot Country charts.
Over the years since then, the song has been covered by rock and country artists, including Marshall Chapman, Joe Sun, Cody Jinks and Billy Strings.
But hands down, The Flood’s favorite version is Doc Watson’s cover with David Holt on their 2002 Legacy album.
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If you were sitting around thinking of songs connected to The Mountain State, “Sweet Georgia Brown” probably wouldn’t be on your list.
It wasn’t on ours either, even though we had loved and played the song for decades. But then about a dozen years ago, the late Dave Peyton dropped some song news on us at a jam session.
“Hey, man,” we remember him saying with a big grin, “it's a West Virginia tune!”
Of course, Brother Dave was absolutely right. Composer Maceo Pinkard, who went on to become one of the greatest composers in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and '30s, was born in Bluefield, W.Va., where he got his education.
While Pinkard wrote hundreds of tunes, including many for stage and screen, this 1925 jazz standard was his greatest one. Yes, she might have been a sweet Georgia peach, she had West Virginia roots.
Bluefield Boyhood
Son of a West Virginia coal miner, Pinkard was educated at the Bluefield Colored Institute, class of 1913, and wrote his first major song — called “I’m Goin’ Back Home” — the following year. (Today Bluefield State University holds a week-long festival each year in honor of its famous alumnus.)
Pinkard had already formed his own orchestra and toured throughout the United States as conductor. In 1914 — at age 17 — Pinkard founded a theatrical agency in Omaha, Nebraska. Three years later found him in New York City creating Maceo Pinkard Music to sell compositions to national publishing companies.
In the decade beginning in 1921, Pinkard produced a rich catalog, including such hits as “Sugar,” "Gimme a Little Kiss, Will Ya Huh?", “Here Comes the Showboat” and “At Twilight.”
Another Pinkard composition from that period — “Them There Eyes” -- was a favorite of the great Billie Holiday, who recorded in 1939 on OKeh. It was one of the legend’s signature tunes when she performed at George Wein’s Storyville jazz club in Boston in 1952.
Meanwhile, Bix Beiderbecke, with sidemen Gene Krupa and Benny Goodman, recorded Pinkard’s "I'll Be A Friend with Pleasure" in 1930.
Sweet Miss Brown
The song that would top Maceo Pinkard’s obituary in 1962 was co-written with lyricist Ken Casey.
Soon after “Sweet Georgia Brown” was composed, it was introduced by bandleader Ben Bernie. As Bernie's nationally famous orchestra did much to popularize the number, Pinkard cut Bernie in for a share of the tune's royalties by giving him a co-writer credit.
While the song today is an iconic jazz standard, it was not an instant hit. Bing Crosby recorded it in April 1932 with the Isham Jones Orchestra, reaching No. 2 in the charts. Four years later, Cab Calloway sang it in the movie The Singing Kid.
Other Renditions
It wasn’t until 1949, though, that “Sweet Georgia Brown” reached its peak of popularity when it was recorded by Brother Bones and His Shadows. This novelty version, complete with whistling and bone-cracking, was a huge hit, spending 12 weeks on the Billboard charts.
This version is the one you might know best, because it was adopted as the theme song of The Harlem Globetrotters basketball team starting in 1952. Still today they use it for their "Magic Circle" when the players warm up, passing around the ball and displaying their techniques and dexterity.
Incidentally, a decade and a half later, The Beatles even had a comic version of the song. Their rendition contains the line In Liverpool she even dared / To criticize the Beatles' hair / With their whole fan club standing there.
But Who Is Miss Brown?
About Miss Brown’s real-life identity, as those who regularly quote the Bible like to say, well, it’s a mystery.
Ken Casey’s original 1925 lyrics make a number of references to African American culture. His rhymes make clear he’s talking about a sweet brown-skinned woman from Georgia, possibly a prostitute, some say. The second verse, for instance, begins, Brown-skin gals, you’ll get the blues, Brown-skin pals, you’ll surely lose.
Or was Miss Brown a white lady? In 1911, Dr. George Thaddeus Brown of the Georgia House of Representatives and his wife, Avis, welcomed a baby girl. Shortly after the child’s birth, the Georgia General Assembly passed a resolution stating that the baby would be named “Georgia” after the state.
Years later, in the lady’s obituary, The Miami Herald wrote:
According to family legend, it was her father who immortalized her when he met composer Ben Bernie in New York. A medical student at the time, George Brown told the composer about his family, including his youngest daughter with one brown eye and one green eye. Bernie whipped up lyrics to a melody by Kenneth Casey and Maceo Pinkard.
Lots of errors here. Besides identifying Bernie as the “composer,” note that it was the 1890s when Dr. Brown attended post-graduate medical school in New York, decades before his daughter Georgia was born.
Beyond that, there is a question of propriety. Dr. Brown’s offspring would have been — what? — 14 when Pinkard’s song was composed. Would you really celebrate your friend’s teenage daughter with a song that said, Fellas she can't get / Are fellas that she ain't met?
But hey, we didn’t know her, so probably we ought to just keep our opinions to ourselves…
Our Take on the Tune
“Sweet Georgia Brown” has been in The Flood repertoire for a very long time.
For instance, as reported earlier, back in 1977, when The Flood hosted a hootenanny one summer night at the Huntington Museum of Art, an instrumental version of the song was on the set list for the performance by Joe Dobbs, Dave Peyton, Stew Schneider and Charlie Bowen. Want to hear it? Click the button below:
A quarter of a century after that, the tune was still front and center when it was featured on the band’s first studio album in 2001.
And, as we noted in an earlier article, “Sweet Georgia Brown” was on the set list for back-to-back shows on a magical weekend in the summer of 2002. Click the button below for a sampler of the tunes we played in those gigs, featuring solos by Joe and Dave, along with Chuck Romine, Doug Chaffin and Sam St. Clair:
Today, a couple decades further along, “Sweet Georgia Brown” is still a showcase for all the folks on The Flood bandstand. In this 2024 version, we feature Charlie and Sam, along with Danny Cox, Randy Hamilton and Jack Nuckols.
Swing It S’More?
Finally, if that’s how you like your Flood to roll, you might want to make Radio Floodango’s free Swingin’ playlist part of your day today for a randomize set of similar tunes.
Click here to give it a spin.
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It was 15 years ago when Sam St. Clair brought us this tune, and it quickly became his theme song. Ever since then, “Ain’t No Free” has been a beloved standard in many a Flood show.
So, of course, the song had to have a place of honor at our big New Year’s Eve birthday bash at Alchemy Theatre several weeks ago:
Click the video above to watch — or re-watch, if you were in the house with us that fun evening — Sam’s latest performance of the tune, as videoed by Pamela Bowen and Gina Martin from their front-row seats.
About the Song
“Ain’t No Free” was written by Terry Adams and originally recorded in 1977 by his band NRBQ (New Rhythm and Blues Quartet), which released it the following year on the group’s sixth studio album, At Yankee Stadium.
In keeping with the band's sense of humor, the album's title is a joke. The recording’s credits read "Recorded at Bearsville Studios, November 1977 (not at Yankee Stadium)." The packaging included photographs of the band members in an otherwise empty Yankee Stadium.
Those photos were taken as a birthday treat for bass player and founding band member Joey Spampinato, a lifelong Yankees fan. His bandmates arranged a private visit to the ballpark.
In the Beginning
NRBQ — born in the mid-1960s in Shively, Ky., near Louisville — was formed by Adams and Spampinato, along with guitarist Steve Ferguson. Like a more worldly older brother of The Flood, NRBQ has an inspiring eclecticism, blending rock, pop, jazz, blues and Tin Pan Alley tunes.
Its songs have been performed by Bonnie Raitt, Los Lobos, Dave Edmunds and others.
The group even served as the unofficial "house band" for TV’s “The Simpsons” back in the late 1990s. That was during seasons 10 through 12, when NRBQ fan Mike Scully was head writer and executive producer. Several NRBQ songs were used in the series, including "Mayonnaise and Marmalade," which the group wrote specifically for the show.
Meanwhile, Back in the Floodlandia
Because we save just about everything, we actually have archival Flood footage of Sam doing this song 15 years ago:
The video above, shot by Pamela, captures one of the first times Sam performed “Ain’t No Free,” this time before a roomful of people at the Bowen house at a jam session in November 2009. Click here to see it in all its YouTubey goodness!
The Studio Version
Two years later, Sam and company laid down a studio version when The Flood trekked to Bud Carroll’s Live at Trackside venue to record the Wade in the Water album.
These days the entire disc can be heard for free on our Radio Floodango music streaming service. Click here to give it a spin.
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This tune has really deep roots in the Floodisphere.
About 20 years after our heroes, The Coasters, released this Jerry Leiber / Mike Stoller song in 1957, The Flood started fiddling with it one fun summer night. After that, though, the song went back to sleep for, oh, a half century or so.
We told much of that tale in an earlier Flood Watch article that also explored the history of the song. Click here to read all about that.
The Song Awakes
Anyway, on a winter’s evening a couple of years ago, the tune popped back into Charlie Bowen’s mind and right away, Randy Hamilton started singing harmony on the chorus.
That inspired us and suddenly the song now is back in the repertoire, evolving into a fine vehicle for Jack Nuckols’ cool drumming and tasty solos by Danny Cox and everyone else in the room.
Get On Board
Even visiting pickers. For instance, on this particular track — recorded at a rehearsal a few days after Christmas — you’ll hear Floodster Emeritus Paul Martin dropping in with his mandolin.
He had come to jam with the guys in preparation for being on the bandstand with us at the big “Flood at 50” bash at Alchemy Theatre. Just listen to how Paul jumps right into the mix on the song, soloing and then trading riffs with Dan.
Set The Wayback Machine to 1979
Meanwhile, would you like to listen to a fast and furious take on the tune from a Flood jam session 45 years earlier?
On this recording from an August night in 1979, you’ll hear Roger Samples singing the harmonies and Joe Dobbs on fiddle.
And keeping it all on track is Jack Nuckols just killing it on the spoons. Click the button below to give it a spin:
And just think. It took us only another 4 1/2 decades after that night to draw Jack into the band…
By the Way…
That 1979 take on the tune also is on the band’s official(ish) bootleg album, Hip Boots: The Flooded Basement Tape. Click here to read all about it.
Finally, if you’d like to flip through more of the band’s long backstory, check out the “Flood History” archives — check here — which links to large chunks of Flood lore over the years.
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A Video Extra:
Whenever our old friend Paul Martin is back in the room — or, better still, on the bandstand with us, as he was for our big “Flood at 50” birthday bash on New Year’s Eve — we always get him to take us on a ride on his favorite Bob Dylan tune.
Here from that wonderful New Year’s night at Alchemy Theatre is Paul leading the way on “You Ain’t Going Nowhere,” which we have considered our Floodster emeritus’s signature song ever since he joined the Family Flood in 2015.
About the Song
Bob Dylan wrote “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” in 1967 in Woodstock, NY, during his self-imposed exile from public appearances following his July 29, 1966, motorcycle accident.
He recorded it with The Band in the famous “Basement Tapes” sessions.
Between June and October 1967, Dylan's writing and recording sessions with The Band in the basement of their Woodstock house, which they called Big Pink,” were the source of many new songs, including "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere” well as another of our favorites, “Down in the Flood.”
The Byrds
But actually the first time many of us heard “You Ain’y Goin’ Nowhere” was not from Bob but rather from a single released by The Byrds on April 2, 1968, which would be the lead track on the band’s famous country-rock album, Sweetheart of the Rodeo.
Although not as famous as the group’s 1965 cover version of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” The Byrds' recording of "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" is considered by many to be the band's best Dylan cover ever. In fact, the song became a staple of The Byrds' live concert repertoire all the way up until their last appearances in 1973.
Joan Baez included a gender-switched version of the song (Tomorrow's the day my man's gonna come) on her 1968 Any Day Now album. The tune also has been covered by Earl Scruggs, Maria Muldaur, Old Crow Medicine Show, Phish, Counting Crows and many other.
And these days the song is one of about two dozen Dylan compositions that make up the wonderful Girl from the North Country musical that currently is touring the country.
More Floodishness
“You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” also is featured on The Flood’s Live, In Concert album, which you can spin for free on our Radio Floodango music streaming service.
Click here to check it out.
More Song Stories?
By the way, some readers tells us their favorite part of Flood Watch is these regular pieces on the history of the songs the band plays.
If you’d like to read earlier musical backgrounders, check out the “Song Stories” archives by clicking here.
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Ever since it came together decades ago, The Flood has always sought a rich diversity in its repertoire. So late last year when Danny Cox asked, “Has the band ever done the song ‘Sunny’?” he heard an invitation in the enthusiasm of the answer: “No!”
Danny worked out the chords, Jack took up the rhythm, we turned the vocals over to Randy, and suddenly the song was in the works.
In fact, now it’s even picking up fans among the visitors. On this particular track, for instance, Floodster Emeritus Paul Martin happened to be in the room and happily took a ride on one of the choruses.
Here, then, is the progress report on Project Sunny.
About the Song
The song that soul singer Bobby Hebb wrote one cold November night in 1963 not only sustained his career for a lifetime, but has become one of the world’s most beloved jazzy anthems to optimism and joy.
Out of Grief
But in truth, “Sunny” was written in response to tragedy. To two of them, actually.
The first was a national tragedy: President John F. Kennedy’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963. The second was a deeply personal tragedy. The night after JFK’s death, Bobby’s older brother was murdered in a knife fight outside a Nashville nightclub.
How then, after such grief, did Hebb write a song about bright days and sunshine?
“It was dark when I started working on the song,” Hebb told an interviewer years later, “and the sun was rising, and it was a different color. The sky was like purple.”
That flash of morning light inspired him. “The president had been assassinated and the very next day my brother got killed,” he said. “Everybody was feeling rather negative at that time, and I think we all needed a lift.”
Easy
The song came quickly and easily. “The lyric and the melody came to me at the same time,” Hebb said. “The lyric spoke for itself; it produced the melody. It was just right there, under my fingers. All I had to do was just play it.
“I was at the right place at the right time,” he said, “in the right frame of mind. I was ready to receive what was being offered.
“’Sunny’ is your disposition,” he said. “Instead of confusing and building chaos, let’s make this day a nice day for everyone. Spread that type of news, so you can become a little more relaxed and not filled with chaos, because chaos can become a killer.”
Pre- and Post-”Sunny”
Hebb already was an accomplished guitarist by the time he wrote “Sunny.” Born to blind musician parents in Nashville, Bobby as a child was performing on local television, and in 1950 as a teenager he was invited by Roy Acuff to play on the Grand Ole Opry.
As part of a song-and-dance team with his older brother, Bobby sang backup for Bo Diddley, and later he was part of the jazz scene in New York City.
But there’s success and then there’s post-“Sunny” success.
Hebb’s jazzy tune made it to No. 1 on the Cashbox charts. BMI ranked it at No. 25 in its “Top 100 Songs of the Century.” On the strength of that one song, he even became an opening act for The Beatles’ final tour in 1966.
Hebb wrote other songs after “Sunny,” of course. The best known was Lou Rawls’ 1971 hit "A Natural Man,” co-written with comedian Sandy Baron.
Hebb continued to live in his hometown of Nashville until his death at age 72 in 2010.
His legacy is “Sunny,” which remains one of the most performed and recorded songs of all times.
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New and old friends made epic memories for us as we celebrated the band’s 50th birthday with a New Year’s Eve bash at Alchemy Theatre, where Nora Ankrom, Mike Murdock, Stephen Vance and the rest made us all feel so very welcome.
Obviously, a 20-minute video can’t do justice to almost five hours of near continuous live music, right up to the strike of midnight. However, working with the superb footage that Pamela Bowen shot from her ringside table, we can at least give a feel for the evening’s festivities.
More than a dozen musicians were in the house, all featured in the video, including Floodster Emeriti Paul Martin, Michelle Hoge and Dave (Bub) Ball.
Highlighting the night were performances by guest artists Karen and Steve Byington of Wiley Dew and Jim Rumbaugh and Karen Combs of 5$Red.
Especially fun was singer-songwriter Douglas Imbrogno’s set, when he performed tunes with a rocking pickup band of Floodsters, including Bub on bass, Michelle on vocal harmonies, Danny Cox on guitar and Sam St. Clair on harp.
Besides the music and visiting with old friends, it was wonderful spending time with all the Alchemy Theatre folks. How fortunate our town is to have this friendly, energetic, creative bunch!
And of course, we loved seeing smiling faces of so many Flood friends all around the room.
What better way could there be to start the new year? Thanks, friends, for a night we’ll never forget. And now we’re so ready for 2024.
Video Extras
Finally, here are two more videosfrom this remarkable evening. We were so pleased we could lure Floodster Emeritus Paul Martin back onto the bandstand for the night. And whenever we’re with him, we always get him to take us on a ride on his favorite Bob Dylan tune:
It was 15 years ago when Sam St. Clair brought us this tune, and it quickly became his theme song. Ever since then, “Ain’t No Free” has been a beloved standard in many a Flood show. So, of course, the song had to have a place in honor at the New Year’s Eve bash:
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All this month we’ve been telling you about plans for our big “Flood at 50” Birthday Bash. Well, kids, tonight’s The Night, and, as Cousin Brucie used to say on good ol’ WABC, “Hey, be there or be square!”
The fun starts at 7:30 at Alchemy Theatre, 68 Holley Ave. Unfamiliar with the location? No problem. Click here for a Google map.
Or you can see it on our “The Venue” page on the web site at FloodAt50.com, which also has information on tickets, recent media coverage, the back story on the celebration and much more.
It will be wall-to-wall live music tonight. The Flood will start the festivities with the opening set when the doors open.
Then we’ll get friends in the room — folks like our pals Douglas Imbrogno, Jim Rumbaugh and Karen Combs of 5$Red, Karen and Steve Byington of Wiley Dew and others — up on stage to do sets of their own.
The Big Jam
And after The Flood’s second set comes the climax of the evening. That’s when all the players in the house will gather around one of the tables and jam until midnight. Think of it as a 21st Century hootenanny! If you’ve ever sat in with The Flood — or if you always wanted to — bring your instrument and be part of this historic open jam.
But remember, you don’t have to be a picker to part of this party. On the contrary, listeners are the guests of honor. This bash is part concert and part jam session, part reunion and part a celebration of the future. You gotta be at this once-in-a-lifetime event when we cheer in the new year!
How We Got Here
As we reported earlier, The 1937 Flood traces its roots to a New Year’s Eve party in 1973, when Charlie Bowen and the late Dave Peyton first started working out some tunes together.
Since that chilly night a half century ago, the band has had dozens of members over the decades, each with his or her own varied musical interests. It is a devotion to diversity that has inspired people to call The Flood “West Virginia’s most eclectic string band.”
Today the band embraces a repertoire ranging from folk songs to jazz, from blues to ballads, from songs of Bob Dylan and John Prine to those of Hoagy Carmichael, Fats Waller and George Gershwin, hokum tunes and old rock ’n’ roll and everything in between. And you’ll hear a bit of it all tonight at Alchemy Theatre.
So, Come on Out!
The fun starts at 7:30. It’s family-friendly. Tickets are $20 and include all the live music you can handle, plus finger foods and that toast at midnight!
Feel free to BYOB, soft drinks and snacks as well!
Join us for a great, safe way to start the new year!
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Here’s a tune we always trot out whenever we feel a party coming on. So you can bet we’ll have it on the set list this weekend for the big “Flood at 50” birthday bash on New Year’s Eve at Alchemy Theatre.
In fact, we’re so eager for this weekend that we actually started putting the song through its paces earlier this month.
Here’s our take on the tune from a joyous night at Sal’s Speakeasy in Ashland just a couple of weeks ago, featuring Michelle Hoge and the guys on the harmonies and happy solos from everybody in the band.
About the Song
The first reference to a tune called “Raise A Ruckus Tonight" dates back more than a century, to an entry in African American scholar Thomas W. Talley's classic 1922 song collection called Negro Folk Rhymes: Wise And Otherwise.
The first known recording of the song was the 1923 Paramount release by Norfolk Jazz Quartette, though their lyrics are different from those given in Talley's collection.
(Incidentally, if that group’s name sounds familiar, you’re probably remembering our earlier article about the song “I Am a Pilgrim,” which noted that the Norfolk Jazz Quartette made the first recording of that tune as well, in 1924.)
Early Crossover Song
“Raise a Ruckus Tonight” dates from the 19th century, in what scholars called an “open-ended dance song” with various floating verses that can be found in many secular slave songs.
Like other songs originating in the African-American community, the tune soon was picked up by white singers as well. A half dozen years after the Norfolk group’s release, for instance, Hugh Cross and Riley Puckett pressed it for Columbia.
Then in the 1950s and ’60s came a slew of folk renditions of the song, including great ones by Eric Darling, Josh White, Oscar Brand and The Highwaymen.
More Recently
For older ears today, the song probably is best remembered for a hit by Georgia-born singer Buster Brown, a harmonica player who relocated to New York in the mid-1950s. Brown put the tune on the charts in 1962 for Fire Records.
In the same year the song made its screen debut when Debbie Reynolds sang it in How the West Was Won in a scene in which her character is trying to get a party started around a campfire.
Finally, 40 years later, a classic 21st century rendition was recorded by Old Crow Medicine Show on Eutaw, the group’s third album.
Our Take on the Tune
It was that particular version that Flood manager Pamela Bowen was thinking of 16 years later when in 2017 she recommended her guys use the tune as the theme song for the then-new monthly “Route 60 Saturday Night” musical variety shows in which The Flood was the house band.
For the next two years after that, the band performed the song nearly every month to start the show. As a result, “Raise a Ruckus Tonight” is deeply ingrained in The Flood recipe, so it’s only natural for us to be serving it again at this week’s birthday party.
Speaking of Which ….
We sincerely hope you’ll help us commemorate the 50th anniversary of The Flood’s birth by joining us at Alchemy Theatre, 68 Holley Ave., this Sunday night. Everything you need to know about the gala — directions to the venue, ticket information, recent media coverage, the party’s back story and much more — is on our new website at Floodat50.com.
Check it out, then come to the do! We’re going to share memories and make a whole bunch of new ones.
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WSAZ-TV, which last week featured The Flood and Alchemy Theatre on its “Studio 3” show, invited us all back this afternoon for more information about Sunday night’s big “Flood at 50” New Year’s Eve birthday bash.
This time Martina Bills interviewed Charlie Bowen and Danny Cox of The Flood and Nora Ankrom and Mike Murdock of Alchemy for a five-minute spot during the station’s “First Look at 4” program, produced by Summer Jewell.
In addition to playing file footage from recent Flood gigs, Bills interviewed us all about how the band began and about details of Sunday’s celebration, which you can read on our new website, FloodAt50.com.
A Bash-Oriented Musical Selection
The host also invited us to play the segment out. While on last week’s segment we chose a blues, this time we showcased an original tune, our “These Boys.” It was a musical opportunity to illustrate what folks will hear at the New Year’s Eve party. As the lyric says, These boys fill up the night with sound!
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Just one week from tonight we’ll gather at Huntington’s wonderful Alchemy Theatre for the New Year’s Eve bash that will commemorate The Flood’s 50th birthday. Here’s our latest party preview, complete with vintage and current Flood fotos.
As the video reports, the Golden Anniversary festivities begin at 7:30 Dec. 31 in the theater at the Geneva Kent Center for the Arts, 68 Holley Ave.
The band will play a couple of full sets and then jam with old and new friends until the toast at midnight to cheer in the new year. Tickets are $20 and include all the live music you can handle, plus finger foods and that midnight toast to 2024!
Everything you need to know in order to join in this once-in-a-lifetime event is on our website at FloodAt50.com. Come on out and be part of the party. We're going to share some memories and make a whole bunch of new ones!
Meanwhile, in The H-D…
Thank you, Herald-Dispatch, for the Page 1 love you have given us this weekend!
To see the paper’s package — complete with Jim Casto's excellent story — click this link.
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We have a Christmas confession. Honestly, we don’t really care that much for Christmas music.
Oh, we’re not scrooges or anything — well, a few of us are — but mainly it’s just the nature of Christmas songs themselves. The chord patterns are not especially easy to remember, and since you do them only a few days or weeks every year, you don’t get a chance to get real cozy with them.
Plus, well, frankly Christmas tunes generally don’t swing. (Put a beat behind “Little Town of Bethlehem” and there will be repercussions….)
But here’s one that does fit the Flood groove nicely, especially when the merriest of our merry band — Danny Cox and Floodster Emerita Michelle Hoge — lead the way.
About the Song
Written in 1943 as a vehicle for Judy Garland in the MGM musical Meet Me in St. Louis, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” was later recorded by Frank Sinatra with modified lyrics and quickly became part of America’s standard Christmas set list on radios across the nation.
In fact, ASCAP regularly ranks it among the five most performed Christmas song each year, along with “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” “Winter Wonderland,” “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” and The Christmas Song.”
MGM hired Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane to write several songs for its movie, which gave “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” a memorable setup.
In the scene in which the song is debuted, a family is distraught by the father's plans to move to New York City for a job promotion, leaving behind their beloved St. Louis home. It is Christmas Eve and Judy Garland's character sings the song to cheer up her despondent baby sister.
Controversies
Although Ralph Blane is credited with writing the music for many of Hugh Martin's songs, Martin later claimed in his autobiography that he wrote both music and lyrics to all of the songs in this movie.
"I was reasonably content to let him receive equal screen credit, sheet music credit, ASCAP royalties, etc.,” Martin wrote, “mainly because this bizarre situation was caused by my naive and atrocious lack of business acumen."
If Martin was indeed doing double duty on the songs, it might explain why he had so much trouble with this particular tune. For instance, before filming began, some of Martin’s original lyrics were rejected by director Vincente Minnelli, who found them depressing.
Martin wrote several changes to make the song more upbeat. In particular, the lines "…. It may be your last / Next year we may all be living in the past" became "Let your heart be light / Next year all our troubles will be out of sight.”
Swinging the Season
While Judy Garland sang it straight — very straight — in the movie, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” started swinging with Sinatra’s 1948 treatment. Since then, many others — from Ella Fitzgerald and Lena Horne in the ‘60s to Joe Williams and Mel Tormé in the 1990s — have heeded the call of those cool chords to make the song jazzier.
In 2009, Keyshia Cole even reached number 58 on the Hot R&B/Hip Hop Songs chart with her take on the tune.
More Christmas Tunes?
Finally, if one song is not sufficient fuel for your current Christmas spirit, we have a booster pack for you. Check our the “La Flood Navidad” playlist in our free Radio Floodango music streaming service. (In fact, we’ve just added our 2023 take on “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” to be its lead-off track.)
For that yuletide playlist, we’ve culled bits of audio recorded over the past dozen years by The Flood as well as by a half dozen Flood friends. Guest artists include Ritch Collins, Ron Sowell, Jim Rumbaugh, Karen Combs, Mike Smith and Randy Brown.
Enjoy, and Merry Christmas to us every one!
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Susan Nicholas and Taylor Eaton of WSAZ-TV’s Studio 3 hosted a bunch of us this morning to talk about plans for our big “Flood at 50” birthday bash upcoming this New Year’s Eve at Alchemy Theatre.
On hand for the spot were Charlie Bowen and Sam St. Clair from The Flood and Nora Ankrom and Mike Murdock from Alchemy.
And In Print!
Meanwhile, in Ashland, Ky., today, Lee Ward of The Daily Independent published a lovely story about the upcoming celebration. Click here to read her story.
Links to these stories and other new developments in the planning for the New Year’s Eve party are on the new FloodAt50.com website, where you can get background on the band, the venue, ticket information and much more. Check it out!
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Returning to Sal’s Speakeasy last night for our latest monthly gig at our favorite Ashland, Ky., venue, we not only had the entire band on stage, but also we were joined by our beloved Floodster Emerita, Michelle Hoge, who drove in from Loveland, Ohio, just to be part of the fun.
Band manager Pamela Bowen, our regular videographer, was under the weather and couldn’t make the gig, so we drafted a dear friend of The Flood — Danny Cox’s lovely sister Jeanette Trent — to shoot a little video. Thanks, luv!
The resulting film features three tunes from the night. Enjoy.
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When we go slippin’ and a-slidin’ into Sal’s Speakeasy in Ashland tomorrow night for our latest gig, we’ll bring with us one of our all-time favorite party tunes.
The song that we call “You Got Me Slippin’” is loosely based on a classic Jimmy Reed piece from 65 years ago at the very dawn of rock ’n’ roll. And to further Floodify the fun, we also inject a few old Bob Dylan verses right in the middle of it just for glee (a shout-out to your grandpa’s sword, pictures on a board and fistfights with the milkman… you know, the usual stuff….)
The Jimmy Reed Original
Inspiration for it all, as we say, is a blues that Jimmy Reed recorded in 1959. Vee-Jay Records released it as “Baby What You Want Me to Do,” but honestly, everybody we knew back then called it "You Got Me Runnin'" because of its opening lines (You've got me runnin' / You've got me hidin' / You've got me run, hide, hide, run…)
It was a chart hit for Reed and, as with many of his songs, it appealed to listeners across various genres, with numerous subsequent covers by other artists.
While Reed himself received the sole songwriting credit for the number, blues historian Gerard Herzhaft notes, “Like almost all of Reed's pieces and whatever the official credits are, it is an original composition by his wife, (Mary) Mama Reed."
Covers and Tributes
The song continues to be performed and recorded — notably by Etta James and by Elvis Presley — making it perhaps the most covered of all of Reed's tunes, spawning versions by blues, R&B and rock artists.
Flood fans might remember that our own version — complete with the addition of those Bob Dylan lyrics from his 1965 “On the Road Again” — is the opening track on our 2016 Live, In Concert album.
Incidentally, our Dylan insertion was a bit prescient. While Bob himself has never recorded a Reed song as far as we know, he did pay tribute to the blues great with the song “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” on the 2020 Dylan album, Rough and Rowdy Ways.
(And by the way, last month we got to hear Dylan sing that one in person when he rolled into downtown Huntington to appear live at the Keith-Albee theater.)
So, Do We Have a Date?
Remember, this Saturday night The Flood will be bringing our take on the Reed song — and a whole lot more — to Sal’s Speakeasy, 1624 Carter Avenue in beautiful downtown Ashland, Ky.
We play from 6 to 9. Call ahead to save a table near the bandstand, then come on down and party with us.
And speaking of dates, hope you’re also making plans to join us at Huntington’s Alchemy Theatre this New Year’s Eve for our big “Flood at 50” birthday bash.
All the details are on the new website, FloodAt50.com. And if you’re on Facebook, “like” the page there at www.facebook.com/the.flood.at.fifty That’ll keep you up to date on the latest details.
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As we noted last week, highlights of Floodlandia’s Decembers are holiday visits with Charlie Bowen’s cousin Kathy Castner, who usually can be persuaded each time to sit in with the band for a special night.
Jam sessions with Kathy are always chances to revisit favorite old tunes, like “Loving Arms” and “The Rose,” but they also can be opportunities to explore some new material too.
For years now Kathy and Charlie have been doing a duet on Graham Nash’s classic song “Our House,” but it was last week during Kathy’s Christmas 2023 trek from her Cincinnati area home to Huntington that the band also got in on the fun. Moreover, we’re fortunate that our manager/videographer Pamela Bowen had the camera rolling to catch that moment for the video above.
About the Song
Nash wrote “Out House” in time to record it with his band mates on the 1970 Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young Déjà Vu album.
Hitting No. 30 as a single on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, the song — which has been characterized as an ode to the 1970s’ counter-cultural domestic bliss — was written while Nash was living with singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell.
Graham had come from England to America in 1969 and was staying with Crosby, who threw a party to welcome him to Los Angeles. Mitchell, whom Graham had met earlier when he was still playing with The Hollies, came to the do.
“After that party, I went home with Joni,” Graham said, “and spent a couple of years with her in her home in Laurel Canyon.”
Capturing the Moment
About the song’s creation Graham said, “One day Joan and I got up and went to breakfast at a delicatessen on Ventura Boulevard, and a few doors away there was a little antique store. In the window she saw this vase, went inside, fell in love with it, bought it and brought it back to the house.
“It was a kind of a cold gray morning as it sometimes can be in Los Angeles, and I said, ‘Why don’t I light the fire and you put some flowers in the vase that you just bought.’”
Bingo!
“My and Joan’s lives at the time were far from ordinary,” Nash said, “and I thought, ‘What an ordinary moment.’ Here I am lighting the fire for my old lady and she’s putting flowers in this vase that she just bought. And I sat down at her piano and an hour later, ‘Our House’ was written.”
Going Forward
The song has been covered by other artists — Helen Reddy and Sheena Easton come to mind — but curiously, Nash has said he "was bored with 'Our House' the day after we recorded it,” though he still plays it occasionally "because it does mean so much to so many people.”
Notably, in March 2019 Nash performs the song on the album Joni 75: A Birthday Celebration, the recording of a tribute concert by various artists to observe Mitchell's 75th birthday.
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Most of the world heard “My Dear Companion” when it was featured on the 1987 Trio album released by superstars Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, with songwriting credits going to Kentucky balladeer Jean Ritchie.
That creation story for the song is accurate, as far as it goes. Ritchie wrote her tune in 1963, and 10 years later it was among the first things The Flood played when the band started coming together.
The Kentucky Connection
Older members of the band often talked about being at folk festivals — like those at Kentucky’s Grayson Lake and Carter Caves state parks — at which Jean Ritchie was the star attraction.
In fact, some of us remember sitting with Nancy McClellan at the festivals — or in her living room in Ashland — listening to Jean tell stories of her early days when as a young girl she made her way from Viper, Ky., to New York City in the 1950s when the folk music boom was just beginning.
The Song’s Pre-Jean History
But the roots of “Dear Companion” go deeper than 1963. Jean never made any secret of the fact that she patterned her piece after a traditional song that English folklorist Cecil Sharp collected in early 20th century America.
Sharp later recounted how he collected the song in1916 from Rosie Hensley of Carmen, NC. The following year Sharp moved on to Kentucky to collect more songs, many of them from Jean Ritchie’s aunts and cousins.
In 1956, Jean herself recorded that original song, which opens with the lines: I once did have a dear companion, Indeed I thought his love my own, Until a dark-eyed girl betrayed me And then he cared no more for me…
A quick aside: In the 1970s, Flood co-founder Roger Samples recalled his mother, Velva Kennedy Samples, back home in Clendenin, WV, singing that same song.
This was long before Ritchie copyrighted her composition. Quite likely, Velva was singing some version of the original Cecil Sharp find.
Meanwhile, that traditional version also was sung by Peggy Seeger, who recalled learning it in 1960 at a Canadian club from fellow folkie Bonnie Dobson, who recorded it in 1963. Dobson’s version used a haunting Bob Coltman melody.
Today if you YouTube the Dobson recording, you can hear the homage that Jean Ritchie pays to that Coltman tune when she crafts her own melody. (We think Jean’s is imminently more hum-able, though, so it’s little wonder hers is pretty much the only version anyone knows nowadays.)
Our Take on the Tune
What makes Ritchie’s rendition special — besides her lovely melody — is her wonderful re-crafting of the lyrics. Like the original, Jean’s song is nominally about abandoned love, but then she goes far beyond that to a larger theme of loss in general.
And it’s because of those deeper expressions — with lines like, I wish I was a sparrow flying / I'd fly to some high and lonesome place / And join those little birds in their crying, / Remembering you and your dear face — that we in The Flood have often thought of this song in times of our darkest grief.
For instance, when our old friend Harvey McClellan died in the fall of 2004, the Bowens traveled with Nancy to Harvey’s Henderson, Ky., birthplace, where Charlie sang the song at the burial. Nine years later, at Nancy McClellan’s own funeral, Charlie, with bandmates Randy Hamilton and Michelle Hoge, sang the same song at her graveside.
So, it was only natural for us recently to think of the song again at the first rehearsal after the death of our own dear companion, Doug Chaffin, last month. He absolutely loved playing that song. So, here’s to you, Doug.
On the Album
Speaking of Doug, you can hear him soloing and playing soulful, tasteful fills behind the solos of Joe, Dave and Sam on “My Dear Companion” on The Flood’s 2013 Cleanup & Recovery album.
These days the entire album can be heard online on our free Radio Floodango music streaming service. Click here to reach the disc.
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Not many bands that can brag of being active for 50 years, but The 1937 Flood is celebrating its Golden Anniversary this year. And we’re hoping you will come out and join the fun!
Alchemy Theatre’s Mike Murdock and Nora Ankrom — the kind folks who brought The Flood in to be part of the wonderful “Bright Star” production last summer — are hosting The Flood's 50th Birthday Party this New Year’s Eve. The fun starts that night at 7:30 at the Geneva Kent Center for the Arts, 80 Holley Ave.
The band will play a couple of full sets and then jam until the toast at midnight to cheer in the new year! Tickets are $20 and include all the live music you can handle, plus finger foods and that midnight toast to 2024!
Memories….
The 1937 Flood traces its roots to a New Year’s Eve party in 1973, when Dave Peyton and Charlie Bowen first started working out some tunes together.
Since that chilly night a half century ago, the band has had dozens of members over the decades, each with his or her own varied musical interests. It’s a devotion to diversity that has inspired people to call The Flood “West Virginia’s most eclectic string band.”
Today the band embraces a repertoire that ranges from folk songs to jazz, from blues to ballads, from songs of Bob Dylan and John Prine to those of Hoagy Carmichael, Fats Waller and George Gershwin, hokum tunes and old rock ’n’ roll and everything in between.
Pickers and Listeners Alike are Welcome!
And born of the hippy parties of the 1970s, The Flood still loves a good time.
That’s why the band invites you to join the jam this New Year’s Eve. If you’ve ever sat in with The Flood — or if you always wanted to — bring your instrument with you. You’ll be as welcome as could be.
But of course, you don’t have to be a picker to part of this party. On the contrary. Listeners will the guests of honor. This bash will be part concert and part jam session, part reunion and part a celebration of the future.
You can read all about it on our new website: FloodAt50.com. Take a look, then come on out to Alchemy Theatre this New Year’s Eve. We’re going share memories and make a whole bunch of new ones!
We’re Gonna Put You in the Movies….
In addition, Sam St. Clair wants us to do a documentary for our golden anniversary year, perhaps something that we can share with the Appalachian Film Festival in the spring.
So we expect to be shooting videos throughout the evening. It’ll be fun if we also can get your Flood yarns recorded, so start remembering your favorites. Here are some random images to get you thinking:
Tickets!
Alchemy Theatre has created a Facebook Event page for the do, with all kinds of additional goodies. Click the graphic below to reach it on Facebook:
You can order tickets online through the page. Tickets also will be available at the door. Note: all proceeds of the ticket sale goes to Alchemy Theatre.
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
Eighty-nine years ago today, one of America’s greatest — though least-known — blues artists died after months of illness.
Gaunt and frail, Arthur Blake — known to blues aficionados by his stage name, “Blind Blake” — must have looked much older at the end than his 38 years.
It had been a wild and sometimes wonderful decade for him. Starting in mid-1920s, he was celebrated as Paramount Records’ sensational guitarist, whose distinctive playing often was compared to the sound and style of a ragtime piano.
Influences
His intricate finger-picking was to inspire generations of guitarists, from Rev. Gary Davis to Ralph McTell, from Leon Redbone to Ry Cooder and John Fahey.
Famously, blues great Big Bill Broonzy, who heard Blake in person in the early 1920s, said Arthur made his guitar “sound like every instrument in the band — saxophone, trombone, clarinets, bass fiddles, pianos, everything. I never had seen then and I haven't to this day yet seen no one that could take his natural fingers and pick as much guitar as Blind Blake."
The Crash
Blake recorded about 80 tracks between 1926 and 1932. His future looked bright. With his records selling well, he felt he could settle down, so he married Beatrice McGee around 1931.
But then the next year it all went bad. Paramount went bankrupt in 1932 under the weight of the Great Depression. In the remaining two years of his life, Arthur Blake was plagued by poverty and by illness.
A coroner’s autopsy confirmed that his Dec. 1, 1934, death came because of complications from tuberculosis.
The Song
Today Blind Blake’s legacy lives on in his recordings and through their impact on nearly a century of blues, folk and jazz musicians who travel in his shadow.
In 1992, for instance, Bob Dylan honored Blake in the title of his Good as I Been to You album, on which he performed a cover of "You Gonna Quit Me Blues.”
Our Take on the Tune
And that’s where The Flood comes in. We started doing the song in the mid-’90s, right after hearing Dylan’s version on that album.
We were looking for an easy, happy tune that we could warm up with, one that would let everybody in the room just stretch out a little. Nowadays it is just as likely to turn up as a last song of the night — as it does here — putting a bow on a great evening of music. Enjoy.
Meanwhile, in Other News…
By the way, we’re now one month away from our big “Flood at 50” birthday bash on New Year’s Eve, and the good folks at Alchemy Theatre who are hosting it have created a Facebook Event page for the do, with all kinds of additional goodies. Click the graphic below to reach it on Facebook:
In addition, our dear friend Shane Ward at Eve.NET has helped us get a dedicated website for the event up and running. Visit us there at Floodat50.com!
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
As an anthem to angst, George and Ira Gershwin’s bittersweet counter-love song “But Not For Me” was well ahead of its time.
The brothers penned the song in 1930 for the stage musical “Girl Crazy,” in which it was premiered by Ginger Rogers, who was appearing in the role that led to her film career.
Since then, the tune has been recorded many times, though many leading vocalists like Tony Bennett don’t seem to have ever given it a try, even though it is, as musician Jed Scott notes, “It’s a gem of a song, and a welcome change from the AABA song form.”
Waiting for Jazz
The number initially failed to achieve significant pop success, charting only once. And that was a dozen years after its composition, when Harry James and His Orchestra brought it out with vocalist Helen Forrest.
However, a decade after that, the song had a rebirth in the jazz world, which appreciated its kinky chord changes. As Scott noted in an online post, instead of the usual AABA of most pop standards, this 32-bar Gershwin melody is ABAB.
Best of all, that second B section “has a brilliant compositional moment,” Scott observes. “In the first B, it leaps upwards to the tonic, but in the second it leaps a step higher, before climbing back down to the low tonic over the next four measures.”
The result, says Scott, is “unexpected, beautiful and typical of Gershwin’s clever compositional approach.”
The Cool Kids
The world of 1950s cool jazz loved those leaps. A particularly beautiful understated rendering was done in 1956 by a 26-year-old superstar of the day. Trumpeter Chet Baker made it a centerpiece on his Chet Baker Sings album, achieving a perfect balance between George’s upbeat melody and Ira’s darker lyric.
Other ‘50s jazz vocals of the tune included great ones by Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughn. Meanwhile, instrumental versions were released in the same decade by Miles Davis, Buddy De Franco, the Modern Jazz Quarter, Kenny Burrell, Ahmad Jamal and Red Garland.
Since then the song has been recorded by various crooners, from Harry Connick Jr. and Barry Manilow to Linda Ronstadt and Diana Krall.
Movie Time
“But Not for Me” has made occasional cameo appearances in movies too, starting out as the title tune for a 1959 Clark Gable-Carroll Baker comedy.
After that, Woody Allen added it to his 1979 Manhattan, a Jackie Gleason arrangement made it into L.A. Confidential in the same year, and 15 years later, Elton John performed it in Four Weddings and a Funeral.
Our Take on the Tune
Last week was The Flood’s first fling with the tune. See what you think.
We also expect to have the song in the repertoire for our big New Year’s Eve do at Huntington’s beloved Alchemy Theatre. Hope you’ve got us on your calendar. If you missed the earlier announcement, click this link:
But Wait, There’s More!
If swinging along on these great old standards is what you need today, be sure to check out the Great American Songbook playlist in our all-free Radio Floodango music streaming service. The link below tells you all you need to know.
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Charlie Bowen played this song for David Peyton on the first night they jammed together at a New Year’s Eve party 50 years ago.
“July, You’re a Woman” was the one of the best tunes in the repertoire for their earliest gigs, especially after Roger Samples came along later that year to sing harmony on the chorus and do magic with his guitar solos.
Bowen adapted his version of the song after learning it when it was brand new in 1969, released by composer John Stewart on his second solo album, California Bloodlines.
John Stewart
John Stewart was a Southern California boy — born and died in San Diego — and grew up listening to the Sons of the Pioneers and Tex Ritter.
His first venture into popular music was in the ‘50s with a high school garage band called “Johnny Stewart and the Furies.” Channeling the sounds of Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley, they toured colleges and coffee houses and released one single in 1957, "Rockin' Anna," which was a minor southern California hit.
After the Furies faded, Stewart turned to folk music, teaming up with two friends to form a group called The Woodsmen. They were heavily influenced by The Kingston Trio, which had just emerged from the crowded San Francisco music scene. That group’s 1958 release of “Tom Dooley” is frequently cited as launching the folk music revival in the early 1960s.
When founder Dave Guard departed the group in 1961 to explore other musical directions, John Stewart was selected by remaining members Nick Reynolds and Bob Shane to replace him. Stewart stayed with The Kingston Trio until it disbanded in 1967.
After that, Stewart toured as a solo act, recording for Capitol Records and exercising his composing chops. He wrote “Daydream Believer,” the closest he ever came to writing a standard. It was a big hit for The Monkeys in the fall of 1967 and then for Anne Murray in 1979.
That Other Song
In 1975, John met and married fellow folk singer Buffy Ford, with whom he remained until his death in 2008 at age 68.
It was with Buffy that John first recorded “July, You’re a Woman” on their Signals Through the Glass album, which predated California Bloodlines by a year.
The song also got some juice when it hit Billboard’s Hot 100 with a rendition by Pat Boone in April 1969. After that, the tune received sporadic attention over the years. Eddy Arnold released it in 1970; three years after that, Red, White & Blue (Grass) took its turn with it.
Our Take on the Tune
In the Floodisphere, the song was much on our minds in the mid-1970s, only to drop out of the mix for many decade. Then one night this autumn — hello! — it came wandering back to us.
On this track from a recent rehearsal, Charlie’s on banjo, Jack’s on bongos, Randy’s singing harmony and Danny’s playing those sweet, sweet solos.
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In the single year of 1925, Tin Pan Alley composer Ray Henderson wrote three — count ‘em, THREE — classics in the great American songbook: “Bye Bye Blackbird,” “Has Anybody Seen My Girl?” (“…Five foot two, eyes of blues…”) and “I’m Sitting on Top of the World.”
Then in the next year, maybe just to show that he hadn’t shot his wad, Ray wrote one of his most memorable tunes — “Birth of the Blues” — with catchy lyrics by Buddy DeSylva and Lew Brown.
First the Song, Then the Movie
The song made the rounds — recorded in its debut year by Paul Whiteman and his orchestra, used in Broadway revues — but its real claim to fame came 15 years later when it was used as the title song of one of America’s beloved pre-World War II musicals.
Released exactly one month before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Birth of the Blues was a joyous tribute to the roots of jazz in turn-of-the-century New Orleans. Its story is loosely based on the adventures of The Original Dixieland Jass Band.
A rollicking vehicle for Bing Crosby and Mary Martin, the film was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Score, though most of the songs were not really new at all. Besides “Birth of the Blues,” the soundtrack included “St. Louis Blues,” “Georgia Camp Meeting,” “St. James Infirmary,” “Tiger Rag,” “Memphis Blues” and “Shine.”
Genuine Jazz
And what a soundtrack it was! It featured many memorable minutes of music by trombonist Jack Teagarden and his orchestra, often with Bing at the mike, belting out the lyrics.
The film was praised by the critics as a feel-good holiday treat in those first tremulous months of America’s entry into the war. In The New York Times, Bosley Crowther didn’t love the script, “but,” he added, “as a series of illustrated jam sessions and nifty presentations of songs and jokes, it is as pleasant an hour-and-a-half killer as the musically inclined could wish.”
“Obviously,” he added, “this little picture is not the ultimate saga of early jazz. But it begins to perceive the possibilities. As the 'cats' say, it takes more than it leaves."
A Schertzinger Legacy
Incidentally, director Victor Schertzinger — who had been making movies since 1917 — also was a musician and a notable composer. He is hailed in jazz circles for his 1940s compositions of “Tangerine” and “I Remember You,” both of which were included in the final Schertzinger film, The Fleet’s In.
Schertzinger died at 53 from a heart attack in October 1941, less than two weeks before the release of his Birth of the Blues.
Our Take on the Tune
“Birth of the Blues” is one of a number of new tunes in our repertoire that we’ve got prepared for our latest gig at Sal’s Speakeasy in Ashland, Ky., tomorrow night.
Come out and party with us. We play from 6 to 9.
Here’s a take on the tune from a recent rehearsal in which you’ll hear Jack and Charlie laying down the rhythm, leaving plenty of room for solos by Danny, Sam and Randy.
Meanwhile….
If you’d like more songs of this stripe, be sure to tune into the free Swing Channel on our music streaming service, Radio Floodango. Click here to give it a spin!
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In the winter of 1969, Bob Dylan arrived in Tennessee with only four songs completed for his Nashville Skyline recording sessions.
Over the next few days at the Columbia studio and in his rooms at the Ramada Inn, he composed another five pieces, including this stunning tune that he used as the album’s closing track.
“Tonight I’ll be Staying Here with You” was the third single to be released from Nashville Skyline (after “I Threw It All Away” and “Lay Lady Lay.”) It reached #50 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart and the top 20 in other countries.
Critical response was positive. Cash Box said that, unlike previous Dylan singles, "this ballad is honed to a fine edge and further sharpened through excellent production touches.” Record World concurred, calling it “another classic from the master.”
Milestone
Dylanologists, meanwhile, found the song insightful, because the lyrics seemed to mark a change from the angst of Bob’s earlier love songs, many of which told of restless searches.
In contrast, "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here with You" finds Dylan devoted to his lover and willing to settle down (at least for the nonce). Some fans waxed poetic at the thought of Bob as a family man, happy to be quietly living with Sara and the kids.
Dylan himself seemed to like that image. Soon after Nashville Skyline’s release, he told Rolling Stone‘s Jann Wenner, “I was on the road for almost five years. It wore me down. I was on drugs, a lot of things. … I don’t want to live that way anymore.”
Trains
Train imagery, by the way, runs throughout the song.
But unlike his earlier lyrics, in this song, even though he "can hear that whistle blowin'," he wants to "throw my ticket out the window" and let "a poor boy on the street" have his seat.
On the album, the song showcases Dylan’s then-new smooth country croon between twangy guitar fills. A more raucous version, though, became a live highlight a few years later when Bob was — yes — back on the road with the Rolling Thunder Revue.
Our Take on the Tune
There’s a reason why The Flood’s rendition of this Dylan classic sounds different from Bobby’s version (or from anyone else’s take on the tune, for that matter).
That’s because back in the early 1980s, when Roger and Charlie started playing around with opening chord progression here, they thought they were writing an original song of their own.
But then Rog and the Samples family moved away — leaving West Virginia for the green hills of Kentucky — and the piece they were working on was left an orphan. It didn’t even have a name or the first hints of a lyric.
Only a year or so later, when Charlie was noodling with it during the warmup at a jam session, did Dave Peyton say, “Hey, you know what? If you tweaked the chords a bit and added the bridge, you could sing that Dylan thing over that!”
Right there and then an arrangement was born, and we’ve been playing it like this ever since.
Meanwhile….
By the way, if you’d like more Floodified Dylan tunes, check out this special playlist we constructed for Bobby’s birthday a Spring or two ago:
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Born in New Orleans in 1899, Alonzo "Lonnie" Johnson was one of America's great blues and jazz artists, touring with Bessie Smith, recording with Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, with Charlie Christian and Eddie Lang, with stride piano giant James P. Johnson and so many more.
He was a guitar pioneer. In fact, blues historian Gérard Herzhaft believes Johnson was "undeniably the creator of the guitar solo played note by note with a pick, which has become the standard in jazz, blues, country and rock.”
He started that style as early as 1927 with his solo on "6/88 Glide" for Okeh Records.
More Chops Than That
But while his guitar innovations reached both Delta blues and urban players who adapted and developed them into the modern electric blues style, Johnson also was known in the 1920s as a sophisticated and urbane singer and composer.
In fact, "of the 40 ads for his records that appeared in The Chicago Defender between 1926 and 1931,” music historian Elijah Wald notes, “not one even mentioned that he played guitar."
But when record sales plunged in the Depression, Johnson’s output dwindled and he worked for a while at a Cleveland radio station, among other jobs, just to make ends meet.
Things started looking up again in 1937 when he went to Chicago to begin recording for Decca. Two years later he joined Lester Melrose’s roster at the new Bluebird Records, for which Lonnie recorded 34 tracks over the next five years.
The Song
A solo hit from one for the last of the Bluebird sessions was Johnson’s composition, “He’s a Jelly Roll Baker,” recorded Feb. 13, 1942, with Blind John Davis on piano and Andrew Harris on bass.
In addition to its scintillating guitar break, the track’s lyrics demonstrate Lonnie Johnson’s growth as a savvy songwriter. “Jelly Roll Baker” presents a swaggering protagonist who proclaims his love-making prowess with women from all walks of society, from a judge's wife to a hospital nurse.
Influences
Lonnie’s second career — which included “I Know It’s Love” on which he switched to the electric guitar that would be his signature instrument from then on — eventually disappeared under an avalanche of rock ’n’ roll in the early ‘50s.
Ironically, “Tomorrow Night,” a Johnson hit on King Records, was one of Elvis Presley’s earliest pressings for Sam Phillips at the Sun studios. (Presley recorded it in September 1954, though it wasn’t released for another dozen year.)
Meanwhile, Lonnie Johnson gained acclaim with a new crowd 10 years later during the folk music revival.
The Flood learned its version of “Jelly Roll Baker” from Tom Rush’s debut Elektra album, released in 1965. Rush, who picked up the tune from fellow folkie Geoff Muldaur, recorded it with Bill Lee on bass and John Sebastian on harmonica.
Lonnie’s Last Years
Johnson life was cut short when he was hit by a car while walking on a sidewalk in Toronto in March 1969.
Seriously injured, he suffered a broken hip and kidney damage. A benefit concert was held on in May 1969, with two dozen acts, including Ian and Sylvia, John Lee Hooker and Hagood Hardy.
Never fully recovering from a subsequent stroke, Johnson died 13 months later.
Our Take on the Tune
As noted, while this sassy song as written and recorded 80 years ago as a rhythm and blues hit, we owe our version to our folk music heroes of the 1960s.
To this day, it’s one of those perfect warmup tunes for us, because it provides plenty of stretching-out room for solos by everyone in the house, Danny and Sam, Randy and Jack.
More Blues?
If you’re not ready to end today’s blues infusion, you can get a big dose of Floodishness with the Blues Channel on our free Radio Floodango music streaming service. Click here to tune in and enjoy the jelly roll.
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When The Flood first started doing this song some 40 years ago, Charlie’s sweet mother asked where such an odd little tune came from. We didn’t want to tell her the truth.
“Mom, it was a popular party song in the late 1920s.”
Well, that wasn’t a complete lie. It’s just that the “parties” where this song was born started very late at night and were in a part of town where nice girls generally didn’t go.
Stump’s Song
The song we’ve always called “Yas Yas Duck” is an old hokum jazz tune that has been recorded under a lot of different names for nearly a century now.
The first recording was made in St. Louis by the great piano pounder James “Stump” Johnson who released it in January 1929 as “The Duck Yas-Yas-Yas.” He recorded his song at least three times during his career, which ended with his death at 67 in 1969.
Also in 1929, new versions started cropping up. Flood heroes Tampa Red and Georgia Tom recorded a version on May 13, 1929. That’s where we learned it.
But a particularly popular rendition also was done by Oliver Cobb and his Rhythm Kings on Aug. 16, 1929, about a year before his untimely death.
In most versions, the song is perhaps best known for its opening lyrics:
Mama bought a rooster, Thought it was a duck. Brought it to the table with its legs straight up …
And, Uh, About That “Party”…
Wikipedia just tells it like it is (or was). “The song,” it reports, “is a ‘whorehouse tune,’ a popular St. Louis party song." (See there, mom? It says it right there! “Party song …”)
The title, Wikipedia goes on, is explained by the verse that goes, Shake your shoulders, shake 'em fast, if you can't shake your shoulders, shake your yas-yas-yas.
The Duck in the ‘60s
Folkies learned the song in 1961 when the legendary Dave Van Ronk released it as "Yas Yas Yas" on his Van Ronk Sings album (though Dave’s source was a variant recorded in the Bahamas by Blind Blake & his Royal Victoria Hotel Calypso Band, released as "Yes! Yes! Yes!" in 1951).
Meanwhile, in 1967 cartoonist R. Crumb used the song in his comic strip album Zap Comix, No. 0, quoting it in the first panel of a story called "Ducks Yas Yas."
Crumb also later recorded the tune with his band, The Good Tone Banjo Boys, on a transparent red vinyl 78 rpm stereo record in 1972.
Our Take on the Tune
For us, “Yas Yas Duck” became a kind of connective tissue between today and our jug band roots of the 1970s and ’80s. That’s why we put it on our first commercial album back in 2001, and why it still gets trotted out regularly at rehearsals, just so newer folks coming to the band room can learn it. Recently, it was Jack Nuckols’ turn.
As you can hear here, Jack’s drumming has brought us a whole new class of cool. Whether it’s his tasty solos, or rocking along with Randy’s bass under Charlie’s vocals, or making his wise and witty contributions to the ensemble supporting Danny and Sam’s solos, Jack’s rhythms have us all wanting to get up and dance.
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Bob Dylan was 20 years old, lovesick and lonely in 1962. His beautiful girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, had prolonged her stay in Italy indefinitely, and Bobby wouldn’t see her again for almost another year.
Consequently, Suze figured prominently in a number of early Dylan verses, including some of his best love/angst songs of the period, including "Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” "One Too Many Mornings" and "Boots of Spanish Leather.”
Above all, the Suze song was Bob’s classic and most covered creation of the period: “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.”
When Dylan first performed the song publicly — 61 years ago this week at New York’s Gaslight Cafe — Suze was already gone. For four months already, she had been away taking art classes at Italy’s University of Perugia.
Bob’s bitterness over her long absence is evident throughout the song’s lyrics. In fact, Dylan later told critic Nat Hentoff that the song wasn’t a love song at all, but rather “a statement that maybe you can say to make yourself feel better ... as if you were talking to yourself.”
Enter Paul Clayton
The melody of the song was greatly influenced by the tune of a public domain traditional song called "Who's Gonna Buy Your Chickens When I'm Gone,” which Bob learned from fellow folkie Paul Clayton. (Clayton himself had recorded it two years earlier, though he tweaked it to be "Who's Gonna Buy You Ribbons When I'm Gone?”)
Now, legend has it that Clayton had an unrequited crush on the young Dylan, but those tender feeling didn’t stop him (or at least didn’t stop his music publisher) from suing Bob for plagiarism.
In addition to a similar melody, Dylan’s song also borrowed a few lines — some word-for-word, others slightly altered — from the Clayton recording, notably, the opening words: “It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why.” Most of the subsequent verses also open with “It ain’t no use to….”
As Phillippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon note in their authoritative Bob Dylan: All the Songs, Paul’s lawsuit resulted in “a generous compensation for Clayton shortly before the two folksingers, reconciled, toured together in February 1964.”
(Incidentally, another of Clayton’s original lines — "So I'm walkin' down that long, lonesome road, babe, where I'm bound, I can't tell” — Dylan subbed out in subsequent recordings with "So long, honey babe, where I'm bound, I can't tell.”)
Spreading the Word
In 1963, Columbia Records released “Don’t Think Twice,” first on the Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album, then as the B side of the single of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” However, neither of those efforts really resonated with the record-buying public.
But then that same year, Peter, Paul and Mary came into Bob’s life. Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman, also managed PP&M, and Grossman started offering his songs to them and to other artists as they headed into recording studios.
"Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" was one of three Dylan songs Peter, Paul and Mary picked up for their third album, In the Wind (the other two being “Blowin’ in the Wind” and "Quit Your Lowdown Ways").
Released as a single, the trio’s recording of “Don’t Think Twice” reached No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 and and No. 2 on its Easy Listening charts. That disc not only popularized the song but also introduced many listeners around the world to a new name: “Bob Dylan.”
Our Take on the Tune
This Dylan classic has been in the Floodisphere forever — Roger and Charlie used to sing it together a half century ago — but only recently has it made a move to be in the regular repertoire.
That’s when Randy stepped to sing his signature harmonies and Danny and Sam started doing double duty on the solos.
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Midway through his seven-year stint with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, the brilliant arranger/composer Sy Oliver wrote this tune, which became a huge late World War II-era hit for the band.
The chart-topping sensation — which Sy called simply “Opus No. 1” — went on to be radio hits for many other performers as well, from Gene Krupa and Harry James to the Mills Brothers and the Four Freshmen.
Sid Garris and Those Sassy Lyrics
Largely responsible for the song’s success was Sid Garris’s work in creating those playful words.
His lyrics lays out the songwriter’s perennial dilemma: trying to think of a name for a catchy melody he has created, hoping to hook a famous crooner into performing it.
I’m racking my brains to think of a name To give to this tune so Perry can croon And maybe old Bing will give it a fling And that’ll start everyone humming the thing …
Meet Sid
Born in New York City in 1921, Garris was a violinist by training, performing with the Philadelphia Orchestra and later with the Dayton, Ohio, Philharmonic, and while he created some of the cheekiest lyrics of the late swing era, his music career ultimately didn’t involve performing.
The late 1940s and early 1950s found Garris working as a jazz disc jockey in Ohio (Dayton and Cleveland), where he was known as "Symphony Sid."
Then in 1953 he relocated to the West Coast where he became a much-sought-after entertainment executive, managing The Four Freshmen, Ray Anthony and Stan Kenton and, then in the 1960s, The New Christy Minstrels, Anthony Quinn, Robert Culp and Jose Feliciano.
Anita O’Day Rocks It
But back to that song, Sy Oliver’s employer, Tommy Dorsey, was the first to put “Opus One” on disc, recording it as an instrumental on Nov. 14, 1944, but the signature vocal version was Anita O’Day’s rendition recorded the following August.
That was an all-star session. Gene Krupa led the big band from behind his drums. Trumpeter Roy Eldridge accented Anita’s vocals as the guest soloist. Quincy Jones made the arrangement.
Sy Oliver After ‘Opus One’
A year after “Opus One” was a hit for Anita and Q, Roy and Gene, Sy Oliver left the Dorsey band to begin work as a freelance arranger and as music director for Decca Records.
In June 1950, Sy Oliver and his Orchestra recorded the first American version of "C'est si Bon" and "La Vie en Rose" for Louis Armstrong. Then a decade later, some of his career’s most successful arrangements were for the 1961 Frank Sinatra album, I Remember Tommy, a combined tribute to their former boss, Dorsey.
In 1974, Sy began nightly shows with a small band at New York’s Rainbow Room, a gig that continued for the next 10 years before he retired in 1984.
Meanwhile, his great song — that magical first opus — lives on and on.
Our Take on the Tune
It was the end of a fun evening at the Bowen house, but nobody was quite ready to quit yet.
Jack started padding a sweet swing rhythm on the house bongos and Randy jumped in with a bass line that fits it to a T. Charlie got the chords going, just as Danny flew in with that cool melody over Sam’s smooth harmonica fills.
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Ashland, Ky., native Clyde McCoy and his orchestra recorded this song for Columbia in 1933 and then for the next half century he continued to perform it in front of crowds all over the country.
In fact, “Tear It Down” was one the trumpeter’s two most requested numbers, second only to his signature song, Clarence Williams’ “Sugar Blues.”
When Clyde moved from Columbia to the new Decca label in 1935, he re-recorded “Tear It Down” as the A side of his band’s first release for that company. While millions of copies of the record sold over the years, few listeners ever knew that Clyde’s happy, silly swing number was rooted in a dark and desperate neighborhood downriver in Cincinnati. We’ll tell that story in a minute.
The Clyde McCoy Story
Rivers were a big part of Clyde McCoy’s life. When he was 9, he moved with his family from Ashland to Portsmouth, Ohio.
There, when he was just 14, Clyde found jobs playing on the riverboats, which in those days still worked the waters of the rural Midwest, southern and border states. He performed on the sidewheelers Island Queen and Bernard McSwain.
One of the youngest musicians on the river, he already was a stand-out trumpet player.
In 1920 McCoy assembled his first band for a two-week engagement at a popular Knoxville, TN, resort. It was quite a trick; though the guys had never performed together, they proved quite popular and their contract was extended to two months.
Then for the next decade, the band mates worked from New York to Los Angeles, honing their chops. It was during this period that McCoy also started using a mute on his trumpet, creating the "wah-wah" effect that became his signature sound, a distinctive musical identification.
Lightning finally struck when Clyde and the boys landed at Chicago’s plush Drake Hotel. When they played their rendition of "Sugar Blues," the crowd went wild. The song hit the radio. A Columbia Records recording contract followed, and the band was on its way. That first record — with “Sugar Blues” on one side and “Tear It Down” on the other — sold millions of copies by early the next year, no small feat in the depths of the depression.
Its success fueled a remarkable 68-year career for the Kentuckian. At Clyde's retirement in 1985, total international sales of that original recording were more than 14 million. Meanwhile, McCoy's "Wah-Wah Mute" was so popular that he licensed the King Instrument Co. to market the device to trumpeters around the world.
The Wah-Wah Pedal
Clyde’s wah-wah-ishness even traveled beyond the trumpet world to guitarists. In 1967, the Vox Clyde McCoy Wah-Wah Pedal, a significant guitar effect of its time, was invented by engineer Brad Plunkett of the Thomas Organ Co.
Original versions featured an image of McCoy on the bottom panel. This branding later gave way to just his signature before the name of the pedal was changed to “Cry Baby.”
But What About the Song?
So, Clyde and his orchestra recorded “Tear It Down” in 1933, but the song seems to have originated at least four years earlier downriver from McCoy’s old Portsmouth, Ohio, home.
Now our story needs to jump to the red light district of Cincinnati where a pair of young brothers named Bob and Walter Coleman were fixtures in the dives on George Street.
With Bob on guitar and Walter on harmonica, the two often teamed up with a Paducah, Ky., multiple instrumentalist named Sam Jones (often called “Stovepipe #1”).
In May 1928, Bob Coleman, under the name "Kid Cole," traveled with Jones to Chicago to record four sides for Vocalion Records. When he returned to Chicago in January 1929, Coleman brought with him both Jones and his brother, Walter, to record four more sides for Paramount, two credited to “The Cincinnati Jug Band” and the remainder to Bob Coleman alone.
It was in that session that Coleman recorded what seems to have been his own composition, “Tear It Down.” That side — along with the group’s "Newport Blues," "George Street Stomp" and "Cincinnati Underworld"— are among the rarest of all jug band recordings and these days remain prized among collectors.
Following Coleman’s 1929 release, “Tear It Down” became one of the favorite tunes for jug bands. Jack Kelly and the Memphis Jug Band did it in 1930, as did Whistler’s Jug Band (though they called it “Foldin’ Bed”).
Meanwhile, Sam Jones moved to Atlanta, taking the tune with him. When he teamed with guitarist David Crockett, he recorded it for Okeh Records as King David’s Jug Band.
And today the song still has game. Back in January 2001, for instance, when the guys of Old Crow Medicine Show made their four-minute debut on the Grand Ole Opry at the Ryman Auditorium, they played "Tear It Down" and received a rare first-time-out standing ovation and a call for an encore.
Our Take on the Tune
Jack Nuckols, an old high school buddy of Charlie Bowen’s, has played lots of instruments — fiddle, guitar, dulcimer, Autoharp — and as a percussionist he used to jam with The Flood back in the Bowen Bash days.
Last week when Jack dropped in to visit with the band, we immediately drew him into the circle. First, we passed him the house bongos to play, but then when a jug band tune came around, we put spoons in his hands.
Jack was rocking it hard, we were digging on those rhythmic riffs and, just as we were fixing to turn it over to him for a solo, darned if those spoons didn’t break in his hands. Now, Jack was apologetic, but — as you’ll hear — we all thought it was a hoot! What better way to end a song called, “Tear It Down”?
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The story of Charles Joseph “Buddy” Bolden — also known as King Bolden — is the story of jazz itself at its very beginnings. A trumpet player in New Orleans in the first years of the 20th Century, Bolden influenced several generations of jazz players.
No recordings of Bolden exist, but the great Jelly Roll Morton called him “the most powerful trumpet player I’ve ever heard.” This tune was Bolden’s only known piece of original music, a song that he called “Funky Butt.”
Jelly Roll later recorded it with the opening line, “I thought I heard Buddy Bolden say,” and that is why it has come down to us with Morton’s title: “Buddy Bolden’s Blues.” Jelly Roll was the only person recording the tune who actually heard Buddy play it.
About Buddy
Bolden and his band were at their peak in New Orleans from around 1900 to 1907. He was known for his loud sound and his imaginative improvisational skills, a style that had a profound impact on younger musicians who crowded around to hear him.
Buddy is credited with (1) creating a looser, more improvised version of ragtime and (2) adding to it blues played by brass instruments. He also was said to have adapted ideas from gospel music that he heard in uptown African-American Baptist churches around the Crescent City.
The Butt that was Funky
Bolden’s best-known number, "Funky Butt," is perhaps the earliest reference to funk in popular music. So, let’s address that name.
Several theories exist… and, ahem, some of them are even printable. Jazz guitarist/banjoist Danny Barker, for instance, said “funky butt” was a reference to the olfactory effect of an auditorium packed with sweaty people "dancing close together and belly rubbing."
Dance definitely seems central to the story. Others say the name refers to a specific dance in which women lifted their skirts, revealing their petticoats, then moved their hips suggestively. Particularly popular among burlesque dancers of the day, “The Funky Butt” is believed to have begun in the 1890s, which is about the time little Buddy Bolden was growing (and probably looking) up.
The Club that was the Butt
Incidentally, a popular jazz club in pre-Katrina New Orleans was called “Funky Butt,” in honor of Bolden.
The venue, located on North Rampart Street at Congo Square, featured a lounge, patio, balcony, restaurant and music club called The Danny Barker Music Room. It was famous for a sassy drink known as “Sweet Brown Juicy Booty.”
Unfortunately, the August 2005 hurricane that devastated New Orleans destroyed the club. The following year, an attempt was made to reopen, but it failed to get a musical license (during this period the inside of the building was stripped).
Our Take On the Tune
Multiple variations of Buddy Bolden’s song have circulated over the years. The Flood learned its version from a 1961 Folkways recording by bluesmen Rolf Cahn and Eric von Schmidt (the same wonderful old disc that inspired two other Flood standards, our takes on “Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor” and “Lazarus,” featured in earlier podcasts).
“Buddy Bolden’s Blues,” which has drifted in and out of our repertoire over the years, drifted back in earlier this month on a sultry summer night that had a decidedly New Orleans tang to it.
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The melody had three daddies — in 1944 bandleaders Duke Ellington and Harry James collaborated with alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges to develop the tune — but it was those sassy lyrics that made the song:
I never cared much for moonlit skies, I never winked back at fireflies, But now that the stars are in your eyes, I’m Beginning to See the Light!
Those words came from the smart pen of the great Don George. In his book, The Poets of Tin Pan Alley, Philip Furia praised George’s witty use of a list of “light” images and his ability to deal with a difficult song.
“Ellington’s tune was particularly hard to set,” Furia noted, “since each A section consists of the same, driving vamp-like phrase repeated three times over before the melody finally changes.”
In his way, George heightens this musical insistence, using the same rhyme for the first three lines of each section, then “George ends by rekindling one of the oldest songwriting cliches, mixing his metaphors of light and heat:”
But now that your lips are burning mine, I’m beginning to see the light.
Beyond the Light
While Don George surely is best known as one of Ellington’s prime lyricists, his career spanned another 40 years following the Duke era and included such pop hits as "The Yellow Rose of Texas” for the iconic Mitch Miller.
George also worked on special material for many performers, from Nat King Cole and Patti Page to The Pointer Sisters.
His lyrics are a study guide for wordsmiths of all stripes. For instance, in David Jenness' and Don Velsey's discussion of composer Moose Charlap, they note that one of the cleverest apologies ever comes from a 1956 George lyric for a famous Charlap melody:
The girl in my arms meant nothing to me, I Was Telling Her About You.
On the Charts
But let’s get back to “Beginning to See the Light.” A year after its composition, the song spent several weeks on “Your Hit Parade” and charted three times in 1945, with co-writer Harry James’ version leading the pack.
Ellington vocalist Joya Sherrill, who was only 17, had just joined the band when they recorded the tune in an arrangement that featured co-author Johnny Hodges on sax and Lawrence Brown on trombone.
Jazz instrumentals of song have been recorded by bassist Oscar Pettiford, pianist Art Tatum, drummer Chico Hamilton and vibist Red Norvo. Vocalists Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee and Frank Sinatra all have made memorable renditions.
More recently, Ann Hampton Callaway included it in her 1996 tribute to Fitzgerald, guitarist Martin Taylor and the David Grisman Quartet recorded it in 1999, and in 2004 — 60 years after the song’s creation — it was revived by the late, great Al Jarreau.
Our Take on the Tune
Our latest Duke Ellington number, this is a sweet vehicle for sassy solos by everyone in the band.
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We have great memories of attending folk festivals over the years. One of the fondest is the time we heard the original Red Clay Ramblers back in 1977. That was just a few years after that great old band formed, and it drove up to play a festival in Grayson County, Ky.
We in the fledgling Flood had bought The Ramblers’ new album, and we were simply blown away by its second track. How astounding it was to discover that one of the best new songs about West Virginia was recorded by a North Carolina band. What??!
Only when we dug a little deeper did we find out why that song was so good. "Twisted Laurel" — the title track of The Ramblers' 1976 disc — was written by none other than Tommy Thompson, who was born and raised just a few miles away from us in St. Albans, WV.
Today we still remember that summer night in Grayson, sitting on the ground in the front of the stage and hanging on every single note Tommy sang. Ever since then, "Twisted Laurel" has been deep in The Flood’s own musical DNA.
Celebrating Tommy
Native son Tommy Thompson is lovingly remembered in The Mountain State. In fact, he was posthumously inducted into the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame in October 2011.
As the announcement at the time noted, “After a stint as a Coast Guard officer in New Orleans where he heard many of the great old-time jazz players and was introduced to Cajun music, Thompson entered the graduate program in philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1963. He divided his time between five-string banjo and academia.”
By 1966, Tommy was deep into old-time tunes with the Hollow Rock String Band.
When that group dissolved five years later, Thompson continued performing locally and at folk festivals, including the prestigious gathering at Union Grove, NC, where in 1971 he took first prize in the World Champion Old-Time Banjo contest.
That same year, back in Chapel Hill, Tommy joined fiddler Bill Hicks and multi-instrumentalist Jim Watson to form The Red Clay Ramblers, which he would anchor for the next 22 years. In those decades, the band did a lot more than play at little festivals like our Grayson, Ky., gathering. The group toured North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, doing four separate U.S. State Department tours.
In 1974, The Ramblers began its long involvement with American musical theater, writing and performing in a number of off-Broadway plays. The group’s music also was featured on Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion,” in Sam Shepard’s work, and on TV shows such as Northern Exposure and Ryan’s Hope.
Originally, The Ramblers stuck with the tunes they learned from 78s by pioneers like The Skillet Lickers and Charlie Poole. However, they quickly tired of this and developed a style that Thompson once called "new-timey music; a bridge that connects the past and present."
Their approach was simple. "We like to make a big noise,” as Thompson put it. “We're entertainers, not preachers or poets. We get people hopping, laughing and feeling good."
The year 1985 found the band in New York, performing incidental music for Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind. They later collaborated with the playwright on two of his films, Far North (1989) and Silent Tongue (1993).
But by the time the latter was released, it was clear that Tommy was experiencing serious health problems. Diagnosed with the early stages of dementia, he was forced to retire from performing in 1994. Twenty years ago this year, at age 66, he passed away.
Our Take on the Tune
Well, this has been Bowen’s Banjo Summer. At the beginning of June, on an impulse, Charlie got a five-string from Paul Callicoat at Route 60 Music and started studying the videos and audios of Dr. Josh Turknett of Brainjo Academy.
He’s still learning — probably always will be (an old song says, “I can be the doctor ‘til the doctor comes” and that also applies to banjo pickers) — but after three months he was ready this week to try this bit of banjocity with The Flood at its weekly rehearsal.
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A hundred years ago, much of America was having a wild and crazy party.
Forgot about the labor wars. Forgot about the spread of Jim Crow and the KKK marching in Washington. Forgot about the doors banging shut on immigrants.
Don’t be a party pooper, jake. The war was over. The plague of the “Spanish Flu” was declining. The stock market was soaring. Oh sure, alcohol was still prohibited, but… shhhhh, wink, wink, nod, nod … we know a place …
It was The Roarin’ Twenties. Flappers. Raccoon coats. Cars. Radios. Records. Jazz!
And Here Comes Jack
What a great time to be a songwriter. Into that happy, boozy blur of an age walked young Jack Yellen. Born to a Jewish family in Raczki, Poland, Jack was 5 when his family bought him to America. Reared in Buffalo, NY, he began writing songs in high school.
Later, after graduating from the University of Michigan in 1913, Yellen worked as a reporter for The Buffalo Courier, but he continued writing songs on the side. Before long, it was journalism that was on the side as his music moved front and center.
Actually, Jack got a jump on the jazz. Hits came quickly for Jack, who seemed to have a feel for the Twenties even before the Twenties arrived.
Collaborating with George L. Cobb on Tin Pan Alley, Yellen wrote a string of “Dixie” songs, such as “Alabama Jubilee” and “Are You from Dixie?” both in 1915.
His real royalty gold, though, was struck when he teamed up with Milton Ager. They entered the music publishing business as part owners of the Ager-Yellen-Bornstein Music Co., for which Jack penned some of the signature songs of the era.
“Big Bad Bill (Is Sweet William Now),” “Hard-Hearted Hannah, the Vamp of Savannah,” “Ain’t She Sweet?,” “Happy Feet,” and “Happy Days Are Here Again” all were Jack Yellen originals.
Washington at Valley Forge…
And right in middle of that rush of riches came our our all-time favorite of Jack’s creation, “Crazy Words, Crazy Tune. (Vo Do De O).”
Yellen and Ager wrote it in 1926. The earliest known versions of the song were recorded on Oct. 29, 1926, by Irving Aaronson and the Commanders, and on Feb. 3, 1927, by The Varsity Eight, a pseudonym for The California Ramblers, which included legend-to-be Tommy Dorsey on trombone.
The song launched onto the goofy lyrics stage 30 years before its hey day in the 1950s. (I’ll see you ‘Vo Do De O’ and raise you a ‘Be-bop-a-lula,’ a ‘Shama lama ding dong’ and a ‘wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom’”)
Soon “Crazy Words, Crazy Tune” became a core song for hokum and jug bands around the world. In fact, we learned it from Jim Kweskin's jug rendition in 1963.
Our Take on the Tune
The Flood always has a few novelty tunes in its back pocket, either to liven up a show or maybe to just give ourselves a laugh at the weekly rehearsal.
And this one is, of course, is how we get all that big grant money, because it’s about history. Well, sort of. There is some question of whether George Washington ever played ukulele, but we’re pretty sure he knew a red-hot mama or two ….
Flood Lore
Incidentally, the song also plays a small role in a Flood Lore. Back in October 2014, the band was part of Marshall University’s wonderful stage production of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” doing a 30-minute pre-show set at each performance of the play’s run in the beautiful Joan C. Edwards Theater.
Click the button below for a story that grew out of that fun week of shows:
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Of all the tunes we do, none is more evocative than “Autumn Leaves.”
Joseph Kosma’s post World War II composition quickly became a jazz standard in America from the 1950s right up to today.
“Autumn Leaves” actually is the tale of two torch songs,” music journalist Bill DeMain notes. “The original, written in French as “Les Feuilles Mortes” (meaning, “Dead Leaves”), was a dark lament of lost love and regret.
“The translated version,” DeMain says, “ touched on the same theme, but in a gentler, more wistful way.”
Poetic Birth
It started as a poem written in 1945 by screenwriter and Left Bank intellectual Jacques Prévert as part of the script for a ballet called Le Rendezvous.
Two years later, when director Marcel Carné made a film of the ballet, Kosma entered our story, setting the Prévert verse to music.
“Maybe because the words weren’t conceived in song form,” says DeMain, “it took on a slightly unwieldy structure. Kosma interpreted it as 24 bars of introductory verse containing two distinct moods and melodies, followed by a 16-bar refrain (half the length of a traditional Tin Pan Alley song).”
Carné’s film was a flop, but the song had a life of its own. The movie’s lead actor, a popular young singer named Yves Montand, made it his.
But it was French chanteuse Juliette Greco — the perpetually black-clad “Little Miss Existentialist”— made perhaps the most memorable French version.
In 1950, when the song was translated into English with Johnny Mercer lyrics, only a small part of the original opening verse survived (and is rarely sung today).
“Mostly,” notes DeMain, “it became about featuring the catchy, spiraling 16-bar refrain. … In effect, this was a completely different song from the rambling elegy Prévert and Kosma had created. While the original was about an all-consuming passion, this was more about a fleeting attachment. More nostalgic than angst-ridden, more bittersweet than bitter.”
Coming to America
Five years later, Nat “King” Cole took it to No. 1 on the hit parade, making it a nightclub standard for everyone from Frank Sinatra to Tony Bennett and Eartha Kitt.
In 2012, jazz historian Philippe Baudoin called the song "the most important non-American standard."
"It has been recorded about 1,400 times by mainstream and modern jazz musicians alone,” Baudoin said, “and is the eighth most-recorded tune by jazzmen.”
Notable versions have been recorded by Miles Davis, Stan Getz, Chet Baker and Erroll Garner, by Ahmad Jamal, Duke Ellington and Cannonball Adderly, by John Coltrane, Chick Corea and Stanley Jordan.
Our Take on the Tune
This song has those marvelous Mercer lyrics, as Floodster Emerita Michelle Hoge demonstrates whenever she’s in the room. But when she’s not here to sing it, the song also is an extraordinary vehicle as an instrumental.
Here from last week’s rehearsal, Danny Cox lays down that lovely melody, then his old friend and our guest for the evening — Bob Murnahan, in town for a visit from his Colorado home — takes a couple of choruses to mine gold in all those cool chords.
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We tend to think of Duke Ellington and his orchestra as the epitome of cool, sophisticated jazz. “Mood Indigo.” “Caravan.” “Black And Tan Fantasy.” “Sophisticated Lady.”
But Duke and the guys also could get down and party, especially when the festivities were organized by his lead trumpeter, Cootie Williams.
Williams, a Mobile, Alabama, native, was just 18 when he joined Ellington’s orchestra in 1929, rising to prominence when the group played in New York’s famed Cotton Club.
Despite his youth, Williams reached Ellington’s aggregation with some pretty heady credentials. He already had played professionally for four years. He started with saxophonist Lester Young in The Young Family Band, working out of New Orleans and playing the black vaudeville and carnival circuits in the region.
A year before joining Duke, Williams made his first recordings in 1928 with legendary pianist James P. Johnson in New York, where he also worked briefly in the bands of Chick Webb and Fletcher Henderson.
The Ellington Years
But it was his 11 years with The Duke Ellington Orchestra that made Cootie Williams internationally famous among jazz lovers.
At first, Cootie's role in the band required him to play the so-called “jungle effects,” in the manner of Ellington's earlier trumpeter Bubber Miley and trombonist Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton. However, Williams’ rich open horn sound and his distinctive plunger-muted playing quickly became an important part of the bigger palette with which Ellington worked.
By the time of his last year with the band, 1940, Cootie was one of the most distinctive musicians in a group of highly individualistic players.
Duke wrote “Concerto for Cootie,'' which became — after Bob (“Don’t Get Around Much Anymore”) Russell added lyrics — “Do Nothing ’til You Hear from Me.”
Williams was also featured on numerous other major Ellington works, ranging from “Echoes of Harlem” and “Harlem Air Shaft” to the religious piece ''The Shepherd Who Watches Over the Night Flock.”
Sing It, Cootie!
Beyond being a celebrated trumpeter, Cootie Williams also had mad skills as a vocalist and band leader in his own right. This he began to demonstrate in the late 1930s when he routinely headed up one of the small groups drawn from the Ellington ranks.
“Cootie Williams and His Rug Cutters” — featuring reed men Barney Bigard, Johnny Hodges and Harry Carney — recorded more than a dozen tunes between 1937 and 1940.
Notable among these releases was Williams’ performance of Dave Heywood’s novelty composition “Ain’t the Gravy Good” in 1938. The song tells a sad story of a meal in which all the dishes in the main course go badly awry — “Your biscuits ain't hot, your cobbler ain't sweet” — but, lord, ain't the gravy good? Saucy!
Our Take on the Tune
Twenty years ago this summer, we were in the midst of planning our third studio album, I'd Rather Be Flooded, when our friend and producer, the late George Walker, showed up with that exact Cootie Williams recording.
George thought the tune would be a good fit for us, and we immediately agreed. In fact, we fell in love with it and worked it up in time for the recording session.
Ever since, whenever this song comes to mind — as it did at a recent Flood rehearsal — our thoughts race back to our good times with you, George. We miss you, buddy.
These days that entire 2003 album is online and can be listened to for free on our Radio Floodango music streaming service. Click here to check it out.
And for more back stories on the songs we sing and play, check out the “Song Stories” section of Flood Watch by clicking here.
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Americans know “Pretty Polly” as the short, tragic story of a young woman who is lured into the forest and murdered by her brutal lover, who then buries her in a shallow grave and runs away.
Actually, though, the oldest versions of this song — which has its origins almost 300 years ago in Great Britain — needed up to 36 verses to tell its grim story.
In the original English ballad — called “The Gosport Tragedy” or “The Cruel Ship’s Carpenter” — the murderer is a sailor who promised to marry the girl he seduced, but then changes his mind when he learns she is pregnant.
After he dumps her savaged remains in a forest grave, the killer returns to sea where he is haunted by his dead lover. In some versions, the sailor is murdered by her angry spirit; in others, he is driven to madness and/or to suicide.
And as is often the case with ballads, the story probably is based on fact.
Back in 1979, Professor David Fowler of the University of Washington published research in The Southern Folklore Quarterly arguing that the events of the song actually took place in 1726 and involved a ship's carpenter by the name of John Billson, who died at sea.
First printed around 1727, the ballad tells the tale of Billson's murder of his pregnant girlfriend and of his fleeing aboard a ship called the MMS Bedford.
Coming to America
By the time the ballad migrated to North America (where British folklorist Cecil Sharp collected versions in the early 20th century), the song had been whittled down to half dozen verses, all without losing any of its emotional impact.
In the United States in the mid-1920s, the song had gained new life as a banjo tune by the time of its earliest recordings, including Eastern Kentuckian John Hammond's "Purty Polly" of 1925 and the "Pretty Polly" versions of B.F. Shelton and Dock Boggs, both in 1927.
Curiously, Shelton and Boggs’ versions both begin in the first person ("I courted Pretty Polly..."), then switch to the third person for the murder ("he stabbed her to the heart….”)
Later, when a couple of first ladies of the 1960s folk revival recorded the song — Jean Ritchie in 1963, Judy Collins in 1968 — their versions featured alternating verses, switching back and forth between Polly and Willie's perspectives.
Our Take on the Tune
Our version of the song follows the well-established narrative of Polly and Willie’s fatal night, but we take a lot of liberties with the traditional melody. Our rendition, in fact, is built on a musical idea that dates back a half century to the pre-Flood days.
When Charlie Bowen and David Peyton were just starting out as a duo in the early 1970s, they found that a repeated scale descending from an opening minor chord resonated nicely on the guitar-Autoharp accompaniment to their voices.
Since those salad days, every configuration of Floodifaction has found something to contribute to that basic original arrangement. And it’s still happening. Just listen to what Sam St. Clair and Danny Cox have brought to the song with their solos on this take from last week’s Flood rehearsal.
More Song Stories
By the way, some fans of this newsletter tell us they really enjoy these deep dives into the history of the songs we sing.
If you’d like more, click here to browse our growing archive.
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The only blue moon of 2023 appears later this month, so it’s high time we dusted off our latest rendition of the world’s best-loved anthem to this particular astronomical event.
“Blue Moon” came into being around 1934 after famed composers Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart were brought from New York to Hollywood by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and commissioned to produce songs for a film called Hollywood Party, which was to star many of the studio's top artists.
“One of our ideas,” Rodgers later recalled, “was to include a scene in which Jean Harlow is shown as an innocent young girl saying — or rather singing — her prayers.”
But the Hollywood experience was a disaster for Rodgers and Hart, who hated the movie biz. And Hollywood didn’t especially love them back, so the song was not recorded at that time. (And the movie was released, in fact, without Harlow.)
Two years later, completely frustrated with film work, Rodgers and Hart were back in New York doing the work they were meant to do: Making magic on Broadway.
But Who Wrote that Song?
“Blue Moon” — the most famous song to arise during the songwriting team’s dreadful Hollywood years — has lately taken a controversial turn: A few years ago an award-winning documentary filmmaker publicly claimed that Rodgers and Hart didn’t even write the song.
On the contrary, said Liz Roman Gallese, “Blue Moon” actually was composed in Troy, NY, on the east bank of the Hudson River by a 17-year-old son of Polish immigrants.
“I know,” Gallese said in a New York Times article, “because I am his daughter, and because I have always known this story. It’s been a part of my family for all of my growing-up years, the source of whispers about ‘that Blue Moon thing’ among the adults.”
Gallese says her father, Edward W. Roman, wrote the song in 1931 and later sold it for $900 in order to buy a car, or maybe he had “settled” with the rich and famous Rodgers and Hart for that amount. (If you’d like to read more about Gallese’s curious contentions — it’s quite a story! — click here to reach her website.)
Monster Hit
Well, whoever wrote it, “Blue Moon” has had a remarkable run in popular culture, with many revivals over the decades.
In 1949 alone, for instance, it was a hit for two separate performers, singer Mel Tormé and band leader Billy Eckstine.
Five years later, "Blue Moon” was the first crossover in rock ’n’ roll, when a young Elvis Presley released his recording, produced by Sam Phillips. It was to be included on Presley’s debut album for RCA.
Over the years, "Blue Moon" has been covered by a great many artists, from Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald to Sam Cooke and The Supremes, from Bobby Vinton and Cyndi Lauper to Bob Dylan and The Cowboy Junkies.
Doo-wop Dave
Baby boomers, of course, remember the doo-wop version in 1961 by The Marcels, with its famous introduction to the song ("bomp-baba-bomp" and "dip-da-dip-da-dip”).
Incidentally, in Flood lore, we still remember how the late David Peyton surprised and tickled his band mates with his impromptu channeling of that old Marcels vibe during our 2006 appearance on Joe Dobbs’ “Music from the Mountains” radio show. Click the button below to hear that moment:
Our Take on the Tune
Like many 1930s-’40s tunes in our repertoire, “Blue Moon” started out as an instrumental showcase for Joe’s fiddling. But as soon as we fell under the spell of the marvellous Miss Michelle, “Blue Moon” was her song and we were just along for the ride.
When Michelle moved away a few years ago to begin a new chapter with her new husband Rich Hoge, we thought “Blue Moon” might have gone with her.
However, lately we’ve found the tune sits very well as a featured vocal by our bassist Randy Hamilton, with Charlie Bowen supporting with harmony and Danny Cox finding all kinds of interesting opportunities for guitar goodies in those cool old chords. Here’s a take from a recent rehearsal at the Bowen house.
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Our version of this traditional tune originated with Roger Samples and the quiet picking sessions he and Charlie Bowen had back in the mid-1970s.
They had been listening to David Bromberg’s then-new debut album, on which they both liked Bromberg’s arrangement of something that Philadelphia folkie called “Dehlia.” But of course, as usual, Samples had his own ideas for the song.
Crafting a new melody that he borrowed from assorted sources — versions had been recorded over the years by everyone from Blind Willie McTell and Blind Blake to Pete Seeger and Josh White, from Harry Belafonte and Burl Ives to Johnny Cash and Bobby Bare — Roger then turned the lead vocal over to Charlie so he could sing the harmony himself on the choruses.
Their resulting rendition of “Delia’s Gone” made the rounds at the Bowen Bashes and put in regular appearances at occasional Flood gigs. But eventually, the song was retired.
And it remained so for the next several decades, until one night earlier this summer. That’s when the tune popped into Charlie’s head during a weekly rehearsal. Right from the start, Danny, Randy and Sam were giving new life to the old number. It looks like it’s back to stay.
Murder History
The story behind “Delia’s Gone” begins on Christmas Eve 1900, when Moses "Cooney" Houston shot and killed Delia Green in the Yamacraw neighborhood of Savannah, Georgia. And if that isn’t tragic enough, both were just 14 years old.
Legend has it the two had been fussing all evening during a Christmas Eve party at the home of Willie and Emma West, where Delia worked as a scrub girl.
Delia and Cooney had been going together for several months. Folks say that night the quarreling started when a very drunk Cooney began teasing Delia about their having sexual relations. Perhaps, some say, he was just trying to embarrass her in front of the Wests.
At some point, according to trial transcripts, Delia got angry at being characterized as Cooney’s wife, and she cursed him, calling him a “son of a b***h.” Sensing a situation that was getting out of hand, the Wests ordered Cooney to leave. That’s when Cooney pulled a pistol.
After shooting Delia, he fled, but Willie West chased after and caught him. He turned Cooney over to a police patrolman who later testified that the young assailant confessed.
Houston served 12 years in prison, paroled in 1913. Accounts of his later life are sketchy, but he is said to have died in New York City in 1927 after other brushes with the law.
Delia Green is buried in an unmarked grave in Savannah.
The Song
If it hadn’t been for a song, Cooney and Delia’s sad story surely would have been quickly forgotten.
However, as early as 1906, folklorist Howard Odum collected a fragment of the ballad in Newton, Ga., and published it in The Journal of American Folklore. This version — a three-verse fragment called “One More Rounder Gone” — implied that Delia was a prostitute. That insinuation was to move in and out of other renditions in the years to come.
After that, the ballad traveled from Georgia to the Bahamas, then back to the States during the folk boom of the 1950s and ‘60s, sung by generations of balladeers and recorded by musical icons like Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash.
In 1928, Newman Ivey White’s American Negro Folk Songs included a five-verse variant called “Delie,” collected four years earlier from Frank Goodell of Spartanburg, SC, who reported that he learned it sometime around 1904.
The first recording of the song was by Georgian Reese DuPree in the winter of 1924.
(If you’ve heard of DuPree, it’s probably because he’s widely recognized as the first African-American male to record a blues. Incidentally, he’s also generally credited with writing the song, “Shortnin’ Bread,” which he was singing in public as early as 1905.)
But back to Delia and Cooney. Early versions of the song like "One More Rounder Gone" and "Delia" were originally accompanied by the traditional "Frankie and Albert" tune.
But when the song made its way to the Bahamas, new lyrics were added, and the tune took on a decidedly Caribbean flavor. As early as 1935, Alan Lomax recorded a local version in the Bahamas by the renowned Nassau String Band.
Curiously, most subsequent versions of the song would use that form rather than one based on the song’s older, original American cousin.
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When we roll into Sal’s Speakeasy tomorrow night for The Flood’s monthly gig, we’ll bring with us a tune that has been rocking audiences for more than eight decades. And that, brothers and sisters, is the definition of a hit!
Bob Russell’s Big Break
Our tale begins with a young man named Bob Russell who was making his living in New York as an advertising copywriter, but who also nurtured a love for music and theater. He had dabbled in writing material for vaudeville and later wrote for movies, but his legacy was to be on the radio as a renowned lyricist.
His big break came 81 years ago when he wrote memorable lyrics for a stirring Duke Ellington melody.
Earlier, Duke had composed a number called "Never No Lament,” which his orchestra recorded in 1940. And what an orchestra it was! In fact, it was perhaps the best in the long Ellington history.
To jazz fans, it is known as the “Webster-Blanton” band (because it had Ben Webster on tenor sax and Jimmy Blanton on bass), but they weren’t the only stars on hand. The recording also was enriched by Johnny Hodges on alto, Barney Bigard on clarinet, Cootie Williams in trumpet and Harry Carney on bari. Whew!
A Song for Its Time
The instrumental was well received, but then Bob Russell came along with some dynamite lyrics that gave the melody a whole new life as "Don't Get Around Much Anymore."
In his lyrics, Russell meant to tell the story of a jilted lover who prefers to stay home rather than be haunted by memories of happier times spent at dances and nightspots. However, the timing of the song’s release gave many listeners a whole different — more poignant — perspective.
It was 1942 and America had just entered World War II. Couples across the country were separating as young people put on uniforms and shipped out. Against that backdrop, many listeners heard the song as the passionate promise of a lonely lover to put such good times on hold for the war’s duration.
It’s no wonder that within a year of Ellington releasing the song, no fewer than three versions were on the charts at the same time. Duke's original was joined by renditions from The Ink Spots and from Glen Gray.
(An amusing sidebar on this song concerns the first line of Russell’s lyrics. What Bob opened with was, “Missed the Saturday dance,” but that sometimes is misheard as “Mister Saturday dance” or “Mister Saturday night,” much to the amusement of musicians who still get these as requests.)
Hits Just Keep On Comin’
Russell could have rested on his laurels. From the mid-1940s to today, “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” has been recorded by everyone from Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole to Sam Cooke, The Coasters and B.B. King to Paul McCartney, Dr. John and Willie Nelson.
But Bob was just getting started. In the 1940s, he wrote more songs with Ellington, notably the hits “Do Nothin’ ’til You Hear from Me” and “I Didn’t Know About You.”
In the 1950s, he turned to writing music for films. The movies The Girl Most Likely, Blue Gardenia and Matter of WHO all included Russell title songs.
In the 1960s, teaming with the up-and-coming music superstar Quincy Jones, Bob was nominated for Academy Awards for two of their collaborations, their theme for For Love of Ivy and for “The Eyes of Love," from the film Banning.
Bob’s Final Hit
Russell’s last song was “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother,” co-written with Bobby Scott, to whom Russell was introduced at a California nightclub by the great lyricist Johnny Mercer.
It was at the end of Bob’s life — he was dying of lymphoma — and he and Scott met only three times, but they managed to collaborate on a song that became a worldwide hit for The Hollies in 1969 and for Neil Diamond the following year.
Just before his death in 1970, Russell was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 2004, he was posthumously awarded ASCAP’s lifetime achievement award.
Come Out for a Sal’s Saturday Night!
Bob Russell’s greatest song — his break-through “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” — is on tap when we head back to Ashland’s wonderful Sal’s Italian Eatery & Speakeasy this Saturday night.
Flood sweetheart Michelle Hoge — back from her world travels with husband Rich — is driving in from Cincinnati to join us on stage for the evening. If you know Michelle, you know that the joint is always jumping when The Chick Singer is in the room.
Our brother Sam St. Clair can’t make the scene this month, but The Flood’s reed section will be in the good hands of the man whom Sam calls his “over-study.”
Jim Rumbaugh, who recently won Ohio’s harmonica championship, has sat in with us many times over the years. In fact, Jim and Michelle were both on the bandstand back in December when The Flood played its debut Sal’s gig. (Here’s a video that Pamela Bowen shot during that memorable night.)
So, we sure hope you’ll get your glad rags on and come party with us Saturday night at Sal’s, 1624 Carter Ave. in beautiful downtown Ashland, Ky. We play from 6 to 9. Tables sometimes fill up early, so reservations are a very good idea. Call (606) 393-1312 and tell ‘em you want a table near the band.
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
Looking for songs to play in our nightly pre-show set as Alchemy Theater’s wonderful Bright Star musical enters its final weekend tonight, we hit on one of the oldest tunes in The Flood’s repertoire, a rollicking number that relates the deeds and misadventures of a rambling ne’er-do-well named Buster.
It was nearly 50 years ago when we first heard “Didn’t He Ramble?” Dave Peyton and Charlie Bowen learned it from the great local string band, The Kentucky Foothill Ramblers, whose leader, banjoist H. David Holbrook seemed to know the entire Charlie Poole songbook. Bowen and Peyton started doing their own version of the song, teaching it to Roger Samples and Joe Dobbs and giving “Didn’t He Ramble?” a decidedly jug band spin.
After that, whenever the band played the song — which was just about every time they got together — they called it their Charlie Poole song, just assuming the song originated with that North Carolina wunderkind.
The Real Story … Sorta
It was only decades later, as The Flood began fraternizing with those remarkable traditional jazz fans of the Coon Sanders Nighthawks Fan Reunion Bash that we learned the truth.
When Poole recorded it in 1929, the song already was more than 25 years old. In fact, it turns out that “Didn’t He Ramble?” has been around the block so many times, it doesn’t know where it came from. Louis Armstrong used to do it. So did Jelly Roll Morton. Rowdy college boys sang it in the 1920s and ‘30s, making up their own verses. It was a New Orleans jazz standard, but before that ragtime players had their own version of it.
Go back far enough, you’ll learn that the song was copyright in 1902 by brothers J. Rosamond and James Weldon Johnson and by Bob Cole, but they probably didn’t write the song’s most memorable lines.
We know that in 1888 a Texas work song was published with that distinctive chorus (Didn't he ramble? Didn't he ramble? / Oh, he rambled till the butcher cut him down!).
In their copyrighted version, Cole and the Johnsons adapted the chorus and then added a narrative, telling the story of Buster Beebe, whose adventures led him to a jail sentence and the loss of his money through gambling.
It didn’t take long for “Didn’t He Ramble?” to became a New Orleans classic. It maybe even surpassed “When the Saints Go Marching In” and “Muskrat Ramble” in popularity, notes The Syncopated Times, “since it is traditionally played on the way back from the cemetery following a New Orleans funeral, in contrast to the slower, sadder spirituals that are played on the way to a burial.”
The joyous tune, the newsletter notes, “suggests the deceased should have no regrets because he ‘rambled all around, in and out of town.’”
A Goat Connection
Some researchers have traced the song — or at least that distinctive chorus — back even further, to an English folk song called “The Derby Ram” about a mythic goat (whose wool reaches up to the sky, his teeth are like a regiment of men, and the space between his horns is as wide as a man can reach) that rambled until the fatal meet-up with the butcher.
The Syncopated Times quotes James Weldon Johnson as pointing out that early ragtime songs frequently were based on folk tune that had been “sung for years all through the South.”
Nowadays Bob Cole is less well-known than the Johnson brothers, but his partnership with the Johnson brothers was a productive one, resulting in more than 200 songs in the early years of the 20th century.
Our Take on the Tune
Bright Star — the musical in which we’ve been honored to be perform as the house band this summer — wraps up this weekend, and we’ll be performing the last of our nightly pre-shows starting this evening. For our little pre-show sets, we’ve sought out old songs like this that complement the play’s new original music.
The last three performances of Bright Star are tonight, Saturday and Sunday nights at Alchemy Theater, 68 Holley Avenue in Huntington’s beautiful hills. For details, visit the theater’s website at www.alchemytheatretroupe.org.
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The Flood is honored and thrilled to be invited by Mike Murdock and Nora Ankrom to be part of their Alchemy Theater’s new production of the musical, Bright Star. This evening is opening night!
The show runs for the next two weekends, July 7-9, 14-16 at Huntington’s new Geneva Kent Center for the Arts at 68 Holley Ave. Doors open at 7 p.m. each evening. In addition, there is one matinee performance at 2 p.m. on Sunday, July 9.
Besides joining the wonderful Mark Smith and John Kinley in the house band, we’ll also be playing a little pre-show Flood set before each performance. That starts at about 7 each night.
Because railroads play a big part in the play’s story line, we’ll offer a traditional train song or two in our set, like this Huddle Ledbetter classic. For the backstory on Lead Belly’s great old tune, see our earlier Flood Watch article:
All About “Bright Star”
Bright Star — which opened on Broadway in the winter of 2016 after being workshopped three years earlier by New York Stage and Film at the Powerhouse Theater at Vassar College — was written and composed by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell.
The story is set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina in 1945–46 with flashbacks to 1923. It opens with literary editor Alice Murphy meeting a soldier just home from World War II; something about the young man awakens Alice’s longing for the child she lost many years earlier.
Haunted by their unique connection, Alice sets out on a journey to understand her past. What she finds has the power to transform lives throughout the community.
At its debut, Bright Star received high praise from critics. Charles Isherwood of The New York Times, for instance, called it a “shining achievement.”
He added, “The complicated plot, divided between two love stories that turn out to have an unusual connection, threatens to get a little too diffuse and unravel like a ball of yarn rolling off a knitter’s lap. But the songs … provide a buoyancy that keeps the momentum from stalling.”
Spoiler Alert: The True Story
As Alchemy Theater’s posters for the show observe, Bright Star was inspired by a true story, and we’re prepared to tell you that story. However, you might not want to know these details before you see the show.
So — flash! — this is your spoiler alert: If you want the story to unfold on stage, stop reading right now. After you’ve seen the play for yourself, you can always come back here to read the rest of the story.
That story begins on an August evening in 1902 near the town of Irondale, Missouri, when a 67-year-old farmer named William Helms was walking along the railroad tracks gathering lumber for a barn he wanted to build.
Along the way, he watched the No. 4 engine of the Iron Mountain Railroad cross the Big River bridge on its run to St. Louis. Just then he heard a strange sound. Following it, Helms found a suitcase on a sandbar sticking out of the river. Inside he discovered a 5-day-old baby.
Having fallen 50 feet, the child was badly bruised with a pronounced dent in his head. Helms took the baby home to his wife, Sarah Jane, and together they nursed him back to health.
The suitcase also contained an extra set of clothing and some black thread, but nothing to identify the child. Although the Helms were up in years and had already raised a family, the couple decided to keep the infant.
They gave him a name that was as long as his tumble from that train: William Moses Gould Helms. (“William” after his new foster father, "Gould” for Jay Gould, the owner of the railroad, and "Moses," because the boy was found at the water's edge like the biblical baby.)
The story of the "Iron Mountain Baby" ran in St. Louis newspapers and spread across the country that summer and fall. Many came to see the baby and some offered to adopt him. At least one lady came, dressed in black, and claimed the child was hers.
From Newspapers to Folk Song
The story might have ended there, but in early 1903 a preacher named Rev. J.T. Barton wrote a ballad called "The Iron Mountain Baby,” setting it to a traditional tune ("The Blind Child's Prayer").
Barton’s song mistakes certain key details — like the number of the train, even the names of the principals — but it became very popular in its day:
I have a song I'd like to singIt's awful but it's trueAbout a baby, thrown from a trainBy a woman, I know not who.
Th' train was running at full speedT'was northbound number nine An' as it crossed th' river's bridgeShe cast it from the door.
A Mother unkind, a Father untrueAnd yet, I'm bound to sayIt must have grieved that Mother's heartTo cast her baby away.
The leaves in which this baby was foundWas fourteen inches longFive inches wide, six inches deepAn', O, so closely bound.
It was Bill Williams who found this babe He heard its helpless cryHe took it to his loving wife;She would not let it die.
She bathed and washed its little headAn' soon, it hushed its cryGod bless them both while they liveGod bless them when they die.We'll name him William Roscoe Because he has no nameThen, if he grows to be a manHe'll wear it just th' same.
This ends my song, my story I've toldI'll say, goodbye to allUntil we meet around the throneIn that bright world above all.
The Record
In the late 1940s, the story reached yet another new audience, this time when Missouri-based country music star Johnny Rion recorded Barton’s song.
And the real Iron Mountain baby was still alive to hear the song on the air, though it is said that William Helms never really enjoyed his peculiar fame.
More Re-Tellings
Nonetheless, his story simply wouldn’t die.
In 2007, Evault Boswell of Greenville, Texas, published a novel, The Iron Mountain Baby, which imagines a young William going to St. Louis to track down his real mother. There he finds intrigue and dishonesty in high places, and, of course, romance.
Meanwhile, Steve Martin and Edie Brickell visited the story even before they wrote Bright Star. It was the subject of "Sarah Jane and the Iron Mountain Baby," from their 2013 album, Love Has Come for You.
Baby Bill’s Life
After the death of his foster father, William Moses Gould Helms moved with his adoptive mother to Salem, Missouri.
He attended Southwest Missouri State Teachers College (his education paid for by the St. Louis Iron Mountain & Southern Railway). He became a printer and sometimes-newspaper editor. In the 1930s, William and his new wife, Sally, moved to Texas, where he lived until his death in 1953.
When the body was carried by rail back to Missouri for burial, it was only the second time that William ever rode a train.
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Okay, up front let’s just get this out of the way. We don’t know what “sugaree” is, or why you would want to shake it, or what’d happen if you did.
And apparently nobody else knows either.
Our Story Begins…
Let’s start our story in the mid-1960s, when folk music legend Elizabeth Cotten recorded her new album, Shake Sugaree.
“That’s more my grandchildren’s song,” Libba Cotten later told Mike Seeger about the title tune. “They made the verses and I played the music. The first verse my oldest grandson, he made that himself, and from that each child would say a word and add to it.”
Apparently it was Cotten herself who added that memorable — if enigmatic — chorus (Oh, lordy me / Didn't I shake sugaree? / Everything I got is done and pawned), though “to tell the truth,” she added, “I don’t know what got it started.
“That’s practically how all my songs, I pick up,” she said. “There’s somebody’ll say something or something done and then... something will come into your mind.”
Enter Fred Neil
A couple years later, singer/songwriter Fred Neil revisited the song, but in a radically different way.
While Cotten’s original was a jaunty tune, Fred framed her lyrics with his own slow and positively pensive melody, transforming it from something playful into a poignant meditation on loneliness and loss.
The arrangement was so different from Cotten’s, in fact, that Capitol Records felt justified in giving Neil co-credit for the composition.
Of course, that decision led to further confusion about the song. For instance, when Pat Boone (uh-huh, Pat Boone … !) recorded the song in 1969 on his Departure album, Fred Neil was listed as its only composer, with Cotten nowhere to be found in the credits.
But What Is Sugaree?
Apparently, nobody bothered to ask Elizabeth Cotten to define “sugaree.” They didn’t ask Fred Neil either. Nor Jerry Garcia when he and The Grateful Dead recorded a completely different song with the same name in 1972. (Maybe Pat Boone knows sugaree’s secret, but he ain’t saying.)
All this mystery has led data detectives on a great what-is-sugaree scavenger hunt on the Internet, producing some wildly weird theories.
An African-American dance featuring sugar spread on the floor? A variation on a native America word or perhaps an ancient tribe’s name? A Gullah term from Cotten’s native Carolinas? A corruption of the word shivaree (itself a corruption of the French charivari.)
Or Maybe the Question is WHO is Sugaree?
Wait. Let’s add to the puzzle. What if Sugaree is a person? That’s what one prominent early rock ‘n’ roll singer/songwriter thought.
A decade before Elizabeth Cotten and her grandchildren created their tune, Marty Robbins — yes, Marty (Out in the West Texas town of El Paso) Robbins — wrote a song called “Sugaree” that was released by The Jordanaires.
Its lyrics made it clear that for Marty and the boys “Sugaree” was a girl (I got a letter from my baby, Sugaree, wrote me today. / It was the first one that she wrote me, first one since she went away.)
And that bit of business prompts an intriguing theory.
Could be it be that the Marty Robbins song — which was recorded by several other groups besides The Jordanaires and got wide airplay in the late 1950s on radio and TV — was a favorite of Libba’s grandkids? (After all, it was a catchy number … and of course, “sugar” does have famously universal kid appeal.)
Maybe that the reason the kids worked it into the song that they were creating with Grandma. If that’s the case, it would mean that “sugaree” was simply a cool sound. Cotten and her kids might have just liked the ear tickle they got from the alliteration when they let “shake” shimmy up next to “sugaree.”
Our Take on the Tune
“Folk progress” is a term that Charles Seeger — folksinger Pete’s pop — came up with about a hundred years ago to describe the tendency of melodies and lyrics to change, a little or a lot, as they pass from person to person and generation to generation.
It’s a process that greatly pleases us in The Flood. From our earliest days, we’ve done everything we can to carry it on by putting our own stamp on every song we do.
This particular number grew out of a recent Flood jam at which a riff Charlie started noodling with on his new resonator guitar had him remembering that old Fred Neil take on the Libba Cotten song. In a flash, Dan and Sam were bringing their own magic to the moment. Here’s the result.
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Sixty years ago this summer, Ironton, Ohio, native son Bobby Bare started work on his debut album for RCA Victor. The LP’s title track — “500 Miles Away from Home” — would turn out to be one of the best-selling singles in the 88-year-old Bare’s long career.
Composition of the song is generally credited to folksinger Hedy West, who is said to have put it together from fragments of a melody she heard her uncle sing to her back in her native Georgia. One of Hedy’s influences was a traditional tune called “Railroaders’ Lament.”
In 1961 West copyrighted the song, which many of us first heard the following year as the second track on Peter, Paul and Mary’s wildly popular self-titled debut album for Warner Brothers.
Enter Bobby Bare
In 1953, an 18-year-old Bobby Bare left Ohio, getting a ride to California and playing music along the way to earn tips to help pay for the gas. In Los Angeles, Bobby struggled to break into country music or rock and roll as a performer and/or songwriter.
He had little luck with his recordings, finding more success playing in nightclubs, until he was drafted into the Army in 1959.
After his military service, Bare’s big break came in 1962 when Chet Atkins signed him to record country music for RCA. His first single for the label was 1962's "Shame On Me,” followed by the Dennis Dill/Mel Tillis composition, “Detroit City,” which charted and won him a Grammy for best country & western recording of the year.
It was after that Grammy that Bare recorded his 500 Miles Away from Home album.
For the title track, Bare and his friend Charlie Williams wrote new lyrics to the melody that he characterized as “an old campfire song.” Years later, talking with interviewer Gary James, Bare remembered creating his version when he was living in North Hollywood down the street from Glen Campbell, his sometimes drinking buddy.
“I was driving back from San Diego one night,” Bare told James, “and I was surfin' the radio and I heard Peter, Paul And Mary singing the old campfire version of ‘500 Miles’ and I thought, boy, that's great!
“Soon as I got home I got Glen's album and it was an instrumental. There were no lyrics. I called Charlie Williams up. I said, ‘Hey Charlie, come over and let's write some lyrics to this.’”
“500 Miles” put Bobby Bare firmly on the musical map. His version became a Top 10 hit on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, as well as a Top 5 hit on both the Country and Adult Contemporary charts.
The Song’s Incredible Legs
“500 Miles” has been extraordinarily popular with singers all around the world. In America, it was covered by everyone from the Kingston Trio and the Country Gentlemen to Sonny & Cher, the Brothers Four and Elvis to Reba McEntire, Jackie DeShannon and Johnny Rivers.
Beyond these shores, versions of “500 Miles” have been recorded in Albanian, Assamese, Bengali, Chinese, Czech, Finnish, French, Germany, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Slovenian, Spanish and Vietnamese. Whew!
Our Take on the Tune
When we play our monthly gig at Sal’s Speakeasy in Ashland, Ky., we often like to have a salute to local folks who’ve made it big in music. For instance, we regularly perform “When You Say Nothing at All,” the song generally associated with Kentucky’s late Keith Whitley.
At our next show, we intend to offer “500 Miles” as a tribute to Bobby Bare and to all our Ironton, Ohio, friends.
Incidentally, “500 Miles” also has a tiny West Virginia connection too. Composer Hedy West was the daughter of Don West, Georgia poet and coal mine labor organizer of the 1930s.
Don co-founded the famed Highlander Folk School in New Market, TN, and later ran the Appalachian South Folklife Center in Pipestem in West Virginia’s Summers County. Don died in Charleston, WV, in 1992 at age 86.
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Guitarists Jerry Reed and Chet Atkins had a special, productive musical bond.
Reed rather famously lived in the moment, often writing wonderfully tasty riffs and licks only to forget them the next day when he moved on to a new project. By contrast, Atkins was a detail-driven professional and a successful producer.
Chet appreciated, completed and recorded many of Jerry's pieces after practicing and polishing them to perfection. “Drive-In,” which our Danny Cox explores in this week’s podcast, is a prime example.
Pickin’ Prodigy
By 1986, Jerry Reed already was a guitar god. For a dozen years, in fact, the Georgian had been on the world’s musical radar, having been proclaimed a new "teen-age sensation" in 1956 after recording his rockabilly composition, "When I Found You."
Then after years as a popular session and tour guitarist, Reed had his best showing on the country chart with his original “Guitar Man,” which Elvis Presley soon covered.
How the Elvis Thing Happened
Jerry recalled being out on the Cumberland River fishing when he got a call from Presley’s RCA Victor producer who said, “Elvis is down here. We've been trying to cut ‘Guitar Man’ all day long. He wants it to sound like it sounded on your album.”
“Well, if you want it to sound like that,” Reed replied, “you're going have to get me in there to play guitar, because these guys are straight pickers. I pick with my fingers and tune that guitar up all weird kind of ways.”
They called time out and called Jerry in. “I hit that intro,” he remembered, “and Elvis’ face lit up.” After that over the years, Presley recorded multiple Reed compositions and had Jerry’s guitar work on various sessions. “I was toppin' cotton, son."
Enter “Drive In'
It was during this fertile period that Jerry’s noodling — and Chet Atkins’ cultivation — produced “Drive In.” Chet was the first to record the piece; it was the opening track of his acclaimed 1968 Solo Flights album.
The tune, a popular vehicle for aspiring pickers on YouTube, is perfect for The Flood’s newest band mate, the rocking, soulful Mr. Danny Cox. Click here to give it a listen.
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Barefoot Days have arrived, a season so sweet and easy that it has its own anthem.
“Summertime,” from George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, is perhaps the perfect jazz standard. Unforgettable lyrics. A melody that seems to be from a dream. Like magic, the song sounds new every single time, no matter how many times you’ve heard it.
And you’ve heard it many times. “Summertime” is one of the most recorded songs of all times; in fact, Guinness World Records is aware of more than 67,000 individual recordings of “Summertime” since its composition in 1934. Just two years later, Billie Holiday was the first to hit the U.S. pop charts with it, reaching No. 12 in September 1936.
Gershwin or Not Gershwin
But did you know that neither the tune to "Summertime" nor its lyrics might be original with Gershwin?
First, about those words. Gershwin’s opera was based on a 1925 novel called Porgy by DuBose Heyward, whose wife, Dorothy, turned into a stage play in 1927. Later, DuBose collaborated with Ira Gershwin to craft the libretto for the Gershwins’ folk opera Porgy and Bess, and the lyrics to "Summertime" are assumed to be by the Heywards.
And the melody? Well, that’s a little more complicated. Gershwin copyrighted it, saying he used no previously composed spirituals in his opera. But really?
Some critics contend “Summertime” is an adaptation of the African American spiritual "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child." Adding a bit of heft to this theory is the fact that the final scene of Dorothy Hetward’s stage play — which predated the Gershwin work by eight years — ended with a performance of “Motherless Child.”
So, it’s debatable. If you want to do your own research, YouTube offers assorted performances of “Motherless Child.” Gershwin detractors often specifically cite Paul Robeson’s 1930s recording as Exhibit A.
Our Take on the Tune
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.
Now in our latest take on the tune, Randy Hamilton does double duty. He takes over the vocals, and his soulful bass work creates a moody setting that inspires introspective solos by Sam St. Clair and Danny Cox. Take a listen; it’s “Summertime,” 2023.
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“You’re No Good,” the opening song on Bob Dylan’s 1962 eponymous debut album, was written, not by the 19-year-old genius, but by one of his heroes, Jesse “Lone Cat” Fuller.
Legend has it that Dylan saw and heard Fuller perform that song himself in 1960 at Denver’s Exodus coffeehouse shortly after it opened in the basement of the Raylane Hotel. The venue was managed by the late folk singer Walt Conley.
Bobby in Denver
A few months earlier, Dylan was still back in Minneapolis’s Dinkytown bohemian neighborhood, but he was restless and ready to cut out; he just wasn’t sure where he wanted his boot heels to be wandering. Then a high school bandmate, Monte Edwardson, told him about Denver’s lively folk-music scene.
Shortly after hitting town, Dylan made his way to Denver’s famed Satire Lounge on East Colfax. A girl Bob knew suggested he introduce himself to Walt Conley, a fixture in the local folk scene.
Dylan biographer Howard Sounes (Down the Highway) quotes Conley as saying kid Dylan looked “like a character out of The Grapes of Wrath,” wearing worn-out clothes and singing hillbilly ballads.
He was from the branch of folk music that was “rolling in the dust,” Conley added, with a style and a look that ran counter to the more polished, spiffy folk musicians like The Kingston Trio and the Denver-based Smothers Brothers.
Dylan ended up in a rented room next door to The Exodus, where patrons drank 3.2 beer served out of buckets, enjoyed the atmosphere — the walls were plastered with “high-camp” posters and impressionistic paintings — and listened to trendy folk music.
The Harp Rack
No evidence exists that Dylan ever performed at The Exodus, but he did hang around long enough to check out other musicians, including Jesse Fuller, who was already known to the hip crowd for his iconic composition, “San Francisco Bay Blues.”
And it might have been from watching Fuller perform as a one-man band that Dylan got the idea to imitate by holding his harmonica in front of his mouth in a metal neck brace, allowing him to alternate between singing and running riffs on the harp.
Several years later, after Dylan recorded “You're No Good” on his 1962 debut album for Columbia, he shared the bill with Fuller at the University of Michigan Folk Festival in Ann Arbor. Meanwhile, Fuller's own recorded version of the song was not released until May 1963, on his album San Francisco Bay Blues.
Our Take on the Tune
The Flood has always had fun at the rehearsals with these sassy old songs, and sometimes the tunes even create their own little legacies.
Here’s a case in point. Midway through this particular track from a recent session, you’ll hear a bit of a crash, like the sound of something hitting the floor. And that’s just what it was.
THE STORY: A while back, The Flood’s ever-jolly den mother, Rose Marie Riter, gave us some nifty bird-in-flight figurines that we put up around the practice room.
For years, the birds have quietly kept their posts, but suddenly on this night, something about the vibrations in the room caused the nearest bird to take an unscheduled, unsuccessful flight.
No one was hurt — including the bird, now returned to its high perch on the bookcase — but the incident was an eerily reminder of another once-upon-a-time when a frog attacked Dave Peyton in the same room. Here’s that story:
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Our story begins nearly 200 years ago on an Irish hillside overlooking the Kenmare River in County Kerry, where a massive manor house was to be built for the Mahony family.
The Mahonys had long wanted a castle atop that hill. In the early 19th century, John Mahony made the decision to build a large home there, but he lost heart for the project when his boat — returning from London with lead for the roof and wine for the cellar — sank in the river, in full view of the intended site.
After that, the project was abandoned for a whole generation. It would not be resumed until John’s son, Denis, took up the work. He hired famed Irish architect Sir Thomas Deane to design and build the castellated Gothic Revival home with a huge gallery in the entrance hall, a west wing to form a round tower and a spiral staircase containing in an attached turret.
Dromore Castle — the name came from Irish Droim Mór, meaning “large ridge” — came to be well known to the people of County Kerry. Builder Denis Mahony, as a minister in the Church of Ireland, was an ardent proselytizer. During the Great Potato Famine of the 1840s and ‘50s, he set up a regular soup kitchen at the castle … but then he insisted on preaching to the hungry as they were drawn in for the food.
Such activities did not make him popular; in fact, in 1850 he was attacked in his own church in town. Then, returning home to Dromore following the melee, he found another angry group had uprooted his flower beds and felled his trees, and now they were preparing to set fire to his castle. Some say the mob was stopped only by the intervention of the local Catholic priest.
Ancient? Yeah, Well, Not So Much…
But where does the song come into this rambling story?
Legend has it this lullaby is one of the oldest extant Irish songs, lulling medieval children to sleep with hush-a-bye, loo, low, loo, low, lan, and with gentle assurances that no matter what riotous troubles lie beyond the walls, safety abide within.
It’s a lovely legend. Unfortunately, there’s no truth to the story that the song is ancient. On the contrary, it traces back… oh, about 125 years or so.
Here’s What We Know
After the ardent Reverend Denis died in 1851, Dromore Castle passed down to a succession of Mahonys. In the 1890s, it came to a national celebrity: tennis star Harold Mahony, who was to be the last Irish winner at Wimbledon.
It was during Harold’s time as head of the Mahony clan that another Harold — songwriter Sir Harold Boulton — came for a visit. Boulton already was famous for writing “The Skye Boat Song,”and it is thought he wrote the words for his even more popular "Castle of Dromore" during or shortly after that stopover. He published the song in 1892 in English, and later it was translated from English into Irish.
Boulton filled his verses with evocative images: autumn winds lamenting around the castle walls, a mother in those peaceful, lofty halls rocking and softly singing to her child. Then we hear her prayer:
Let no ill will to hinder us, my loving babe and me, Dread spirits of the Blackwater, Clan Owen's wild banshee. And Lady Mary, pitying us, In Heaven for grace doth sue.
Sometimes recorded under the name “October Winds,” this is likely the only song — much less a lullaby — in which you’ll heard someone warding off banshees. Surely, though, that reference is a prime reason some listeners have passed along the notion that the song just has to be ancient. Who talks about banshees any more?
Banshees in Irish lore — often depicted as crazy, mournful crones — are spirits that portend death in a family. Each castle or clan could claim its own banshee. The banshee’s wail was said to sound like the wild wind through the trees, like the winds on raw October night, perhaps?
Our Take on the Tune
The Flood’s eclectic repertoire can routinely pivot from an R-rated blues or hokum tune to a some sweet family-friendly ballad. Even a lullaby might pop up from time to time, like this lovely Irish melody. And we toss in the banshee for free.
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Among the tunes we’ve got on tap to share at Sal’s Speakeasy this weekend is one with a curious history. A monster AM radio hit in the early 1960s, it actually was originally a jug band tune recorded many decades earlier.
Back in the 1920s, a remarkable roots musician named Gus Cannon co-wrote “Walk Right In” for his hot new band, Cannon’s Jug Stompers, to record for Victor Records.
Already an established entertainer in the first years of commercial recording, Gus Cannon had a life story that reads like a novel. Born in the early 1880s on a plantation in Red Banks, Mississippi, he was 12 years old when his family moved a hundred miles southwest to what was to become the world capitol of all things blues, Clarksdale, Mississippi.
Cannon’s musical skills developed with little training, but with much innovation. For instance, he is said to have made his own first banjo, crafting it from a frying pan and a raccoon skin.
At 15, he ran away from home to begin his career entertaining at sawmills, at levees and at railroad camps throughout the turn-of-the-century Mississippi Delta. Along the way, he taught himself fiddle. And a local musician named Alec Lee showed him how to use a knife blade as a guitar slide, a technique that Cannon adapted to his banjo playing.
About 1907 Gus left Clarksdale for the big city of Memphis, where he played in a jug band led by Jim Guffin as well as with established blue and hokum artist Jim Jackson.
It also was in Memphis that he met two other up-and-coming musicians — harmonica player Noah Lewis and guitarist Ashley Thompson — with whom he formed Cannon's Jug Stompers. Together they played parties, dances and medicine shows.
Soon after that, inspired by the success of the Memphis Jug Band’s first records, Cannon took his group to Victor Records to start putting out some discs.
Enter The Song
By then, the Jug Stompers were joined by Hosea Woods, who could chime in with guitar, banjo and kazoo and provide some vocals. It was with Woods that Cannon wrote and recorded “Walk Right In”.
The tune offered great promise for the Stompers. Unfortunately, time wasn’t on their side. The recording date was ominous — Oct. 1, 1929 — that is, less than a month before the collapse of the stock market and the beginning of the Great Depression.
The Stompers’ last recordings were made in 1930 and by the end of that decade, Cannon had effective retired, although he occasionally performed as a solo musician.
Folk Revival
Now fast forward to 1962. The folk music revival was in full swing. Erik Darling was an important influence in the early days of the movement. (He had already formed The Tarriers with actor/singer Alan Arkin, hit the Billboard charts with their version of “Banana Boat Song,” and had replaced Pete Seeger in the last days of The Weavers.)
In June 1962, Darling formed The Rooftop Singers with two friends with the specific goal of recording an updated version of “Walk Right In.” Darling had a bright new idea for the song. Unlike its juggy 1929 original, his arrangement got its distinctive sound by pairing twin 12-string guitars played in a pounding, percussive style. Their version — released six months later — became a No. 1 hit (and created a fad among folkies for the then-little known 12-string).
Initially, writing credits on the record label were allocated solely to Darling and his band mate Bill Svanoe. However, eventually everyone did the right thing: the copyrights were corrected to add Gus Cannon and Hosea Woods’ names.
The success of The Rooftop Singers’ recording — it became an international hit — was a big lift for Cannon, who by then was in his late 70s and fallen on hard times. In fact, the previous winter he’d had to pawn his banjo just to pay his heating bill. For the rest of his life, Cannon now received regular royalties checks as a songwriter.
He also saw renewed interest in his music among newly minted folk fans.
In 1963 Cannon recorded an album fo Stax Records with fellow Memphis musicians Will Shade (the former leader of the legendary Memphis Jug Band) on jug and Milton Roby on washboard. On the disc, Cannon performed traditional songs and his jug band era compositions and told stories between the tunes.
Our Take on the Tune
In Flood years, we came to this song a little late in the game. We started playing it about a dozen years ago — our first recording of it was in the winter of 2010, at the beginning of the second year of our weekly podcasts — and it quickly became such a favorite for Michelle and Charlie that we brought it as the opening track of the band’s next studio album, Cleanup & Recovery.
Since Michelle will be back with us tomorrow night as the guest artist when we do our monthly show at Sal’s Italian Eatery & Speakeasy in Ashland, Ky., we thought it would be fun to bring “Walk Right In” to the mix too. Here, from last week’s rehearsal, is the 2023 take on the tune.
If you’re tooling around this weekend, be sure to walk right in and sit right down at Sal’s this Saturday night. We play from 6 to 9 at 1624 Carter Avenue in beautiful downtown Ashland. The video below gives a taste of what’s in store:
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What is probably America’s best-known song about the Netherlands — “The Dutchman” — was written by a man who had never been there.
“The song has in it almost everything I'd ever read or heard, in school and in the library, about Holland,” composer Michael Peter Smith told a fan in 2010, about 40 years after he wrote the song at the very start of his career.
Did he ever consider singing it in Holland?
Oh, hell no!
“Can you imagine,” Smith said, “the reception a Dutch singer would get in New York City with a song in Dutch called 'The American’?”
Unconditional Love
“The thing is,” Smith added, “it isn't really about a country or its denizens, is it? It's about these older people's day and how she takes care of him and how they sing together and how quickly everything is past and forgotten. They truly could be anywhere, yes?”
Yes, of course. Anyone who listens to it knows “The Dutchman” has little to do with windmills and canals and everything to do with the unconditional love of Margaret and the sweet little husband who is drifting away from her.
Enter Steve Goodman
“The Dutchman” — the best known song by Smith, who died in 2020 at age 78 — came to prominence in 1972 when it was released as the opening track of Steve Goodman’s second album, Somebody Else’s Troubles.
A few years earlier, Goodman had become entranced with the song when he heard Smith perform it at a club in Miami. Goodman went back every chance he could just to start memorizing it. Subsequently, his rendition became an instant FM radio hit at a time when FM was rich territory for original and innovative “adult contemporary” music.
Over the years, Smith always credited Goodman for giving his songs a much higher visibility. (Steve recorded a second Michael Smith classic — “Spoon River” — on a subsequent album, Incidentally, The Flood also regularly performs “Spoon River,” as reported in this earlier Flood Watch article.)
The Liam Clancy Connection
While Steve Goodman is central to the Michael Smith story, the composer actually had a different singer in mind for the ultimate performance of “The Dutchman.”
“The only person I ever flat out asked to sing this song,” said Smith, “was Liam Clancy, the great Irish singer. I knew it'd be good for him and I was right. Bless him, he sang it for almost 40 years, and made it sound like a Clancy Brothers tune.”
Liam, who Bob Dylan once called "the greatest ballad singer of all time,” recorded it with Tommy Makem in 1983.
Our Take on the Tune
We always loved Liam’s version, but the song already was familiar to us from Steve Goodman’s recording.
Roger Samples, falling deeply in love with all of Goodman’s albums, learned the song in the mid-1970s and taught it to the rest of us. Then for a decade or so, Rog sang it to our harmonies. Later on, when Rog moved away, the song lingered behind, Charlie taking over the vocals.
Since then, every configuration of The Flood has regularly played “The Dutchman”, often at the end of a particularly sweet evening of music and stories. Lately, Charlie has given the song this new spin by adding a bit of mellow banjo to the mix.
A Flood Footnote
By the way, “The Dutchman” also plays an important part in a choice bit of Flood Lore, as Charlie can relate in a little two-part story. Click the button below to hear what happens when a guitar player starts thinking about his thumb:
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When Joel and Ethan Coen needed help with the soundtrack for their fabulous 2000 film, O Brother, Where Art Thou? they turned to respected artist/producer T-Bone Burnett, a famous champion of long-forgotten folk music.
Thinking about how the film was to be set in Depression-era Mississippi and to open with a scene of an escape from a prison chain-gang, Burnett studied some legendary field recordings by American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. There he found a gem.
From the Library of Congress archives, Burnett unearthed Lomax’s September 1959 recordings at Mississippi’s Parchman Farm State Penitentiary. Among them was a work song called “Po’ Lazarus” led by convict James Carter. It perfectly fit the opening moments of the movie.
Later, after the great box office success of O Brother and then rocketing sales of the resulting soundtrack album, The New York Times told the story of how Lomax’s daughter Anna Lomax Chairetakis helped Burnett locate James Carter. Their search led them to an apartment in Chicago, where they presented Carter with a $20,000 royalty check. He was astonished. He said he couldn’t even remember making the recording for Lomax 43 years earlier.
About the Song
On that autumn day in 1959, Carter and his fellow inmates performed a typical work song for Lomax, meaning it was sung at a tempo that matched the task, such as breaking rocks in the hot sun. Its plodding rhythm perfectly suited Carter’s bluesy treatment of the tune.
In the following decades, his melancholy rendering was echoed in dozens of new versions, from those recorded by Dave van Ronk and Bob Dylan, by Ian & Sylvia and Buffy Sainte Marie, by Sparky Rucker and the Carolina Chocolate Drops.
Understandably, most of those versions presented the story of Lazarus as a tragic tale of a man who escapes a prison farm, only to be hunted, caught and gunned down by a sheriff with a .45.
Our Take on the Tune
But the song can be done in a diametrically different way. It can be turned from a sad tale of loss into a defiant — ultimately almost triumphant — story of rebellion and resistance.
This is the Lazarus we like. The inspiration for The Flood’s take on this tune comes from a seminal 1961 Folkways album by Rolf Cahn and Eric von Schmidt.
On that record — made just three years after Lomax’s visit to Parchman Farm — von Schmidt sings “Lazarus” to his own melody (he didn’t remember the original tune). Also he starts the story, not at the usual point — with the high sheriff searching for the escapee — but rather with the angry protest that led to Lazarus’ flight in the first place. (“Lazarus, my old partner, walked on the commissary counter, then he walked away.”)
But what’s going on here?
“When prison food and other conditions became too much for a man,” Rolf Cahn wrote in the liner notes for their album, “he would literally walk on the counter, kicking the food onto the floor. Since this resulted in violent objections from other convicts, as well as thorough preventative measures from the guards, only a very tough and very angry man would ‘walk on the commissary counter.’”
The Flood’s “Lazarus” uses von Schmidt’s melody as well as his faster, more insistent rhythm and most of his lyrics.
Then we also stir in a little something of our own.
We opt to end the song by returning to Lazarus’ overriding spirit of defiance. We offer a flashback to his counter-walking protest, then we depart with a prediction of an uprising by his old partners “next sunny day.”
More Folk Music, Please
By the way, if folk music is your thing, you might like to tune in the Folk Channel in The Flood free music streaming service, Radio Floodango.
Something like six or seven dozen song are waiting for you on the playlist there; if you’d like it can be a day-long soundtrack. Click here to turn us on!
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’s a song that has just never gotten the respect it deserves. It was back in 1967 that Washington State folkster Danny O’Keefe wrote “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues.”
O’Keefe waited four years to record it, putting it on his 1971 self-titled debut album. That effort was largely ignored, so he gave the tune another shot the following year with a slower, more downbeat arrangement for his second album, O’Keefe.
This version did a bit better, especially when it also was released as a single. The song reached No. 9 among Billboard’s Hot 100 singles and No. 5 on the adult contemporary chart.
That was the peak of its fame in the record sales game, but “Good Time Charlie” had fans among a wide range of important singers.
Waylon Jennings, for instance, recorded it in 1973, Elvis Presley in 1974, Conway Twitty in 1977 and Charlie Rich in 1980.
Willie Nelson and Leon Russell both hit the country charts with it in the same year — 1984 — and crooner Mel (“The Velvet Fog”) Tormé recorded it especially for a 1986 episode of NBC TV’s “Night Court” in a segment in which the singer also had a bit acting role.
Our Take on the Tune
It was Randy Hamilton who brought us the song.
Not long ago, he and his buddy, Flood guitarist Dan Cox, came in the room on a rainy night like last night, sat down, tuned up, and almost immediately the song fell into a groove. Along with Danny, Sam St. Clair found a special voice for soloing, and “Good Time Charlie”, with Randy’s lead vocals, landed solidly in our repertoire.
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For more than a hundred years, the Deep Ellum section of Dallas has been known for music. Well, that and, in its raucous youth, uh, S-I-N…
Today that lively entertainment district also vibrates with street murals, quirky art galleries and long-time concert venues for indie performer.
But, like a family’s black sheep uncle, Deep Ellum has a sketchy, colorful resume. If you hop in your time machine and zip back to the 1920s, your walk down the streets on Deep Ellum would mean rubbing shoulders with Blind Lemon Jefferson and Huddie Ledbetter, with Robert Johnson and Bessie Smith.
You also would see pigeon droppers, reefer men, crap shooters, card sharps and various purveyors of cocaine and bootleg whisky. And then there would be the odd gangster, some (in)famous like Bonnie and Clyde and Pretty Boy Floyd.
In his 1982 book Dallas, an Illustrated History, author Darwin Payne quoted a 1937 newspaper column describing Deep Ellum as a spot that “needs no daylight saving time, because there is no bedtime.” It went on to say this was “the only place recorded on earth where business, religion, hoodooism, gambling, and stealing go on at the same time without friction.”
The Recordings
Those words were published four years after the district was first singled out in song. In 1933, a group called The Lone Star Cowboys (actually, a pseudonym for The Shelton Brothers) recorded “Deep Elm Blues.” (Note the district’s name still has various spellings, from “Elm” to “Elem” to “Ellum”).
The recording borrowed its melody and derived its lyrics from The Georgia Crackers’ 1927 recording called “The Georgia Black Bottom.”
While no one does that tune these days, “Deep Elm (Elem/Ellum) Blues” lives on.
For instance, long before he became The Guitar God, a young Les Paul (under the pseudonym “Rhubarb Red” with his partner “Sunny Joe”) recorded it in 1936 for Decca.
Other versions were made between 1957 and 1958 by Jerry Lee Lewis for Sun Records, Bobby Jackson for Gold Air Records, Mary McCoy & the Cyclones for Jin Records and, later still, by The Grateful Dead, Levon Helm and Rory Gallagher.
In 2020, Bob Dylan's "Murder Most Foul" contains a shout-out with the line, "When you're down on Deep Ellum, put your money in your shoe…”
See the Movie
Finally, if you haven’t seen it, by all means check out a wonderful 12-minute 1985 documentary by Alan Govenar about the Deep Ellum district in its prime. Nowadays you can view it for free online through a great film archives called Folkstreams. Click this button to watch it:
A must-see/hear in the film is late Texas bluesman Bill Neely’s stories.
“It was a pretty rough place down on Deep Ellum,” Neely tells Govenar at one point. “It's where all the thugs and thieves, drunks, bums, winos, they all hung out down there. The desperados. Guys like Clyde and Bonnie, Raymond Hamilton, even Pretty Boy Floyd hung out down there sometimes.”
It’s especially cool that Neely’s playing for the camera includes an original verse or two. Our favorite (which we’ve copped for our own turn with the tune) is:
When you go down on Deep EllumKeep your carburetor clean’Cause the women on Deep EllumSell some dirty gasoline.
Our Take on the Tune
We always try to come up with a couple of new songs for our monthly gig at Sal’s Speakeasy in Ashland.
This is the latest, with Randy rock solid on that harmony and he, Sam and Danny just cooking on the solos.
Remember, we’re at Sal’s Italian Eatery & Speakeasy this weekend, 1624 Carter Avenue in downtown Ashland, Ky. We play from 6 to 9 this Saturday night. And best of all, the beautiful Michelle Hoge is driving in from Cincinnati just to sit in with her old band mates. It’s going to be an epic evening. Come out and party with us!
More Blues?
Finally, if all this has you in a bluesy mood, you might want to tune in The Flood’s all-you-can-east blues channel on our free Radio Floodango music streaming service.
Click here to turn us on!
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
This is the story of a song’s evolution from ragtime composition to folk song, then from blues to bluegrass.
We begin in 1900. Danish-born American violinist/composer Jens Bodewalt Lampe, inspired by Scott Joplin’s hot new “Maple Leaf Rag,” composed his own syncopated piece, which he called “Creole Belles,” published in Detroit by Whitney-Warner.
A child prodigy (he became the first chair violinist for the Minneapolis Symphony when he was just 16), Lampe was exploring this exciting new type of music. What later came to be called “ragtime” was at the time variously described as “cakewalk,” “march” or “two-step” music.
Lampe’s “Creole Belles” was a hit, performed widely by pianists, ragtime bands, brass bands and military bands. In 1902, when John Phillip Sousa championed this piece by recording it, Lampe became one of the country’s best-known ragtime composers, second only to his hero, Joplin.
The Evolution Begins with The Fiddlers
Lampe’s work had one of the most amazing cultural cross-pollinations in music history.
The catchy melody of the second section or strain of “Creole Belles” first was picked up by fiddlers, who also adopted alternative names for their newly borrowed tune, including “Back Up and Push,” “Rubber Dolly” and “Rubber Dolly Rag.”
Then came the string bands. The tune was so popular with them, in fact, that most Appalachian bands that were recording in the 1920s and ‘30s released some version of it.
Under the title “Back Up and Push,” the song was recorded twice in mid-1929, just days apart. It was waxed in Richmond, Indiana, by a little-known group called The Augusta Trio, then in Atlanta by a fiddle band with the unlikely name of “The Georgia Organ Grinders.”
Five years later, the better-known Gid Tanner and The Skillet Lickers did the song in San Antonio for Bluebird.
Meanwhile, the earliest version in which the tune was called “Rubber Dolly Rag” was recorded by Uncle Bud Landress for Victor, also in Atlanta, in November 1929.
The song broke out of the hillbilly genre with a 1931 Columbia Records release by Perry Bechtel and His Boys. (Bechtel, a virtuoso guitarist and tenor banjoist, called it “Little Rubber Dolly.”)
Footnote: In 1926 banjoist Charlie Poole and his North Carolina Ramblers used the same melody for “Goodbye Booze,” itself based on a 1901 novelty vaudeville number by Jean Constant Havez.
The Blues and Folk
Meanwhile, the melody was ready for yet another evolutionary turn.
Beloved blues guitarist and singer Mississippi John Hurt, who in the early 1920s often collaborated with fiddler Willie Narmour, brought Lampe’s original title back to the forefront by adding lyrics, calling it “My Creole Belle” and giving it a smoother new rhythm.
Hurt sang:
My Creole Belle, I love her wellMy darling baby, my Creole BelleWhen the stars shine, I’ll call her mineMy darling baby, my Creole Belle.
Known for playing square dance and ragtime music during the same period that he was recording early blues for Okey Records, Hurt’s interest in different musical styles meant the melody was heard by a much wider audience. (Incidentally, Hurt also used essentially the same tune for his “Richland Woman.”) Subsequently, Woody Guthrie and other folkies were to record it as “My Creole Belle.”
Swing (Western and Otherwise)
Soon Western swing bands and Texas-style fiddlers popularized four or five versions of the tune with characteristic dance rhythms.
And in 1939, Ella Fitzgerald and The King Sisters each released "Wubba Dolly" with novelty vocals.
Bluegrass and Beyond
When bluegrass and early rock developed, each genre gave the song still more new treatments. For Bluebird, for instance, Bill Monroe recorded an instrumental version in 1940.
Fiddler Tommy Jackson brought out his take in 1951, followed by The Stanley Brothers and then by …. well, by everybody.
Finally, there were rock renditions. Curiously, for example, 10 years after Bill Black died, the Bill Black Combo still was touring, and the group charted as late as 1975 with “Back Up and Push” on its World's Greatest Honky Tonk Band album.
Our Take on the Tune
Danny Cox learned his version of the song from a recording by his hero Chet Atkins on the 1965 More of That Guitar Country album. This Flood track was recorded at a recent gig at Sal’s Speakeasy in Ashland, Ky.
Here you’ll hear Dan and harmonicat Sam St. Clair trading choruses on the tune as we call folks back to the bandstand to begin our second set.
By the way, The Flood will be back at Sal’s next week. We’re playing Saturday, April 22, from 6 to 9, and, as a special treat, our dear friend, Floodster Emerita Michelle Hoge, will be back as the evening’s guest artist. Come on out and party with us!
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
Purists love to tell us that many songs with “blues” in their title — “Blues in the Night,” “Birth of the Blues,” “Lovesick Blues” — technically are not blues at all. (Shoot, even the great “St. Louis Blues,” while it certainly opens with a traditional 12-bar blues structure, wraps up with 16 bars in a habanera rhythm that its composer W.C. Handy called his “tango section.”)
Of course, many of these cited songs aren’t meant to be blues, but to be about having the blues, and 1950s classic rocker “Singing the Blues” certainly meets those specs.
A perfect honky tonk tune of its time, “Singing the Blues” was written by 20-year-old Arkansas native Melvin Endsley in 1954. The following year, Endsley took his song to Nashville to pitch it backstage at the Grand Ole Opry. And it worked. In 1956, Marty Robbins recorded the song (which is credited, by the way, with putting Robbins on the musical map).
It was pretty good for Endsley's career too. His writing talents were in high demand after Robbins's success. Over his 50-year career, Melvin wrote some 400 songs that were recorded by hundreds of artists.
Living the Blues
Melvin Endsley himself had more than a passing acquaintance with the blues. In 1937, when he was three years old, he contracted polio, requiring him to use a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
Then, starting at the age of 11, he spent three years in the Crippled Children's Hospital in Memphis. However, the resourceful youngster parlayed that into a life-altering experience. While in the hospital, Melvin regularly listened to music on the radio, and he taught himself to play the guitar.
After returning to Arkansas, the teenaged Endsley began performing on local radio shows. By the time he was 20, he had an original song — "It Happens Every Time" — that caught the attention of a couple of established artists, Don Gibson and Dorsey Burnette, who encouraged him to continue his songwriting.
Within months, Melvin had created the song that would change his life.
While “Singing the Blues” was first recorded by Marty Robbins, its best-known recording was released in October 1956 by Guy Mitchell, whose rendering of it spent 10 weeks at No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard chart from December 1956 to February 1957.
Two other charting versions of the song — Robbins’ original along with one by English singer Tommy Steel — also were released almost simultaneously with Mitchell’s.
Since then, “Singing the Blues” often has been revived. In the 1960s, for instance, Bill Haley & His Comets, Hank Snow and Dean Martin all made recordings of it.
In the 1970s came versions by Black Oak Arkansas and by Marie Osmond. In the 1980s, it was Gene Summers and Randy Travis, while the ‘90s saw takes by The Kentucky Headhunters and by Paul McCartney.
The English Football Connection
Weirdly, the tune also has resonated with English football fans. It has been sung since the ‘60s by fans of various clubs, usually offering parodies of the opening lyrics.
For example, Everton fans sing, "I've never felt more like singing the blues, when Everton win and Liverpool lose. Oh Ev-er-ton, you've got me singing the blues."
Our Take on the Tune
Pamela Bowen, who has been our band manager for more than 20 years, is a major influence on all things Flood, from the venues we visit to the tunes we play when we get there.
So when Pamela recently suggested we augment the roots music portion of our repertoire with some more classic old-time rock, we started casting our thoughts back to the tunes that stirred our youth, like this from the Fifties.
Our first public performance of the song was last week at Sal’s Speakeasy, where, as we reported here earlier, it even made Pamela’s video from the night.
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It was April 1927 when a pair of blues singers from Mississippi named Little Harvey Hull and Long Cleve Reed walked into a Chicago studio to record the first of a half dozen tunes they’d leave there over the next few weeks.
Joining them for the session was guitarist Sunny Wilson, whose song "Hey! Lawdy Mama/France Blues" was among their first.
The trio was billed on the label as “The Down Home Boys” when the disc was released the following month by Black Patti Records, a new short-lived company created by a fascinating historical character named J. Mayo “Ink” Williams.
Ink Williams
A Brown University graduate, Ink Williams is the only man we know of who was inducted into both the National Football Hall of Fame and the Blues Hall of Fame. Besides being one of the first African American pro-football players (as part of a Chicago team in the first season of the NFL), Williams also is remembered as an important recording industry pioneer.
Starting his career producing for the fledgling Paramount Records, Williams earned his nickname because of his persuasive way of inking contracts with a wide range of original talent. Over the years, he was to work with Blind Lemon Jefferson and Ma Rainey, with Tampa Red and Georgia Tom, with Blind Blake and Ida Cox (not to mention Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Mahalia Jackson, Alberta Hunter, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Roosevelt Sykes, Sleepy John Estes and so many more).
In 1924, Williams also earned an early entry in blues annals by producing the legendary Papa Charlie Jackson's “Lawdy, Lawdy Blues,” the first successful blues record made by an African American man.
In 1927, Williams left Paramount to go out on his own by starting Black Patti Records, named after the opera singer Matilda Sissieretta Joyner Jones, who was called “Black Patti” because some thought she resembled the Italian opera singer Adelina Patti.
While Williams’ label lasted only seven months, it produced 55 records in a variety of styles, including blues, jazz and spirituals, as well as hell-fire sermons by “straining preachers” and comedy routines and popular ditties from vaudeville stars.
When the enterprise was not immediately profitable, Williams moved on to greener pastures by the end of 1927, but not before discovering a few stand-out blues acts that had moved to Chicago from the South as part of “The Great Migration.”
Among his finds in those early days was The Down Home Boys, whose two-guitar accompaniment was a blend of parlor guitar and ragtime. The trio sang blues, but much of its repertoire was from the turn of the century — before blues had become a dominant musical genre — and included ballads and medicine show material.
Back to the Song
Sunny Wilson’s “Hey! Mama” tune didn’t have the same cachet of some of the group’s other numbers — notably the guys’ “Original Stack O’Lee Blues,” which probably was a response to Ma Rainey’s version of the number, which had the young Louis Armstrong on cornet — but it did have a long shelf life. For instance, right after its Black Patti debut, it was brought out as "France Blues" on Gennett (credited to "Sunny Boy & His Pals") and again on Champion by "The Original Louisiana Entertainers.”
Then 40 years later, the song was reborn in the folk revival of the 1960s.
The Flood learned the song from the January 1964 album recorded by Stefan Grossman and Peter Siegel’s Even Dozen Jug Band. This seminal ‘60s group also featured John Sebastian, Steve Katz, David Grisman and Maria Muldaur, all friends who got to know each other during legendary jam sessions in New York’s Washington Square Park.
Later that same year, the song made another notable folk revival appearance, this time performed by Mark Spoelstra (with Fritz Richmond on washtub bass and Doug Pomeroy on washboard and kazoo) on a landmark Elektra album called The Blues Project.
Our Take on the Tune
If you hang out much with The Flood, it seems like everything we do is carefully planned …. uh, right… but actually, accident and happenstance are a couple of our good friends.
Earlier this week, for example, we got together to plan for our show tonight at Sal’s Speakeasy. As you’ll hear in this track, between songs Charlie starts singing a bit of this old 1920s song. Immediately, Randy jumps in with some great harmony. Then Sam brightens it up with his harmonica and Danny puts a bow on the whole thing with a cookin’ guitar part. And just like that the tune has inserted itself into the set list.
All that’s missing now is you. Come on down to Sal’s Italian Eatery & Speakeasy tonight, 1624 Carter Avenue in beautiful downtown Ashland, Ky., and we’ll getting you singing along on that hey-lawdy-mama-mama / hey-lawdy-papa-papa part! We play from 6 to 9. Come on out and party with us.
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Known to Bob Dylan’s earliest fans as the B side of his first single, “Corrina, Corrina” appeared briefly in record stores in late 1962. However, versions of that wonderful 12-bar blues already had been rattling around America’s musical consciousness for at least a half century before that.
In 1918, Roger Graham published a song called “Has Anybody Seen My Corrine?” In the next decade, Corrina was being flirted with by Vernon Dalhart and Wilbur Sweatman, by Blind Lemon Jefferson and Bo Carter of the Mississippi Sheiks.
Corrina’s Mid-Life
In the 1930s and ‘40s, novelty, blues and even Western swing versions of Corrina-centric tunes were being released; then in the 1950s and ‘60s, assorted rock renditions arose, like Joe Turner’s in 1956 and Bill Haley’s in 1959, and, of course, wild man Jerry Lee Lewis’s in 1965.
But if you listen to any — or, well, all — of those versions, you won’t hear anything that sounds much like the soulful, thoughtful version that Bob Dylan recorded in October 1962 for his landmark Freewheelin’ album, his second Columbia Records release.
As Dylan told writer Nat Hentoff for the liner notes of that disc, “I’d never heard ‘Corrina, Corrina’ exactly the way it first was, so that this version is the way it came out of me.”
In a classic understatement, Phillippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon note in their authoritative Bob Dylan: All the Songs, “As always, his adaptation is very personal.”
The Blues Notes
Margotin and Guesdon point out that, while Dylan used most of the lyrics and structure from earlier versions of the song, he also borrowed a perfect line — “I got a bird that whistles, I got a bird that sings” — from the great blues innovator Robert Johnson’s 1937 “Stones in My Pathway.”
Dylan kept elements of Johnson’s melody, but goes for a much bluesier, more soulful vibe.
Meanwhile, “the shadow of another bluesman floats over this song” as well, the book continues, “another Johnson, named Lonnie.”
The authors quote Dylan as saying, “I was lucky to meet Lonnie Johnson at the same club I was working, and I must say he greatly influenced me. I used to watch him every chance I got, and sometimes he let me play with him.”
Early Electricity
Bob’s “Corrina, Corrina” is especially noteworthy to the Dylan community because it was his first recorded work with a band, though, of course, it was the barest bones of a band, just a bit of light drumming, bass and some tasteful solo electric guitar.
And of course, that solo guitar was famously played by Bruce Langhorne, the same Bruce Langhorne who was to reappear in the Dylan orbit three years later on Bringing It All Back Home. Heeeey, Mister Tambourine Man….
Folk Process
Ultimately, whether Dylan heard any of those earlier “Corrina” tunes is irrelevant, because what emerged from his work with the song is so different from its precursors that he could have copyrighted it for himself as it is more or less a new song and not a rearranged "traditional.”
Interestingly, Dylan’s version also added another chapter to the Corrina evolutionary story, because six years after that 1962 release, Taj Mahal used the Dylan formula to craft his own "Corrina" for his Natch’l Blues album: He built it around Robert Johnson lines and completely abandoned the context of all those Corrina originals.
Our Take on the Tune
Before we played this one at a recent rehearsal, we had a bit of conversation about all those more raucous renditions of “Corrina, Corrina” of our youth (and mom and dad’s youth…. of grandma’s youth…)
But then when we kicked off the song, we all just naturally dropped into the bluesy, moody groove that Dylan established. This is our first take on the tune, but it feels like it’s campaigning to be a regular in the repertoire. Stay tuned.
The Bob Dylan Playlist
By the way, as we’ve said before in Flood Watch, the richest, deepest vein of music we have ever mined has been Dylan’s extraordinary oeuvre. From The Flood’s earliest days to just last week, we have faithfully tapped into tunes from darn-near every era in Bob’s long career.
Last spring, to celebrate Dylan’s 81st birthday, we’ve put together a special hour of music in our free Radio Floodango music streaming feature that offers Flood performances from the past four decade. To check it out, click 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
In Floodlandia, we celebrate this day by channeling the grand, green spirit of William Butler Yeats. We do several songs based on verses by this beloved Nobel laureate.
Our favorite is “Down by the Salley Gardens,” which Yeats published in his 1889 volume The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems.
In notes about the work, Years once said the poem was "an attempt to reconstruct an old song from three lines imperfectly remembered by an old peasant woman in the village of Ballisodare, Sligo, who often sings them to herself."
In fact, Yeats's original title of his poem was "An Old Song Re-Sung.” Precisely what old song Yeats was thinking of we don’t really know, though researchers think it might have been a now-obscure ballad called “The Rambling Boys of Pleasure.” That song’s first verse spoke of lovers meeting in a garden, then added, “She bade me take life easy just as the leaves fall from the tree / But I being young and foolish, with my darling did not agree."
Yeats’ poem wouldn’t appear under today’s better known title until it was reprinted in a 1895 volume.
But What’s a Salley Garden?
To find out, let’s start with a “where.”
As Yeats’ notes suggest, the location of the poem is the banks of the river at Ballysadare, and that happens to be where the residents used to cultivate trees to provide roof thatching material.
That material was known locally as “salley” or “sally,” a form of the Standard English word "sallow," i.e., a tree of the genus Salix. And that is close in sound to an Irish word, saileach, which means “willow.”
What About the Melody?
We don’t know what, if any, tune Yeats had in mind for his poem, but in 1909, Irish composer Herbert Hughes, who also was a frequent arranger of folk songs, set the verse to a traditional air called "The Maids of Mourne Shore.”
While over the years other different melodies also have been applied to the poem (notably by composers Rebecca Clarke and John Ireland in the 1920s), today it is usually to the tune of "The Maids of Mourne Shore" that most performers sing and play it.
The earliest recordings of the song were in the 1940s by John McCormack, Peter Pears and Kathleen Ferrier.
Our Take on the Tune
The Flood started doing this song about 1979, right after Roger Samples and Charlie Bowen learned it from a beloved album, Tommy Makem and Liam Clancy, released in 1976.
Rog always said he thought the melody was buried in the very genes of Irish people, adding, “Every time we do that song, I feel like the ghosts of my ancestors come into the room!”
“Salley Gardens” has been in The Flood’s repertoire ever since, even tucked away among the tunes the band recorded on its first commercial album two decades ago.
This current version — with solos by Dan Cox and Sam St. Clair — was recorded in a recent jam session just to be our gift today.
To Continue Your St. Pat Celebration
Want a bit more of the Old Sod for St. Patrick’s Day 2023? Sure (and begorrah)! Just link in to the St. Patrick Blend in our free Radio Floodango music streaming service.
Erin go Bragh, y’all!
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Composed more than 60 years ago by the great John D. Loudermilk, “Windy and Warm” is a one of the late 20th century’s most loved virtuoso pieces for fingerstyle guitar players.
It was first recorded and released in the spring of 1961 by legendary guitarist Chet Atkins. In fact, the story goes that the tune came into being specifically because Chet wanted something that sounded old-fashioned, something in the old Merle Travis tradition.
"I'm getting too deeply into jazz,” Chet was reported to have said at the time. “I need to get back to my roots.”
"I played this song for him,” Loudermilk mused many years later, “and he picked up the guitar and … he finished the damn thing before I finished it. And I wrote it!"
The piece quickly became a signature tune for Chet, who continued to perform it throughout his lengthy career. It wasn’t long after that thousands of guitarists — shoot, over the past six decades, perhaps millions — were learning it. Recordings came from everyone from The Country Gentlemen and Tony Rice to Tommy Emmanuel and David Grisman.
Along Comes Doc
Of those also-rans who recorded “Windy and Warm” in tribute to Chet Atkins’ original treatment, the most influential probably was Doc Watson’s performance on his massively successful 1966 “Southbound” album.
Doc recorded it again in 1970 in a popular “live” rendition with his son, Merle. The Watsons played it so well, in fact, that listeners who didn’t pay attention to the album’s credits might have assumed they wrote it themselves.
Tommy Emmanuel
The day after John D. Loudermilk’s death in September 2016 at 82, famed guitarist Tommy Emmanuel posted on Facebook that “Windy and Warm” was the first song “to come along and change my life.”
Emmanuel added, “It was played by Chet Atkins and written especially for him by a great songwriter, storyteller, history-maker and all-round genius! … My love and sympathies go out to all the Loudermilk Family today. John, thanks for your humor, your passion for music, people and songwriting. We will never forget your beautiful blue eyes and your warmth for us all. Love you, Big Daddy.”
Our Take on the Tune
When the incomparable Dan Cox joined The Flood Fold last year, one of the first tunes he and his buddy, veteran Floodster Randy Hamilton, brought to the mix was “Windy and Warm.”
While most of this take is all about Danny’s pitch-perfect picking, it also features Randy and Dan vocalizing at one point, a moment that you can hear being happily applauded by Charlie. Check it out!
Want More Danny?
If that Dan Cox picking only whets your appetite for more, you’re in good company. For another helping or two, check out The Danny Cox Channel in our free Radio Floodango music streaming service.
Click here to hear Danny playing in a randomizes playlist of several dozen especially cool tunes in all kinds of styles and moods.
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Flood fan Orville Picklesimer had a kind comment on a recent podcast.
“Well done!” he wrote after listening to the Feb. 17 broadcast of our take on “I Am a Pilgrim,” adding, “ I was fortunate to see Doc (Watson) do this one, and The Flood’s cover pays homage to Doc and adds its own personal flavor.”
“It doesn’t need more cowbell,” he said, “but I’d like to hear more resonator on future projects.”
Well, you don’t have to ask us twice!
But First
If you’re not up on your grand guitar history, you might not know that the resonator guitar — that is, an acoustic guitar that produces sound by conducting string vibrations through the bridge to one or more spun metal cones (“resonators”) — was invented about a century ago.
It all started in the mid-1920s, in the days before electric instruments. The idea was to create a new kind of guitar that would be louder than its regular acoustic cousins, which were being overwhelmed by the horns and drums in the dance orchestras of the day.
But developers like the legendary John Dopyera and his brothers Rudy and Emil did much more than that. The resonator that the Dopyera brothers and others created had such a distinctive tone that it found lifelong fans among blues and folk aficionados, and that love affair has continued long after the arrival of roaring electric guitars.
Floodifying It
Of course, “blues” and “folk” are a combination that has “Flood” written all over it. That’s why about a month ago, Charlie brought a resonator into The Flood’s mix in the form of a wood-framed “boxcar” style resonator from Gretsch.
Slowly but surely this new guitar — which Charlie has christened “Chessie” (get it? Boxcar? Chessie? … Never mind…) — has started working its way into the band’s repertoire, beginning with that “I Am a Pilgrim” rendition that Orville liked a few weeks ago.
Now, answering his request for a bit more resonator action, we’ve incorporated Chessie into our latest take on the old Carter Family tune, “Solid Gone.” Orville, this one’s for you, old friend!
Our Take on the Tune
As we noted in earlier article in the newsletter, “Solid Gone” has a long, LONG history in The Flood’s story.
It was, in fact, the first song that Dave Peyton suggested to Charlie when the two of them first started picking together at that New Year’s Eve party in 1973.
Since then, the tune has come back in every iteration of The Flood, and it has never sounded better than in this latest version, with Danny Cox and Sam St. Clair double-dipping on the solos and Randy Hamilton singing all that rock-solid harmony.
Click here for the the long, curious history on this song, as it weaves its way through the Carter Family and Charlie Poole, by way of Furry Lewis and Mississippi John Hurt, right up to folksinger Tom Rush. What a yarn!
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Our story begins with the star of a new show who is unhappy with the song her upstart writers have given her to perform. In a panicky phone call, she persuades a more established composer to come up with something she thinks will be more worthy of her talents.
The show, in fact, turns out to be a dog — vaudeville’s “Betsy” has only 39 performances between December 1926 and January 1927 — but oh, that song!
Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies” was an instant hit with the audience on the “Betsy” opening night. The song literally stopped the show. Twenty-four encores! During her final repetition, star Belle Baker actually forgot the lyrics, prompting a bit of Broadway lore when Berlin himself sang the words for her from his front-row seat.
And Those Disdained Upstarts?
As it happened, Berlin had written the new “Blue Skies” a few weeks earlier as a Christmas gift for his newborn daughter, Mary Ellin.
Berlin agreed to let the composition be a last-minute addition to the show, even though he usually resented the interpolation of songs by other composers into the score of his shows, say biographers Philip Furia and Michael Lasser.
“But,” the writers add, “he must have been delighted at the chance to work one of his songs into a score by the young songwriting team who were already being compared to Gilbert and Sullivan,” namely, a couple of newcomers named, ahem, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart.
Big Time on the Big Screen
If its reputation relied only on that failed 1927 Ziegfield musical, we probably wouldn’t know “Blue Skies” nowadays.
But the song’s real fame came later that same year with “The Jazz Singer,” the first full-length motion picture to have sound; it starred Al Jolson singing nine songs, one of which was the brand new “Blue Skies.”
And that was just the beginning of the song’s celluloid celebrity.
It later was featured in “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” (1938), a biopic inspired by Irving Berlin, and the 1946 film “Blue Skies” starring Bing Crosby, then in the 1954 “White Christmas” with Crosby singing it with Danny Kaye.
And of course, the song has jazz cred too. Ella Fitzgerald scatted a version for her eight-album “Song Book” series. Count Basie and Benny Goodman’s recordings hit #8 and #9 respectively on the pop charts.
The song has contributed to the country and western songbook too. It was a standard by 1939 when Moon Mullican recorded it. Willie Nelson’s 1978 release was a #1 country music hit.
The Star Trek Connection
The song even has gotten air time in outer space. It was featured prominently in the 2002 film “Star Trek: Nemesis,” as sung by Commander Data (Brent Spiner) during a wedding scene at the start of the story.
It is sung again at the very end of the film by Data’s "brother," the android B-4, during the final scene set in the 24th century, a time period not revisited by the Trek franchise for another 18 years, with the release of “Star Trek: Picard” in 2020. "Blue Skies" is featured in that series' premiere episode and again in the 10th episode.
New Generations
“Blue Skies” has clicked with generations of performers and audiences, from Freddy Cannon, Della Reese, Jim Reeves and Bobby Darin in the 1960s to Lyle Lovett, Dr. John and Eva Cassidy in the 1990s to Debby Boone and Rod Stewart in the 2000s.
We’ll Bring “Blue Skies” to Sal’s Tonight
The song will be on tap when the Family Flood returns to Sal's Italian Eatery & Speakeasy in Ashland, Ky., tonight.
We’re excited to be there, and, best of all, The Chick Singer is back! Yes, Floodster Emerita Michelle Hoge (whom the late Joe Dobbs christened "da chick singer" years ago) is coming in from Cincinnati just to sit in with her old band mates for the evening. It's going to be epic! We'll be playing from 6 to 9 p.m.
By the way, if you've not yet had The Sal's Experience, this would be a great chance to enjoy this remarkable venue in downtown Ashland. To read all about it, check out our earlier article:
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When Merle Travis recorded his beloved (and never-out-of-print) Folk Songs from the Hills album in 1947, he included a version of “I Am a Pilgrim” that would inspire decades of loving imitations by artists such as Bill Monroe and Doc Watson, Johnny Cash and The Byrds.
Some people figured Travis must have written the song himself — after all, the same album included two of his best-known originals, “Dark as a Dungeon” and “Sixteen Ton” — but actually “I Am a Pilgrim” is a traditional gospel tune that has deep roots among white and African-American musicians alike.
From Camp Meetings … and, well, from jail …
In an introduction on his recording 75 years ago, Travis can be heard saying, “When I first got big enough to start running around by myself at night, the first place I wanted to go was to the camp meetings and to the brush arbor meetings and hear them sing the good old songs. I learned a lot of the old songs, but there was one specially that I liked better than all the rest, and I remember it today just as well as I did the day I learned it.”
Nice story. Actually, though, Kentucky-born Travis had a mentor: legendary fingerpicking stylist Mose Rager of Muhlenberg County.
Legend has it that Mose's brother Lyman learned "I Am a Pilgrim" while in jail in Russellville, Ky, when he heard it being sung by a black prisoner in a nearby cell. Another version of the yarn places the jailhouse in Elkton, Ky. Wherever lockup actually was, Lyman was said to have later taught the song to his brother, Mose, who in turn taught it to their young neighbor, Merle Travis.
Mose Rager Remembers
In a early 1960s film, Mose Rager is heard telling folklorist D.K. Wilgus about the tune’s origin.
“We sang that old song around here years ago,” he said. “It’s just an old brush arbor song. Everybody sang it; Merle Travis and my two brothers, we’d all get together out here … out to the edge of town and just sit out there till about 12 o’clock and sing old hymns.”
We don’t know the name of the black singer whom Lyman Rager heard in that Kentucky jail, but as Asheville, NC, musician/author Wayne Erbsen has noted, “I Am A Pilgrim” was recorded “by 14 African-American groups before it was even a gleam in Merle Travis' eyes."
Pre-Merle Renditions
The first of those groups was the Norfolk Jubilee Quartette, which recorded the song in 1924 for Paramount Records.
The Tidewater Virginia group released dozens of records between 1921 and 1940 — much of it gospel, but also blues and jazz numbers — and in their hands, “I Am a Pilgrim” has a bit of the kick that would come down to Travis two decades later.
Among other little known groups to record it were The Good Will Male Chorus (1927), South Carolina Quartette (1928), Mound City Jubilee Quartette (1935), Heavenly Gospel Singers (1936), Golden Gate Quartet (1939) and Southern Wonder Quartet (1940).
Bluegrass Attachments
Of course, the song also has strong bluegrass attachments. Carl Story, considered the father of bluegrass gospel sound starting in the 1940s, said he knew the song from the repertoire of Georgia country music pioneer Riley Puckett.
Story learned it as a little boy when his father took him to hear Puckett play in Lenoir, NC. Puckett’s recordings were to inspire everyone from Bill Monroe and Flatt and Scruggs on. Many bluegrass lovers also came to know the tune as strictly an instrumental, because of guitarist Clarence White’s picking on the Kentucky Colonels’ iconic 1964 album, Appalachian Swing!
A Possible Origin Story
But how did the song come about in the first place? A good question, that. Our research has turned up no definitive author, but it does find this to be an excellent example of how folk songs evolve.
A connection to classic Christian hymn writing seems obvious, because the lyrics cite some rather esoteric New Testament verses. The title, for instance, seems to refer to The Epistle to the Hebrews (11:13), which reads in part, “…and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.” Also, one verse says, "If I could just touch the hem of his garment" which appears to allude to a story in the Book of Matthew (9:20) in which a woman is healed after touching Jesus' robe.
All this might mean we should look for an origin in an 1841 composition by South Carolina poet Mary Dana Shindler, whose hymn “I Am a Pilgrim and I Am a Stranger” contained such Bible references. A rendering of that song actually was one of the first records ever released, specifically a 1917 disc pressed on Victor by The Imperial Quartet.
However, the melody there is absolutely nothing like what’s come down to us from Merle Travis. In other words, it is highly unlikely that any of those 14 African-American groups recording “I Am a Pilgrim” between 1924 and 1947 were listening to that thing. A better theory is that concurrent with white churchified rendering were more soulful African-American versions.
We do know that in 1925 — just one year after the Norfolk Quartette’s Paramount recording — the song showed up in a book called, The Negro and His Songs: A Study of Typical Negro Songs in the South by Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson.
In addition, folklorists John and Ruby Lomax also collected a version of it during their 1939 Southern states recording trip.
Our Take on the Tune
For The Flood, it all began a few weeks ago when Charlie took his first stumbling steps — slipping and a-sliding, as it were — in learning some bottleneck technique on his new resonator guitar. Right away, what came out reminded him of the old gospel tune from his youth — he even recalled Grandma Robertson humming it while she washed dishes — but he just couldn’t seem to get the song down.
Then Danny came along, took one listen and started just naturally channeling an old Doc-Watson-cum-Chet-Atkins vibe, laying down an absolutely rock solid foundation.
Sam grabbed his “E” harp and found his groove, Randy jumped in with some beautiful harmony for the choruses, and suddenly “I Am a Pilgrim” landed righteously in the repertoire.
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Authorship of “Sister Kate,” one of the first famous songs of the Roarin’ Twenties, is a musical mystery.
The composer of record is New Orleans bandleader/violinist Armand Piron, who had a publishing partnership with Clarence Williams. However, Piron’s credits for the song frequently have been disputed, most famously by trumpeter Louis Armstrong, who always claimed he wrote the tune himself.
Armstrong contended he sold the song for an overcoat (which he received) and a few dollars (which he did not).
Piron — who copyrighted it in 1919 as “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate” (though it wasn’t published till 1922) — told jazz historian Al Rose that “that’s not Louis’s tune or mine either. That tune is older than all of us. People always put different words to it. Some of them were too dirty to say in polite company.”
For instance, the way Armstrong did the song didn’t have anything to do with a sister Kate, but a lot to do with jiggling lady bits.
Gotta have ’em before it’s too late,They shake like jelly on a plate.Big ‘n’ juicy, soft an’ round,Sweetes’ ones I ever found.
“There’s only so many places you could do a number like that,” Piron told Rose, “and not in my band.”
The Skinny on The Shimmy
Commenting on the song’s history, bluesman/author Elijah Wald notes, “Though Piron and his band cleaned up the lyric, they kept the sense intact, since the generally accepted derivation of ‘shimmy’ fits Armstrong’s verse pretty well.”
“The etymology isn’t solid,” Wald adds, “but most authorities derive it from chemise — ‘shimmy’ seems to have been American slang for a lightweight women’s blouse as early as the 1840s — and the dance move was to ‘shake your shimmy’ by vibrating the relevant area as rapidly as possible.”
And Who Is Kate? Uh… Ask Louis
So, in Piron and Williams’ telling, the song was associated with a suggestive shimmy dance move, but was there actually a “sister Kate?”
And — poof! — just like that, we’re back to Louis Armstrong.
The trumpeter long claimed that he knew Kate before she ever shimmied. In his book Louis Armstrong, An Extravagant Life, author Laurence Bergreen said that when New Orleans trombonist Kid Ory hired Armstrong for his band, he told the youngster he should work up a number so they could feature him once in a while. Armstrong did and even created a little dance to go with it.
The song was “an unashamedly filthy thing,” Bergreen wrote, called “Katie's Head,” reportedly inspired by the 1883 stabbing death of New Orleans madam Kate Townsend. This particular Kate, who ran a high-class house of prostitution on Basin Street, was murdered in a drunken quarrel with her longtime "fancy man" Troisville Sykes.
Despite its dark and bloody subject matter, the song was a hit. Bergreen quoted Armstrong as saying that whenever he sang it, “Man, it was like a sporting event. All the guys crowded around, and they like to carry me up on their shoulders.”
Armstrong’s performance usually was accompanied by his dance, apparently a version of "The Shimmy,” which was just starting to appear around the country.
"One night, as I did this number,” Armstrong went on, “I saw this cat writing it all down on music paper. He was quick, man! He could write as fast as I could play and sing. When I had finished, he asked me if I'd sell the number to him. He mentioned $25. When you're only making a couple of bucks a night, that's a lot of money. But what really put the deal over was that I had just seen a hard-hitting steel gray overcoat that I really wanted for those cold nights. So I said `Okay' and he handed me some forms to sign and I signed them. He said he'd be back with the cash, but he never did come back."
The stranger with the forms and the pen was Armand Piron’s partner Clarence Williams, the ambitious music entrepreneur who would soon be leaving New Orleans for Chicago and then on to New York City.
First Recordings
The earliest recordings of the song were little known 1922 sides by The Original Memphis Five on Pathé Actuelle, by Mary Straine and Joseph Smith's Jazz Band on Black Swan Records and by The Virginians on Victor.
A better received version was the 1923 release by vocalist Anna Jones with Fats Waller on piano.
Arrangements over the years since then ranged from big band jazz to a hokum version by The Alabama Jug Band in 1934, a precursor to jug band revival and string band versions during the 1960s by Dave Van Ronk, Jim Kweskin and The Greenbriar Boys.
Our Take on the Tune
The Flood has always been much enamored of those ‘60s string band renditions. Nowadays our version follows Jim Kweskin’s idea on his jug band’s 1966 Relax Your Mind album to combine “Sister Kate” with another Louis Armstrong standard, “Heebie Jeebies.”
On this track, while everybody is on fire, bringing their own hot solos to the mix, we all agree that it is Danny — our newest Floodster — who, as Sam says, “becomes one” with 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
Jackson Browne has always called the first song on his 1972 self-titled debut album a kind of modern fable.
His inspiration for “Jamaica Say You Will" was a girl who worked in an organic food orchard on California’s Zuma Beach, across the street from the Pacific Ocean, "like the Garden of Eden,” Browne once told an interviewer, “and she was a kind of Eden-like girl, too.”
In the lyric, the girl leaves with her father to sail out into the world, “but my ship had not found the sea, as it were," Browne told Uncut magazine. “I wanted to have the cocoon of this relationship to just stay insulated from the world, but she was ready to move out into the world.”
The song was a lament for the time he sheltered in that love affair. “I realized,” he added, “I'd been writing about the relationship I'd just left, not this new one I was in. So I learned something about myself and maybe found more closure or solace. … It's odd that that's exactly how songs come into being."
The Song that Birthed a Label
“Jamaica,” which Browne wrote when he was 20 in 1969, also played a big part in creating a new record label.
In 1970, after listening to a demo of the song, artist manager David Geffen signed Browne and began looking for a record contract for him. Ultimately, after he couldn't get a deal anywhere else, Geffen co-founded Asylum Records in 1971 with Elliot Roberts.
The story goes that Geffen had pitched Browne to Atlantic Records president Ahmet Ertegun, saying, "You'll make a lot of money." To that, Ertegun reportedly replied, "You know what, David? I have a lot of money. Why don't you start a record company and then you'll have a lot of money."
A deal then was struck in which Ertegun put up the initial funds and Atlantic Records distributed Asylum Records with the profits split 50/50.
Jackson Browne was one of first artists Geffen signed for Asylum, of course; he was quickly joined on the new label that same year by Linda Ronstadt, John David Souther, David Blue, Joni Mitchell, Glenn Frey and others.
Covers
But many people became familiar with “Jamaica Say You Will” even before they heard Jackson Browne’s Asylum recording of it.
That’s because the song was released by The Byrds on their Byrdmaniax album for Columbia the year before Browne’s debut.
And after that, the song was covered in 1972 by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and by Tom Rush and then by Joe Cocker in 1975.
The TV Treatment
The tune even has had its television moment. In 1992, it was heard playing on the radio at the end of “The Wonder Years” episode "The Lake" from Season 5.
(TV’s time machine slipped a little, though. The episode’s story line was set in August 1971, but that was several months before the Browne album was released.)
Our Take on the Tune
In music, newness is often a magical ingredient, and everything about this song is new for us.
Its Flood connection started a few weeks ago when Charlie brought home yet another new guitar, this time a sweet little Gretsch resonator that he intends to keep in one open tuning or another. Recently, playing around in open D, Bowen landed on “Jamaica,” which just seemed to lay so easily on the strings.
The song was unfamiliar to Danny and Randy, but — true to their Flood nature — they took to it right away, immediately finding ways to enrich it. Just listen to Dan’s smart, beautiful solos and to Randy’s gorgeous harmonies on the choruses.
Sure, our arrangement is still evolving, but we wanted to share it with you all while it still has that lovely new song smell.
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A trope in our part of the world is, “If you don’t like the weather, wait an hour!”
The fickleness of what comes from our skies around here — or sometimes doesn’t — was on Charlie Bowen’s mind years ago when he wrote a song called “All Out of Season.”
His lyric opened with meteorological musings about a chilly afternoon when “suddenly from nowhere came an April kind of day / and sat herself right down in winter’s way….”
Origin Story
The song originally was performed by a short-lived group called Front Royal that Charlie and fellow Floodster Stewart Schneider started with long-time singer/songwriting friend John Koenig.
Front Royal, which lasted only a few years in the mid-1970s, existed mainly to create new music. “All Out of Season” was one of the last compositions to come out of that earnest little experiment. After the group folded, the song — along with the others created by the trio — went into storage for the next 40 years or so.
Rebirth
Only recently, as the latest configuration of The Flood started exploring original compositions, did Bowen think of seeing if his old tune might want a new life.
Of course, the slam on this song will always be that nothing could be more “all out of season” than a 1970s relic that’s been biding its time in a dusty desk drawer.
Still…
Well, just listen to how the sensitive retelling of the tune by these dear friends has made it feel right at home in the 21st century.
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“Timeless” is a much overused word, but were it not, we ourselves would happily overuse in talking about “Misty.” It’s hard to imagine a time when this scintillating melody did not exist. Actually, though, it is a relative newcomer to the Great American Songbook.
“Misty” began its life as instrumental. It was 1954 — decades after many of the great jazz standards were born — when pianist Erroll Garner composed the song in the traditional 32-bar format and recorded it with his trio for their Contrasts album.
Garner always said he developed his most famous melody while on a flight from San Francisco to Chicago. During that trip, the plane passed through a wild thunderstorm, and then, as the flight descended into O’Hare, Garner looked out the window to see a rainbow glowing through a haze.
Moved by the sight, he begin composing "Misty" on the spot, striking imaginary piano keys on his knees as he hummed the notes (causing, incidentally, a neighboring passenger to summon a flight attendant, worried that the jazzman had maybe, you know, well, flipped out…).
Anyway, because he did not write or read music, Garner committed his new tune to memory until he could get home and record it for transcription.
Along Came the Johnnies
Only later did famed lyricist Johnny Burke add his iconic words to the melody, just in time for a young Johnny Mathis to rocket the song — and himself — to international fame with his 1959 album, Heavenly.
Mathis was still in his teens when he heard Garner playing the song in the Black Hawk jazz club in Mathis’ home town of San Francisco. He recalls blurting out, “Mr. Garner, I am going to record your song if I ever make a record.”
Signed by Columbia Records a few years later at the age of 21, Mathis started singing jazz in that same Black Hawk club. After a couple of unsuccessful jazz recordings, Mathis started working with Columbia’s A&R chief Mitch Miller who steered him toward a more straightforward vocal approach and to more romantic songs. Then along came “Misty” and Mathis was Made.
Over the years, the Garner composition has been recorded by all the greats, like Ella Fitzgerald and Aretha Franklin, like Frank Sinatra and Sarah Vaughn. But it was the two original renditions — those by Garner and then by Mathis — that were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
Rebirths
“Misty” had a couple of interesting revivals in the 1970s.
In 1971, the song found a new audience in movie houses after actor Clint Eastwood paid Garner $25,000 for the right to use an instrumental version of the tune in his directorial debut film Play Misty for Me, a low-budget film that proved to be a box-office success.
Then in 1975 Ray Stevens, a country and novelty-song singer/songwriter/producer, had a big hit with an entirely different approach.
“Misty” was not on the schedule for the recording session that day, but Stevens and the other musicians were warming up and experimenting when they drifted into an upbeat, countrified version of “Misty.” They liked the sound, and the final version was recorded on the second take. It became a Billboard Hot 100 hit and was awarded a Grammy for Music Arrangement of the Year.
Our Take on the Tune
“Misty” has worn many hats in the Floodisphere. Back in the 1970s, it was a Ray Stevens-style campy instrumental for Joe and Rog. Then a few decades later, it became a sultry vocal standard for Michelle.
Nowadays — after Michelle went off to Cincinnati for the latest chapter of her life as the happily married Mrs. Rich Hoge — the song has returned to its original instrumental roots as a showcase for Vanessa and Danny.
This take from a rehearsal last month is a classic jazz vehicle, starting with Veezy’s elegant statement of the melody, followed by her and then Dan exploring remarkable nuance among all those lovely Erroll Garner chords.
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If you’re free tonight, why not let your friends in The Flood get your weekend started right? We’re playing at the coolest new venue in the Tri-State Area; we’re at Sal’s Italian Eatery & Speakeasy, 1624 Carter Ave. in Ashland, Ky., from 6 to 9.
Come out and enjoy a set or two. Grab a seat, order a prime rib feature and enjoy your evening. Finish it off with, say, Sal’s legendary bananas foster.
We in The Flood so love this place! Click here for our backstory on this establishment.
One of the Songs We Have on Tap for Tonight
Almost 70 years ago this year, a street musician named Jesse “Lone Cat” Fuller recorded his new song, “San Francisco Bay Blues,” for the World Song label.
Nowadays that particular 1954 recording is a collector’s item, but the world really didn’t start knowing this rocking number until 1962 when Fuller recorded a one-man band rendition, which appeared on a Smithsonian Folkways compilation called “Friends of Old Time Music.” After that… well, everybody seemed to know it.
Folk singer Ramblin’ Jack Elliott was perhaps the first to embrace it and perform it around the clubs and the studios. With that, it entered the canon of many a trouper, from Tom Rush to Richie Havens to Peter, Paul and Mary.
Since then, the song has had an extraordinary number of covers, by Bob Dylan and Jim Kweskin, by Jim Croce and The Weavers, by Hot Tuna and Janis Joplin.
Even The Beatles, minus George Harrison, performed a version of ‘San Francisco Bay Blues’ during the Get Back/Let it Be sessions on Jan. 14, 1969. And John Lennon recorded an unreleased version of the song during the Imagine sessions in May 1971, while McCartney performed ‘San Francisco Bay Blues’ often during his solo concerts in San Francisco. It was played more frequently still at his soundchecks around the world.
Eric Clapton performed the song on MTV Unplugged in 1992 during the taping in England. The live album earned six Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year.
Lone Cat’s Backstory
In the decades before “San Francisco Bay Blues” made its mark, Jesse Fuller rambled along quite a winding path. Born Jonesboro, Ga., in 1896, he grew up with foster parents and did numerous jobs: grazing cows for 10 cents a day; toiling in a barrel factory, a broom factory and a rock quarry; working on a railroad and for a streetcar company; shining shoes; even peddling hand-carved wooden snakes at one point.
As a young man, the 1920s found him living in southern California, where he operated a hot-dog stand. It was in those heady Roarin’ Twenties days that he was befriended by silent film legend Douglas Fairbanks, who helped him work briefly as an extra in The Thief of Bagland (1924) and East of Suez (1925).
Come the Depression, Fuller moved north to Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco, where he worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad as a fireman, spike driver and maintenance-of-way worker.
Around the early 1950s, Fuller began making a living as a street musician, working solo as “The Lone Cat” and busking for money. Starting locally, in clubs and bars in San Francisco and across the bay in Oakland and Berkeley, Fuller became more widely known when he performed on television in both the Bay Area and in Los Angeles.
And then came That Song.
Our Take on the Tune
Honestly, we don’t remember when we started doing this one. Twenty years ago, “San Francisco Bay Blues” was the rollicking final track on our first album, but it was already an old number with us.
And lately it’s back in the repertoire with lively solos by the whole crew.
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The great jazz innovator Jelly Roll Morton once told folklorist Alan Lomax that “Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor” was one of the earlier country blues to come rambling into the big city of New Orleans. Morton said it was being played in the Crescent City many years before he was born there in 1890.
As Jelly Roll further noted, "A pallet is something that — you get some quilts — in other words, it's a bed that's made on a floor without any four posters on 'em.”
The song was even known to be favorite of a famous jazz forefather. In an early printed reference n 1911, the tune was reported to be featured in the repertoire of New Orleans’ legendary cornetist Buddy Bolden.
It Was Everybody’s Song
But it wasn’t only in New Orleans; up in Memphis, Jelly Roll’s songwriting rival W.C. Handy must have heard it too.
That’s because Handy reappropriated big chunks of the same melody for his composition “Atlanta Blues,” first recorded in the Handy band's 1917 performance of "Sweet Child.” Nearly 40 years later, trumpeter Louis Armstrong put “Atlanta Blues” on disc in 1954.
Shoot, there must be hundreds — maybe thousands — of versions of this old tune. Search Google for "Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor" and you'll find references to recordings by everyone from Gillian Welch and Sandy Denny to Doc Watson and Odetta.
The Flood got its particular version from a recording made in the early 1960s for Folkways by the late great Boston bluesmen Rolf Cahn and Eric Von Schmidt.
Tracing Some Roots
To look for an origin story for the song, you probably should start with a 1906 report in The Indianapolis Freeman, which referred to a performance of it by "The Texas Teaser, Bennie Jones.” Two years later, the song appeared in sheet music form as part of John William “Blind” Boone’s Southern Rag Medley No. One: Strains from the Alleys.
The lyrics also appeared in a 1911 article by folklorist Howard Odum, who transcribed them from a performance he said he heard in Mississippi a few years before that.
Early recordings of the song were made by Virginia Liston on OKeh in 1925 and Ethel Waters for Columbia in 1926, as well as by Mississippi John Hurt, who recorded it as “Ain’t No Tellin’” in 1928.
Meanwhile, back to Alan Lomax: Delta blues man Sam Chatmon once told the folklorist, “When I first started picking guitar, this was about the first or the second song I learned ... I was about 4 years old.” That would fix the year at 1900 and the place Bolton, Mississippi.
Our Take on the Tune
So, we’re talking old here. And the older we get, the more we bristle at that thing we used to say each new year. You know, that “out with the old, in with the new” business?
We’re surely glad no one ever applied that silly rule to this great old song. The tune might be 150 years old, but it still righteously rocks, as we testify here with swinging solos from everybody in the band!
By the Way…
This is one of the songs we have on tap to play when we’re back at Sal’s Italian Eatery and Speakeasy in Ashland. Ky., one week from tonight.
In other words, please mark it on your calendar. If you’re free next Friday night, Jan. 13, come to downtown Ashland to party with The Flood at the coolest new venue in the Tri-State Area. We play from 6 to 9.
We so love this place! Click here for our backstory on this establishment.
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
Don Redman — a young man from Piedmont, West Virginia, who did much to create the sound that the world came to know as big band swing — composed “Gee, Baby, Ain’t I Good To You?” just as The Roaring Twenties came to a close.
In fact, the song’s first studio recording, featuring Don performing with McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, came out just one week after the 1929 stock market crash that started the Great Depression.
The crash even inspired a revision of the song. Andy Razaf’s original words reflected the consumer-driven culture of the ‘20s, using expensive gifts to illustrate the depth of the narrator’s sentiments. “Bought you a fur coat for Christmas and a diamond ring,” said the initial lyrics, “a big Packard coupe and everything.” Ut-oh, Packard was bankrupted and went out of business. (“Big Cadillac car” took its place in the verse.)
The mid-1920s had been good for Don Redman. He was responsible for integrating the rhythmic approach of Louis Armstrong’s playing into his arrangements for Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra. In 1927 Redman was wooed away from Henderson to join McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, the house band at the celebrated Greystone Ballroom in Detroit.
Iit turned out the 1930s were darn good for Don as well. The trademark of his ever-more sophisticated band arrangements was the harmony he wrote to play under the group’s solos.
His brass and reed sections played off each other in a titillating call-and-response pattern; one section punctuated the figures of the other, while the melody moved the melody around to different orchestral sections and soloists. So innovative was the Don Redman style that it was to be widely imitated in jazz arrangements for decades to come.
Redmond remained active in music until his death in 1964 at age 64. And while he never again lived in West Virginia, he did not forget his home state, especially Harper Ferry’s Storer College, from which he graduated in 1920. His most lasting musical contribution to the institution was his composition of the “Storer College Alma Mater,” which endured throughout the school’s history.
Back to the Song
“Gee, Baby, Ain’t I Good to You?” was the first song Don Redman wrote for McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, but after its 1929 release, the tune went into cold storage.
More than a decade passed before the next major jazz artist recorded the song, and it turned out to be yet another West Virginian.
Saxophonist Chu Berry, a Wheeling, WV, native, recorded the song in 1941 on the flip side of his rendition of “Sunny Side of the Street.” (Sadly, it would be Berry’s last recording before his untimely death for an automobile accident in northern Ohio later that year.)
Two years later, Don’s song finally made the big time when the great Nat King Cole turned “Gee, Baby, Ain’t I Good To You?” into a hit, topping the 1943 R&B charts. Around the same time, Count Basie adopted the song as a favorite, using it to showcase vocalists, including Jimmy Rushing and Joe Williams.
Though modernists like Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakely and Paul Bley also recorded the tune over the years, it was among more traditional jazz players that “Gee, Baby, Ain’t I Good To You?” remains a favorite.
Our Take on the Tune
Last week was our first outing on this great old jazz standard.
When we started it, Veezy said she wasn’t sure she was familiar with it. By the time we finished it, it sounded like she wrote it herself!
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In our country, we often know it as “What Child Is This?” based on a Christmas verse written more than a century and a half ago. But, of course, the tune “Greensleeves” is even more deeply enshrined in our common human experience.
One of the oldest melodies we know, the song originally it wasn’t religious in nature at all. On the contrary, its earlier lyrics told the story of a painful romantic conundrum (with some, uh, subtly salacious references).
Popular legend even attributes the song to King Henry VIII, who was said to have written it for the ill-fated Anne Boleyn.
Or Not
That association, though, is wrong, says author Lisa Colton in her book Angel Song: Medieval English Music in History. Actually, Colton finds “Greensleeves” originated a generation later, during the reign of Henry’s daughter, Queen Elizabeth I.
At any rate, the melody is well over four centuries old and is, even now, still going strong. First published in 1580, the tune was used for a wide variety of 16th and 17th century broadside ballads.
In fact, so well known was “Greensleeves” by the time of William Shakespeare that he could refer to it by name three times in his play, “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” each time with a bit of a wink and a nod.
Losing Those Love’s Labors
That’s because the song’s original lyrics dealt with a spurned lover who accused one “Lady Greensleeves” of casting him off "discourteously," after he had done no less than (1) paid for her lodgings and bought her (2) a petticoat, (3) a pearl-bedecked gown and (4) a jeweled necklace.
And more. A scandalous twist is implied in the title. But to understand the naughty bits, we need to know that in Elizabeth’s day, the color green often hinted at promiscuity, suggesting images of a woman getting grass stains on her dress from a frolic or two in the woods.
The Christmas Connection
It was another century or so before this ancient, beautiful melody started being connected with the holidays.
By the 1680s the tune had definitely started getting “churched,” but it took another 200 years for British hymn writer William Chatterton Dix to come along and, in 1865, write "What Child Is This?" undoubtedly our own time’s most popular “Greensleeves” re-envisioning.
Ever since then, the song has clung to its religious and holiday veneer. It never really seems to get very old, does it?
Click here to enjoy our 2022 Christmas gift, with Vanessa, Dan and Sam soloing on “Greensleeves.”
Oh, and if you’d like to hear a vocal treatment, check out Floodster Emerita Michelle Hoge’s rendition of “What Child Is This?” in our Christmas playlist. Here’s a direct link to our “La Flood Navidad” Christmas show.
Meanwhile, have a joyful Christmas, dear friends. Here’s to comfort and joy all around!
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 decades now, Kathy Castner and her cousin, Charlie Bowen, sing duets whenever they have one of those rare chances to be together. Their musical connection goes back a long way.
As a child, Kathy regularly was brought to visit relatives in Ashland. Whenever she was, their grandmother usually assigned her cousin to sing her to sleep at bedtime. (Yes, Grandma Robertson was prescient about Bowen’s mad skills for putting audiences to sleep.)
One of the tune the young troubadour brought to bear on the little girl’s eyelids was this New Christy Minstrels classic, a song that still gets regular airplay on Top 40 radio.
About the Song
“Today” is a 1964 folk song written for the Minstrels by the group’s founder, Randy Sparks. And thereby hangs a tale.
Sparks formed that large-ensemble folk group in 1961 and with it quickly scored two hit in 1963 (“Green, Green” and “Saturday Night”). However, by 1964 creative tension within the organization prompted Sparks’ decision to leave.
But before quitting the group, whose name he sold to its managers, Sparks had one more project for the Christys; he was contracted to write the score for a film comedy called Advance to the Rear, and that work was to include his composing of “Today.”
Rocky Start to Stardom
“Today” — which critic Bruce Eder calls "achingly beautiful” and which became the second biggest hit of the Christys' long career — fell flat on its introduction to the group.
Legend has it that Sparks sang it for the bunch of them just days after he finished it, and nobody said a word. Absolute silence.
Finally, banjoist Larry Ramos reportedly spoke up. "I think I can speak for everyone here ... it's a piece of sh—, the same sh— you always write!"
"Is that how the rest of you feel too?" Sparks asked.
More silence.
"Well,” he said finally, “you'd best get used to it, because you're going to sing it anyway."
The song didn’t get any respect from the record company, either. Columbia Records veep Bill Gallagher reportedly hated it. However, the public, with dimes and dollars, vetoed all those objections. The Minstrels’ recording of “Today” became a nationwide hit in under six weeks.
And the Christys’ “Today” album — simultaneously released as a soundtrack album for the movie — made the year’s Top Ten on the LP charts, the group's highest charting album ever.
A loud “so there!” could be heard from the Sparks house.
Our Take on the Tune
These days, whenever Kathy comes to Huntington from her Cincinnati home (usually at Christmastime and again sometime during the summer), she almost always has an evening of music with The Flood, and “Today” usually is among the songs shared.
Here’s the latest rendition from last week’s jam, with sweet solos by Dan Cox, Veezy Coffman and Sam St. Clair and with Randy Hamilton joining Kathy and Charlie on the harmonies.
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
Christmas songs abound right now, but how about a tune for the downtrodden holiday shopper, the weary wielder of the maxed-out debit card?
Well, your friends in The Flood can’t pick up the tab, but we can at least give you a blues to suit your mood, brought to you from a recent gig.
After a day of rushing around spending money you don’t have to buy things people don’t want, just take our advice: If you lose your money, please don’t lose your mind!
Sonny and Brownie
Nobody ever did the blues better than Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.
Back in the late 1950s they recorded an incredible album for Smithsonian Folkways called "Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry Sing," which offered a number of original compositions, including this song.
It was from that album that we took our inspiration for this blues with which we often open or close a rehearsal, just because it's so much fun to play.
Folk Process
Now, we don’t do the tune exactly the way Sonny and Brownie did it. The whole “folk process” idea invites us to bring our own style and attitude to all the music we play. And that was something that Sonny and Brownie knew well, because they too were building on some blues they had heard from their own heroes.
The evidence is in the fact that the song’s provocative key line — “If you lose your money, please don’t lose your mind” — didn’t originate with them.
Back in 1936, Blind Boy Fuller used exactly the same line in his recording of “Keep Away From My Woman.” But, hey, it didn’t start with Fuller either.
Seven years earlier, in 1929, Blind Joe Reynolds used the same line to open his tune, “Outside Woman Blues,” a song, incidentally, that would be covered 40 years later by Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce’s classic rock group, Cream.
The bottom line is we’re in good company in offering our take on the tune.
Real Christmas Tunes
But for Christmas? Seriously? Okay, okay, it is a cheap trick for us to co-op this great old blues and try to sneak it into a Christmas rotation, so we’re prepared to make amends.
If you’re looking for a real holiday playlist, take a listen to the “La Flood Navidad” special blend over in our free Radio Floodango music streaming service. Just click here to whisked away to The Flood web site.
By the Way, Tonight…!
Oh, and meanwhile, if you’re in the Ashland, Ky., area tonight, we hope you’ll swing by Sal’s Italian Eatery and Speakeasy where The Flood is playing from 6 to 9 p.m.
As reported earlier, for this special night, we’re being joined by a pair of dear friends. Floodster Emerita Michelle Diane Hoge is traveling in from Cincinnati to sit in with her old band mates, and harmonicat Jim Rumbaugh, winner of the Ohio harmonica championship, also is on hand for the evening. For more about the gig and about this remarkable new venue, click 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
When a friend recently asked us what song has the longest association with The Flood, we had to stop and think. Several old-timers are still in the band’s repertoire.
The Carter Family-inspired “Solid Gone,” for instance, has been in our collective consciousness all along, starting way back to when David Peyton and Charlie Bowen were just a modest little duo in 1973.
Uncle Dave Macon’s “Way Downtown” has legs too; we have tapes from 1975 on which Charlie and Dave are doing that one with Roger Samples and Joe Dobbs the first time the new configuration began calling itself “The 1937 Flood.”
Regularly Reborn Song
But the longest-lived Floodified tune that we have the most fun with — the one that has a rebirth with every new incarnation of the band — is the hokum classic “Jug Band Music,” which, as reported here earlier, we started doing in 1976.
We learned the tune from a 1960s recording by our heroes, the Jim Kweskin Jug Band. And they learned it from a 1934 recording by everybody's heroes, The Memphis Jug Band, headed up by the legendary Will Shade.
Not unlike The Flood itself, the Memphis Jug Band didn't like to easily categorize its music, recording a wild mixture of ballads, dance tunes, knock-about novelty numbers, blues and even their own special take on pop tunes of their day.
This particular tune Kweskin called simply "Jug Band Music," but when it was originally recorded on Nov. 8, 1934, and released on Vocalion and Okeh, Shade called his composition “Jug Band Quartette.”
Jug Band Craze
Among hokum performers to spring up in Memphis in the 1920s, the Memphis Jug Band was the most recorded, releasing more than 100 sides between 1927 and 1934 (rivaled only by another long-time Flood favorite, Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, incidenally).
The jug band craze started in Louisville around 1905. By 1910 there were a number of bands active in that area, including string bands and jazz groups that added a jug player just to cash in on the craze.
In 1925, Will Shade first heard the records of a Louisville jug band called the Dixieland Jug Blowers. He quickly convinced a local Memphis musician called "Lionhouse" to switch from blowing an empty whiskey bottle to a gallon jug, added Tee Wee Blackman on guitar and Ben Ramey and the Memphis Jug Band was born.
Shade played guitar, harmonica and "bullfiddle" (a stand up bass made from a garbage can, a broom handle and a string). It was a loose-knit outfit with a constantly changing membership.
Sounds So Sweet…
They have a good five or six years, but by the mid 1930s, Memphis was in decline. Known as the "murder capital of the world," it was rife with corruption. Local politicians tried to combat the problems by closing down the gambling houses and brothels.
That crackdown also signaled the end of the jug band era, because it removed many of the venues where that rowdy music had thrived. For that reason, when Shade and the guys trouped to Chicago in November 1934, they probably knew it was to be their last recording session.
It was at that moment that this beloved jug band anthem was recorded, their celebratory lyrics a elegiac tribute to themselves, to their fellow musicians, and, most of all, to the music that even now sounds “so sweet … hard to beat.”
Our Take on the Tune
Every configuration of The Flood, from 1976 to the present, has done its own variation of this happy song, each one, in its way, a loving tribute to our heroes. (As reported here earlier, the song was even central to our video debut on YouTube back in 2008.)
This latest rendition, recorded at a recent gig, offers wonderful solos and fills by everyone in the band. Even the grins and winks seem to come through in the audio.
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“Honeysuckle Rose,” an absolute anthem of the Roaring Twenties, was born in a New York speakeasy almost a hundred years ago.
The story of the song’s roots is related by Barry Singer in his biography of lyricist Andy Razaf. The tune — or at least its title — was born at the Club Alabam in Harlem as far back as the winter of 1924, when a young Razaf won a chance to perform a song for which he would write both the words and music.
The whole business was staged at the club with full chorus of what Singer described as an "eye-pleasing bevy of show girls" billed as "The Honeysuckle Rosebuds." It was from those hoofers that Razaf picked his title: "Honeysuckle Rose."
The Name’s the Thing
Actually, Andy’s original melody was no great shakes — in fact, Razaf junked both it and the lyrics right after the show closed — but he just couldn’t forget that title.
Now fast-forward five years.
It’s 1929 and Razaf is working with his new partner — the great Fats Waller — to finish their third song for a soon-to-be-forgotten show called “Load of Coal.” We find Andy stitching his old title and a few other elements to the chorus. At some point, he decides he had better telephone Fats to check his work. It’s a good thing he does; over the phone, they have to add a new eight-bar bridge in the middle of the tune, because Waller can’t remember what he wrote the day before.
After many minutes of desperate humming and shouting back and forth, Razaf lays down the phone to dash to his piano and try out what they have. When he gets back, he finds the line is dead. Waller has gotten bored and hung up.
Neither Razaf nor Waller realize that they have written an immortal song. “We thought very little of it at the time," Razaf recalled.
(Of course, the tune would be recorded more than 500 times by major artists such as Tommy Dorsey, Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins, Earl Hines, Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Lena Horne, Nat King Cole and many others. Fats’ own 1934 recording was inducted in the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999.)
And From There…
“Honeysuckle Rose” was a defining piece for Waller and Razaf, who would collaborate on other memorable songs, including “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” “My Fate Is In Your Hands,” “Black And Blue,” “Blue Turning Gray” and “When Gabriel Blows His Horn.”
While Waller became one of the best-known entertainers of the ’30s and ’40s, Razaf went on to write lyrics for over a thousand more songs, including “In The Mood,” “Stompin’ At The Savoy” and “Memories Of You.”
Oh and if you’re ever in Asbury Park, NJ, you can tour the house where Fats and Andy wrote the song. “The Honeysuckle Rose House” at 119 Atkins still stands, looking much as it did in the late 1920s. And has its own website.
Our Take On the Tune
You can learn about how versatile a band is by listening to its handling of instrumentals. Without the poetics of the lyrics or the theatrics of the singer, it’s up to the soloists to bring drama to the song. To hear what we mean, listen to this four-minute track from a recent Flood show.
Vanessa Coffman opens the action with her tasteful statement of the melody. Then about a minute in, she begins to weave and spin brilliant new threads on that old familiar frame with her tenor sax, beautiful work that then inspires her bandmate, guitarist Danny Cox, when he follows with some gorgeous strings of his own. Yes, Veezy and Danny bring the honey to this rose.
The Swing Channel
If you’d like more of this style of music, don’t miss the free Swingin’ Channel in our Radio Floodango music streaming service.
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It had been an unproductive day for songwriters Paul Overstreet and Don Schlitz, and this pair was unaccustomed to dry spells. After all, together and individually, Overstreet and Schlitz had written dozens of Top 10 hits, had won multiple Grammys and each frequently had been named country music’s Songwriter of the Year.
Still, this day in 1988 was frustrating. Hours of guitar strumming had produced zero new ideas.
"Then, as we tried to find another way to say nothing, we came up with this song," Overstreet later told author Ace Collins. Soon came the line that would lead to the title: “You say it best when you say nothing at all.”
It was something, this particular nothing. Initially, though, Overstreet said, they thought the song was OK, but just… well, nothing special.
But that was before the late Keith Whitley heard it. Keith loved it, and, moreover, he was not going to let it get away. Not like the last time.
Earlier, Whiley had recorded a different Overstreet-Schlitz creation — “On the Other Hand” — only to watch it become a No. 1 hit for a competing artist, singer Randy Travis. Whitley said he was determined not to let "When You Say Nothing at All" meet the same fate.
And it didn’t.
In fact, to date, “When You Say Nothing at All” has been a hit for four different performers. Whitley, of course, 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 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.
"It's a freak thing," Krauss told The Los Angeles Times in March 1995. "It's kinda ticklin' us all. We haven't had anything really chart before. At all. Isn't it funny, though? We didn't know what's goin' on.... The office said, 'Hey, it's charting,' and we're like, 'Huh?'" The recording was named the Country Music Association’s Single of the Year and even hit the big screen when the rendition was used in the 1999 movie “The Other Sister.”
(By the way, during the time when Krauss' version was on the charts, Mike Cromwell, production director at Milwaukee’s WMIL-FM, concocted a duet merging elements of her version with Whitley's original. This post-mortem "duet" garnered national attention, though it was never released commercially.)
Our Take on the Tune
Danny and Randy brought us this song just a couple of weeks ago, and in no time it became a rehearsal night favorite.
Here’s our latest take on the tune, with Randy doing the honors on the vocals and everybody taking turns on the solos.
Meanwhile….
If this has got you in the mood for more Floody goodness, you can take a spin through other tunes that have visited the band’s rehearsal space lately.
Listen to the Year 2022 Channel on our free Radio Floodango music streaming feature. Click here to turn us on!
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For the first time in years, The Flood has started working on original compositions.
Currently, for instance, we’re studying with bandmate Vanessa Coffman to craft accompaniments for her original folk songs in a project to remaster the “Brave Brigade Pirate” album that she previewed earlier this year.
Meanwhile, to see if he has any tunes that might have a new life in a new millennium, Charlie is digging into his hippy diaries to bring out things he wrote — or sometimes just started writing and never finished — decades ago.
A Different Kind of Podcast This Time
Because some of these posts in Flood Watch are a kind of status report on assorted band projects, we thought you might enjoy a different kind of podcast this week, one that lets you eavesdrop on our noodling with one of these tunes.
The odd little melody in question is one that Bowen started writing on the front porch on a steamy summer night back in 1979. The work has remained unfinished for more than 40 years. In fact, it still doesn’t even have a name.
That figures, you might say, for a song that’s about … well, procrastination. As the opening lines goes, “Like the morning paper, with its day-old news, I’m always just one step behind…”
While its working title is “Druther Not,” a repeated bit of the lyric — “Opportunity’s calling, but, honey, I’m not home” — seems to be campaigning to become its real name. We’ll see about that. There’s no guarantee at this point that the song will ever really be finished.
What You Hear in the Audio
So this is truly a ”status report.” What you’ll hear in this audio is the band working together to craft an arrangement, each player working out a part.
The track opens with Charlie laying down the melody, and you can hear Randy Hamilton crafting a bass line for it to roll along on. Immediately, the soloists take up the challenge — first Danny Cox, then Sam St. Clair — cruising in and out of the curves on the foggy, winding road suggested by the chords and the tune.
For any visiting musical anthropologists amongst us, probably the most interesting point on the entire track comes about midway through, when we stop so Vanessa and Dan talk a little about the chords and the scales they are encountering.
(Yes, it is decidedly odd, this song, at least by Flood standards. Few tunes in the key of E come across Fmaj7 and Gmaj7.)
The payoff, then, is in the audio’s final atmospheric minutes, when Veezy and Danny put together what they’ve just discussed to become a delightful denouement as the tune rides off into the mist.
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One of Ray Charles’s first hits was “Mess Around,” released on Atlantic Records back in 1953, but actually in this case, Brother Ray was a little late to the party.
Many of the ideas for that song can been heard in a whole mess of New Orleans boogie piano riffs, starting as early as, say, Cow Cow Davenport’s playing in the late 1920s.
But if you want to go back even further — and, well, we generally do — there are references to dances called a “mess around” as far back the earliest days of jazz.
For instance, in his wonderful autobiography called Trumpet on the Wing, the great New Orleans jazzman Wingy Manone 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 Tune
As reported here earlier, the good-time hokum tunes of the 1920s and ‘30s have been part of The Flood’s oeuvre since its earliest days, and here — from a recent rehearsal — is testimony to the fact that that tradition is alive and rocking.
Our mess around — “4th Street Mess Around” — is the tune we learned from a spring 1930 recording by long-time Flood heroes, the remarkable Memphis Jug Band.
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About a year after she wrote this moving Appalachian song in 1965, folk legend Jean Ritchie came back to Kentucky from her New York home to perform it in a solo concert at Ashland Community College in Ashland, Ky.
Some of the earliest members of the Family Flood were lucky enough to be sitting in the front row that night. Memories of Jean’s cool-as-crystal-water voice singing a cappella on those mountain ballads still send shivers down our spines.
On that particular autumn evening in 1966, we also remember Ritchie introducing her newest song by saying, "It's nice to play this tune for people who don't need to be told what the L&N is or why we care when it doesn’t stop anymore."
Ritchie, who by then had been on the national folk music scene for 20 years, grew up in Viper, Ky., and the Louisville and Nashville tracks ran right through of the mouth of Slabtown Holler near her family home.
Difficult times began when the local coal mines closed, and the trains stopped coming. Ritchie typically eschewed controversial topics, but in the mid-1960s, the plight of impoverished coal miners in her native Perry County moved her to write this, perhaps her best known song.
Even then, though, she considered the subject touchy enough that she originally released "L&N" in 1965 under her maternal grandfather's name. “Than Hall” was named as the composer; it was the same name she used for the credit on another of her original songs of that period, “Blue Diamond Mines.”
But in the last decades of her life, Ritchie became increasing political. For instance, in 2008 — seven years before her death — she still owned the family farm in Viper, and she publicly fought against mountaintop removal, the form of strip mining that she called simply “a sin.”
Both Michelle Shocked and Kathy Mattea have covered “L&N” over the years, but the song was made famous when country music icon Johnny Cash published his own cover of the ballad after hearing his wife, June Carter Cash, sing it.
Our Take on the Tune
The weekly Flood rehearsal has always been an eclectic affair. A typical night will travel from old jazz standards of the 1930s and ‘40s with their flurry of quirky chords to little-known jug band tunes and blues. Maybe we’ll stop along the way to sample a few Flood originals that are still busy being born.
After all that musical wandering, we often end up back at some simpler folk song of our youth. Last week, for instance, the last moments of the evening were spent on this haunting tune that Ritchie built on just two well-considered chords.
Meanwhile….
If you’d like to hear more of our eclectic musical meandering this year, be sure to drop into The 2022 Channel of our free Radio Floodango music streaming service for a playlist of tunes we’ve flirted with starting in January of this year. Click here to turn us on.
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More than a hundred years ago, musicologist John Lomax recorded an African American woman named "Dink" singing a song as she washed her man's clothes in a Texas work camp on the banks of the Brazos River near Houston.
Lomax and his son, Alan, were the first to publish it, including it in American Ballads and Folk Songs, which Macmillan brought out in 1934.
A decade later, the great Josh White put the song on his first album. Since then, it has been recorded by scores of performers — Pete Seeger and Cisco Houston, Bob Dylan and Fred Neil — sometimes as "Fare Thee Well," but most often simply as "Dink's Song."
Now flash forward three quarters of a century and a highlight of Joel and Ethan Coen’s extraordinary 2013 film “Inside Llewyn Davis,” set in one winter’s week in 1961 Greenwich Village, is Oscar Isaac, in the title role, performing a moody rendition of the same tune.
That moment especially resonates with all us folk music lovers, because most of us learned the song from a 1960s recording by the late folk genius Dave Van Ronk, whose work seems to have inspired the Coens’ film in the first place. Dear Dave. They didn’t call him “the mayor of MacDougal Street” for nothing.
Our Take on the Tune
Have you ever notice the magic in folk melodies, that they are both ancient and stunningly contemporary at the same time?
And the magic doesn’t end there. Besides their wonderful timelessness, these well-worn melodies also are almost universal in their emotional appeal.
This song has floated around the Floodisphere for many years, but it didn’t really take flight until Vanessa came along to blend it with a soulful Old World aire, and then Randy stepped up to take the lead on the vocals. Here, with pensive soloing by Dan and Sam, is our merging of the thoroughly American “Dink’s Song” and the lovely Scottish “Loch Lomond.”
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Nowadays “The Nearness of You” often conjures a mental image of 21st century song stylist Norah Jones. And, indeed, Jones did release a gorgeous rendition of the song in 2001, leading some to think that she wrote it. Actually, though, the tune is twice Norah’s age.
Hoagy Carmichael wrote the song in 1938, originally intending it for an odd little movie project.
In his Carmichael biography Stardust Melody, Richard H. Sudhalter reports that Hoagy dashed off the yet-unnamed melody for “a screen adaptation of Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ featuring a 15-year-old Mickey Rooney as Puck,” but that production fell through.
Then with lyrics from Ned Washington, the composition became “The Nearness of You” and was scheduled for inclusion in the feature film Romance in the Rough. However, that film, too, was never produced.
Celluloid Confusion
There is some celluloid confusion about the song’s place in films. Sudhalter notes that despite accounts to the contrary, “The Nearness of You” was never scheduled to be included in the 1938 Paramount film, Romance in the Dark, starring John Boles, Gladys Swarthout and John Barrymore.
Probably because of the similar titles — Romance in the Rough vs. Romance in the Dark — writers often have mistakenly credited the introduction of “The Nearness of You” to Swarthout in Romance in the Dark. That error is recorded in at least one reference book, numerous sheet music books and nowadays on hundreds of websites.
Charting
In reality, after the Hollywood false stops, the song had to wait for republication in 1940 to win its place as a beloved jazz standard. That was the year Glenn Miller and his Orchestra introduced a recording of “The Nearness of You” with vocals by Ray Eberle.
The Bluebird label recording appeared on the pop charts at the end of June and remained there for 11 weeks, peaking at No. 5.
In 1953 the song charted again, this time with Bob Manning singing with Monty Kelly and His Orchestra. His recording climb the charts to No. 16. Since then, the tune has been recorded dozens of times, by everyone from Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong to James Taylor, Barbra Streisand, Etta James and Seal.
Dueling Pundits
It’s fun how the critics have differed wildly in their comments about this particular Carmichael creation. For instance, in his book American Popular Songs: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950, Alec Wilder called the song “simple and unclever,” adding that it is “the sort of song that an academic musical mind would sneer at.”
As if to answer that challenge, Yale University music professor Allen Forte devoted no fewer than five pages to the song in his book Listening to Classic American Popular Songs. Forte called it “unusual,” “remarkable,” and “striking,” and even offering an effusive “Congratulations, Hoagy!” for Carmichael’s slightly concealed replication of the refrain’s opening phrase in the verse.
Our Take on the Tune
This tune really hasn’t made The Flood set list yet — we’ve only just started working with it — but it sure seems like it wants to settle down with us. Listen to everybody listening to everybody else.
For instance, check out how midway through, Veezy’s solo establishes a lovely mood that Danny beautifully echos when he takes his turn. Yeah, it’s not a regular Floodified number yet, but stay tuned.
More Ballads
By the way, if softer sounds are what your day is calling for, we’ve got the play list for you! Tune into the Ballads Channel of the free Radio Floodango music streaming service for the tunes for your mood.
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One of the wonderful things about the folk tradition in music is that you learn so much from people you know, sometimes from relatives, but more often from good friends.
Terry Goller, a remarkable singer and guitar player who taught our whole community about folk music, was — long before we even formed The Flood — one of those inspiring friends.
Terry was on hand for some of the seminal moments in the earliest days of The Flood’s history. And in our antediluvian history as well. For instance, as illustrated above, Goller was one of the first to recognize in the late 1960s the budding Autoharp prowess in his good friend David Peyton.
And a few years later, Terry was the headliner on that magical winter night in 1971 at Ashland (Ky.) Community College, the evening we have called the genesis of the band.
As we noted in an earlier report here, Goller shared the stage that night with Brother Peyton and his partner, fellow Flood co-founder Roger Samples, while Pamela and Charlie Bowen sat in awe in the audience.
Not only that, in August 1972, Terry and his wife Pat were at the very first of those “Bowen Bash” music parties where he introduced us to the music of an exciting new singer/songwriter named John Prine, blowing everyone away.
Terry always tapped into The Next Big Thing. Working on several popular local radio shows, he also was often teaching guitar at music shops and performing at parties and at local folk venues. Though quite busy, he nonetheless usually had time show us a few licks and to tell us the history of the tunes he was playing. (Yes, our love of musical storytelling owes much to Mister Goller.)
Terry died nearly 40 years ago this month, but he's still often on our minds. For example, one of the songs that cropped up at the end of last week’s rehearsal traces directly back to Terry and to our earliest days with him.
In fact, the very first time we ever heard "Dusty Boxcar Wall," it was being sung by Terry Goller and his buddy Dave Bias in the summer of 1967 at the Summit Coffee House on Marshall University’s campus, a beloved venue that Terry himself was instrumental in establishing when he was a sophomore there.
About the Song
So the song was very new when Goller and Bias started singing it. Just two years earlier it had been introduced by composer Eric Andersen on his debut album for Vanguard, “Today is the Highway.”
It has been said that Andersen was the first of the “new Dylans” among the mid-’60s folksinging upstarts. And about the same time that the original Dylan was settling in and conquering New York’s Greenwich Village, Eric was dropping out of college in Geneva, NY, and hitchhiking west to San Francisco to try his luck singing solo in North Beach coffeehouses and seeking out the poets of the Beat Generation.
In liner notes for that first album, Stacey Williams said “Dusty Boxcar Wall” was written “on the Bay Bridge between Berkeley and San Francisco,” adding, “Eric had been performing at the Cabale coffeehouse in Berkeley with a city group that did country music, The Snopes County Camp Followers.”
Wanting to do a solo with the Snopes group, according to Williams, Andersen wrote “this archetypal song of death, love and separation.”
By the way, Berkeley’s famed Cabale coffeehouse was founded in late 1962 by folksinger Debbie Green, who later became the first Mrs. Eric Andersen.
Our Take on the Tune
Flash forward 60 years to the Bowen house.
While Charlie has given his new banjo the nickname of “Buzz Kill,” the instrument actually does have its moments, especially when the tune on the table is of the old folksong variation.
Here — as Danny, Randy, Sam and Charlie have a go at this classic Eric Andersen tune — the banjo brings an appealing little lope.
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What a happy coincidence it was that our saxophonist Veezy Coffman brought her shiny, silver soprano to the rehearsal as we were just starting to work out our arrangement of “Moondance.”
It was unbeknownst to her (shoot, unbeknownst to all of us) that a sax — specifically a member of that high-flying end of the saxophone family — was fundamental to Van Morrison’s composition of this classic tune.
Morrison, while famously closed-mouthed about the origins of most of his songs, has said about this one, “I wrote the melody first. I played the melody on a soprano sax and I knew I had a song, so I wrote lyrics to go with the melody.”
Morrison initially said he didn’t really have any words to particularly describe the song, but later added, “’Sophisticated’ is probably the word I’m looking for. For me, ‘Moondance’ is a sophisticated song. Frank Sinatra wouldn’t be out of place singing it.”
Sophisticated, indeed, said Morrison biographer John Collis, who commented that “Moondance” is more commercially accessible for most radio stations than a lot of Van’s earlier work.
Collis called it "an important song in the development of Morrison's career, since it indicated to radio station programmers a previously unsuspected versatility. Stations that would never have considered playing, say ’Slim Slow Slider’ found that the smooth, jazzy sophistication of 'Moondance' was more to their taste."
It is widely believed that “Moondance” today is Morrison’s favorite of all his compositions. It is the one he most frequently performs in concert. And others love it too. It placed right in the middle of Rolling Stone magazine’s December 2004 feature “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time” and it is listed among The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s “500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.”
Our Take on the Tune
When we first started fiddling with this tune, it didn’t seem to gel for us. But that was back before our brother Randy Hamilton returned to the fold after being gone for a couple of years.
And when we’ve discovered that it was one of Randy’s all-time favorite songs too, we just turned the vocals over to him and suddenly “Moondance” has lately started finding its footing in The Flood. Here, as a kind of progress report, is the latest rendition, with solos by the whole crew, Danny, Sam and Veezy.
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Regular readers/listeners love all those scintillating sax solos by Vanessa Coffman, and with good reason! This talented 20-year-old started in January 2020 rocking our repertoire on her tenor, Blue, as well as on her bari, Viper, and her soprano, Savoy.
And member of the her Flood family know Veezy also is a fine singer, as demonstrated in this song, which she has brought us earlier this year. Listen as Danny Cox leads us on beautifully framing Vanessa’s lovely vocal.
About the Song
"Don't Know Why" was Norah Jones' first single.
The song launched her to stardom, but, contrary to what some folks assume, Jones didn't write it. Instead, it was written in 1999 by New York City-based songwriter-guitarist Jesse Harris, who played a key role in Jones’ rise to Grammy-winning renown.
A few weeks after he wrote “Don’t Know Why,” Harris recorded it himself and released it under the name of “Jesse Harris and The Ferdinandos.” He sold the album on his website.
It was a year earlier that Harris met Norah Jones when he and a group of other musicians put on a clinic at the University of North Texas, where Jones was a student. The two of them stayed in touch, and in 1999 at his urging she moved to New York City to pursue music.
Notably, Jones’ version of "Don't Know Why,” which was nominated for the Record of the Year Grammy, was the first take of a demo recording session she did live with her band on Oct. 8, 2000.
"I just remember we walked into the control room thinking we would try it again, and the engineer looked floored," Harris later recalled. "He said, 'Man, that is amazing. That was it.' "
The song spent 24 weeks on the Hot 100 before it reached the top 40, making it the longest ascent by a female artist in one chart run.
That year Jones cleaned up at the Grammys, winning all five awards she was nominated for. And of course, it was "Don't Know Why" that she performed on the awards show.
The Lyrics
Built around the lyric "I don't know why I didn't come," the song is about the empty feeling of being alone. Incidentally, Harris says his song is not autobiographical, that he often writes about loss that has nothing to do with his personal life. Beyond that, he prefers not to discuss his lyrics. "I think songs have different meanings for different people,” he says, “so I'm reluctant to impose my own meaning.”
But over the years, others have had fun with his tune.
For instance, Norah Jones once performed on TV’s Sesame Street, playfully lamenting about the letter "Y," singing, "Don't know why Y didn't come." (Of course, the errant letter eventually does show up, and, in good Sesame Street style, everyone gets along and learns something.
Our Take on the Tune
Just as we did.
Click here to hear our take on the tune, with Veezy’s vocal framed by solos from Danny Cox and Sam St. Clair.
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Controversy surrounds the question of who actually wrote the 1930 standard “On the Sunny Side of Street.”
If you rely only on what is printed on the sheet music, you see Jimmy McHugh listed as the composer. So, why is there an enduring legend in jazz circles that the melody actually was written by The Flood’s great hero Fats Waller?
To this day, Waller’s contribution to the melody line remains unconfirmed, but there is some compelling evidence that the tune might have been his work.
For starters, early drafts of the song appear to be in Fats’ own handwriting. In addition, it is well documented that during some hard times in the late 1920s, Waller was writing and selling a number of tunes to other songwriters.
Maurice Waller Weighs In
Finally, consider the testimony of Fats’ son Maurice, in his 1977 book, Fats Waller. “Sometimes I’d inadvertently play a song he had sold to another composer and all hell would break loose,” Maurice wrote in the memoir.
“One afternoon I was playing, ‘I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,’ and he heard me. Dad came storming down the stairs in a rage. ‘Maurice, I don’t want you to ever play that damn song. I don’t want you to even whistle it. Do you understand?’
“I didn’t understand, but later on he explained how he had sold that tune and other tunes just for drinking money, and it bothered him terribly that they had become hits.”
And what about “On the Sunny Side of the Street”? Here’s what Maurice Waller wrote about that:
“The most vivid memory I have of one of those incidents dates back to the time when … Dad was listening to the radio one Sunday afternoon. Suddenly he became infuriated and smashed his fist through the living room’s beautiful glass French doors. The song was ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street,’ a hit record credited to Jimmy McHugh. Dad had sold the song for a few bucks when he was broke back in the ‘20s. McHugh also ‘wrote’ ‘I Can’t Give You Anything but Love.’”
The Lyrics
Meanwhile, authorship of the lyrics of both those song — the work of teacher/poet Dorothy Fields — has never been questioned.
Fields, who died in 1974 at age 69, was the first woman inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. She met Jimmy McHugh in 1927 and began a seven-year partnership that produced some of her greatest lyrics, from “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” to “I’m in the Mood for Love,” which was her first song to rise to No. 1 on the Hit Parade.
Well, who ever wrote the melody — Fats Waller or Jimmy McHugh — the wonderfully bright, cheerful and engaging “On the Sunny Side of the Street” has been a favorite of musicians and audiences since it first came out. Ted Lewis made the first recording in 1930.
But it was Louis Armstrong who recorded the classic rendition in 1934 and the song became closely associated with him. Other versions include those by Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman with Peggy Lee, Dave Brubeck and Jimmy Smith. Arguably the most popular arrangement was by Tommy Dorsey and the Sentimentalists, which achieved chart success in 1945, reaching the No. 16 spot on the Billboard charts.
Our Take on the Tune
This 2022 take of our old favorite was the very first tune we played on a happy summer evening at the Bowen House just a few weeks ago.
Veezy Coffman was just back from a month’s vacation with her family and everyone in the room was so happy to see and hear her again, as you can here right here.
The Flood has been loving this tune for more than 20 years. For instance, it was the 11th track on our first album back in 2001, with Joe Dobbs and Sam St. Clair rocking the solos on a rather mellow instrumental rendition. Click the button below to hear it:
A few years later, the song began a long love affair with Floodster Emerita Michelle Lewis (now Michelle Hoge). In fact, it was the first song she sang in public with the band.
The event occurred as the band traveled into the eastern mountains to play at the 2nd annual Snowshoe Institute, a cooperative arts project by Marshall University, West Virginia University, the W.Va. Humanities Council and Snowshoe Mountain.
Joe asked engineer George Walker, Michelle’s husband, to record the evening’s performances for use on his “Music from the Mountains,” so we have this recording of Michelle’s maiden flight with The Flood, complete with Joe’s introduction:
Yes, all sunny, all the time.
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There’s nothing new and special about the melody to the 1930 jazz standard “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone.” In fact, it’s a bit of a ripoff, because Sam Stept’s chords are virtually the same sequence as what Ray Henderson used in his 1925 composition, "Has Anybody Seen My Gal? (Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue).”
But it is the lyrics that everyone remembers, a saucy admonishment between parting paramours in which the narrator tells the erstwhile lover, “if you can't say anything real nice it's better not to talk at all, that’s my advice!”
Comedian / dancer / composer Sidney Clare penned those words, which have grabbed the imagination of a wide range of performers for the past 90 years, from The Mills Brothers to Willie Nelson, from Frank Sinatra to Leon Redbone, from Billie Holiday to Ann Margaret, from Bob Wills to Bill Haley. And the song has been recorded as recently as 2007 by Manteca Beat and in 2009 by The Original Rabbit Foot Spasm Band.
The Comic Effect
Admiration of the tune’s comic character has a long history.
Norma Shearer sang it in the 1939 film “The Women” as a joke when she leaves her girlfriends at tea to take a call from her philandering husband. TV anchor Edwin Newman sang it in 1984 during his hosting of “Saturday Night Live.”
And is there a boomer in the room who remembers the character Michigan J. Frog doing a killer rendition of it in the 1955 Warner Bros. cartoon “One Froggy Evening”?
By the way, Sid wasn’t one of your one-hit wonders. Shoot, he probably could have retired, for instance, on the royalties from “On the Good Ship Lollipop” which he wrote with Richard Whiting for Shirley Temple’s 1934 film “Bright Eyes.”
Hedzups, Trivia Fans!
Finally, there is one more cool pop culture highlight in Sidney’s bio.
The Oxford English Dictionary credits Clare with the world’s earliest usage on record of the term “rock and roll.” Yep, he wrote those words in 1934 in his soundtrack for a movie called “Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round.”
Sidney Clare was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970, two years before his death at 82.
Our Take on the Tune
For us, a perfect warmup song to get ready for an evening of music is one whose chords are familiar enough that we don’t have to think about them too hard, but also give us enough stretching out room so that we can just sit back and enjoy each other’s company. This happy tune from Grandpa’s day checks all the boxes.
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The late Aunt Jennie Wilson, who was born in 1900 in Logan County, WV, learned tunes from family members and other musicians in her coalfield community and was among the first women in her region to play the banjo.
Our dear friend Dave Peyton — who is much on our minds, since today is the second anniversary of his death — got to know Jennie in the 1960s and learned a number of her songs, many of which he taught The Flood over the years. One of our all-time favorites is “Georgie Buck,” Jennie’s old play-party tune that has been in our repertoire for about 20 years now. Below is a 2008 video that Pamela Bowen shot of David leading us on it, with solos by Doug Chaffin, Joe Dobbs and Sam St. Clair.
But with the song comes a mystery. After a few decades of thinking this relatively obscure tune was a classic West Virginia folk song, Dave was astounded to find it on the 2006 debut album by The Carolina Chocolate Drops, who reported that they learned it from African-American string band fiddler Joe Thompson.
Researching further, Peyton learned that the song actually was heard in many parts of the South, but was relatively rare. So, how in the world, he wondered, did a tune that experts today characterize as “a black Southern banjo song” find its way to the ears of a young white girl on the banks of the Guyandotte River at the start of the 20th century?
Jennie Wilson couldn’t be asked — by the time of The Chocolate Drops released their debut Dona Got a Ramblin’ Mind album, Aunt Jennie had been dead for 14 years — but a veteran reporter like Peyton was undeterred. Talking about it with Appalachian culture authorities, David came up with a theory. Jennie — who started playing square dances and parties when still a teen-ager — probably learned the song from African American musicians who came through Logan County in the 1920s to work on the railroad and/or in the coal mines. Nowadays it is well-documented that some mountain music and dance were influenced by black traditions of rhythmic dance and songs.
The Elizabeth Cotton Connection
“Georgie Buck” also was in the repertoire of Chapel Hill, NC, guitarist and banjo player Elizabeth Cotten who, at 67, taught the same song to a 19-year-old Taj Mahal.
The blues and roots music connoisseur was still thinking of the song 40 years later when he recorded his 1999 Kulanjan album. During the recording session, Taj played it to the Malian musicians who were recording with him; then when he put down his guitar, they started to play their own version based around a 6-string hunter’s harp called a “kamale ngoni.”
This may be as close as one gets to how the blues once sounded long before even the wax-cylinder recordings at the turn of the century, Taj said, adding, after the last notes faded, “That’s five centuries there; the music just went around in a big ring.”
Our Take on the Tune
Meanwhile, Brother Peyton always loved it when his Flood family gave a new spin to old songs, but even he probably couldn’t have imagined our 2022 take on this tune.
Just picture Dave grinning to hear Veezy’s rollicking sax backed by Charlie’s new banjo. To hear our current version of the tune, click here.
Everything old is new again, and while the lyrics might say that “Georgie Buck is dead,” his song seems to be more alive than ever.
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The jazz standard “Makin’ Whoopee” — introduced in a 1928 stage musical with a performance by legendary song-and-dance man Eddie Cantor — is built around the sassiest words ever penned by one of the great lyricists of the Roarin’ Twenties.
Gus Kahn was born in 1886 in Bruschied, Germany, son of a cattle farmer who emigrated to the United States four years later and moved his family to Chicago.
After graduating from high school, Gus worked as a clerk in a mail order business before launching one of the most successful and prolific careers on Tin Pan Alley.
In the next 30 years, Kahn contributed to an extraordinary number of Great American Songbook numbers. Like what? you say. Like “Pretty Baby,” “Ain’t We Got Fun?,” “Carolina in the Morning,” “Toot, Toot, Tootsie *Goo’ Bye!),” “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby,” “My Baby Just Cares for Me,” “Dream a Little Dream of Me.”
No wonder that in 1951 — 10 years after his death — Gus was featured in a popular movie about his life.
“I’ll See You in My Dreams” starred Danny Thomas as Kahn opposite Doris Day as Gus’s wife, Grace LeBoy. The film was a serious hit, Warner Brothers' second-highest-grossing film of the entire year.
Walter Donaldson
Gus had a life-long friendship with his main collaborator, composer Walter Donaldson (who you may remember from our earlier post about their “My Blue Heaven.”) Their first collaboration was “My Buddy” in 1922. They went on to compose over one hundred songs together.
In 1928, the pair composed all the tunes for a show called “Whoopee!” based on Owen Davis's play, “The Nervous Wreck.” Included in the score was “Makin’ Whoopee,” the winking-est and nodding-est number of the season. The title refers to love and marriage. Quickly, though, "making whoopee" becoming a euphemism for recreational love making. Gus’s lyrics begin with a sardonic celebration of a wedding (“another bride, another June … a lot of shoes, a lot of rice”), then moves on to the love nest and babies and responsibilities (‘washing dishes and baby clothes, he’s so ambitious he even sews…) but then to affairs and confrontations, possible divorce, a visit to a judge…
The 1928 show was successful enough, but oh, that song! In the same year that it debuted on Broadway, it also was recorded Bing Crosby and Paul Whiteman and the next year by Rudy Vallée. Then in the 1950s, after that Danny Thomas / Doris Day movie, the song was back in a big way, with versions by Nat King Cole, Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker, Frank Sinatra, Dinah Washington, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald.
And that isn’t the end. More recently, it has been recorded Dr. John and Rickie Lee Jones, by Cyndi Lauper and Tony Bennett, by Rod Stewart and Elton John.
Our Take on the Tune
Honestly, we don’t know how a band that’s been around for nearly half a century — one that has a special love for novelty and good-time tunes of the 1920s and ‘30s — could have missed this one.
But the fact is it’s only now that The Flood started playing around with this classic. Guess it took our newest members — Veezy Coffman and Danny Cox — to open our ears to it. We’re sure glad they did.
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Many of us grew up listening to The Coasters, the iconic 1950s band that bridged the gap between doo-wop and R&B, that brought humor and sass to the birth of rock ’n’ roll. Remember “Yakety Yak” and “Charlie Brown,” “Along Came Jones” and “Poison Ivy,” “Wake Me, Shake Me” and “Little Egypt”?
But before any of those tunes topped the charts, it was a lesser known Coasters cut that grabbed us. Picture it: Hot summer, 1957, and into our shiny new transistor radios The Coasters came sashaying into our ears with a sexy little song that said, yeah, she may go to the baker for cake and to the butcher for steak, but when she wants good lovin’? …well!
It was a winking and nodding Jerry Leiber-Mike Stoller composition called “(When She Wants Good Lovin’) My Baby Comes to Me.”
The song, a minor hit for The Coasters, was resurrected nine years later when a little known group called The Chicago Loop took a rendition of it to No. 37 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Rock trivia-lovers like to point out this disc because it features a young Michael Bloomfield on the guitar and Barry Goldberg on keyboards.
But in the Floodisphere, we were much more impressed with a different pressing of the song released one year earlier. Favorite folksinger Tom Rush’s 1965 self-titled debut Elektra album included a version of the tune, accompanied by bassist Bill Lee along with John Sebastian (of The Lovin’ Spoonful) and Fritz Richmond (of The Jim Kweskin Jug Band.)
Choosing the song was a rather bold move for Rush at a time when some music purists were trying — in vain — to keep the gap between rock and folk as wide as possible. In his liner notes, Tom pointed out that the song was released on the flip side of “Great Big Idol with the Golden Head,” adding, “I am a great admirer of The Coasters.”
It was back in the 1970s that Dave Peyton, Rog Samples and Charlie Bowen started playing around with the song because it definitely had jug band vibe going on.
Want to hear a fast and furious take from an August night in 1979 (with our buddy Jack Nuckols just killing it on the spoons)? Click the button below:
After that, the song went back to sleep in our consciousness for, oh, a half century or so.
Then last winter, Randy Hamilton started singing harmony with Charlie on the chorus and suddenly the song was back, evolving into a fine vehicle for cool solos by Danny Cox, Veezy Coffman and Sam St. Clair. Click here to hear the 2022 version of this early rock classic.
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“Memphis in June” was written by Hoagy Carmichael and Paul Francis Webster for the 1945 George Raft movie “Johnny Angel.” Carmichael himself, playing a character named "Celestial O'Brien,” performed the tune in the film, then revisited it on several subsequent recordings.
A Musicians’ Favorite
While it isn’t one of the better known Carmichael compositions, “Memphis in June” is a particular favorite among musicians, covered 40 times over the years in various genres and formats.
For instance, 16 years after the movie, Nina Simone delivered perhaps the definitive version of the song. (Of course, almost any song Simone approached was definitively addressed). Simone's jazzy 1961 reading is tinged with a bluer quality that puts the emphasis on Memphis.
A half century later, Annie Lennox brought a wonderful interpretation of the composition to her 2014 “Nostalgia” album, a reading full of warmth and feeling that some think are missing from Hoagy’s 1945 original.
Meanwhile, Bob Dylan gave a hearty shout-out to song on his 1985 “Empire Burlesque” album. Remember how Bob’s song “Tight Connection To My Heart” drew this word picture?
Well, they're not showing any lights tonight
And there's no moon.
There's just a hot-blooded singer
Singing "Memphis in June.”
Our Take on the Tune
Back in the days when we would ride on — and occasionally even perform on — the good ol’ Delta Queen steamboat, it often meant a reunion with a dear friend, the boat’s band leader, legendary New Orleans cornetist Connie Jones.
We learned “Memphis in June” from Connie. On his album, it was an instrumental, but whenever we’d ask for it on board the boat, Connie would sing it.
From a recent rehearsal, this is The Flood’s latest take on the tune, conjuring up memories of sunny days up in The Delta Queen’s Texas Lounge, seeing Connie, eyes closed and grinning as he purred those sweet lyrics. Here then, in memory of Connie Jones, is Hoagy’s love song to summer.
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Many “river” songs try to tap into the romance of riverboats, but few can claim to be born on the river and be written by an actual steamboater.
New Orleans clarinetist Sidney Arodin got his start in music in the 1920s working in bands that entertained on excursion boats that traveled up and down the Mississippi River.
“(Up a) Lazy River,” Arodin’s most famous competition, was a tossed-off composition based on a common jazz chord progression that Arodin learned on the boats to use as a warm-up exercise before a performance. For the tune, Sid simply slowed it down to a lazier pace.
Sidney’s Start
Now, the story goes that at 15 Arodin got his first clarinet and took lessons for only two months. This was the sum total of his "legit" musical training, until years later when he took a week off to teach himself a bit of music theory after being fired from a band for not knowing how to read the sheet music.
His very first gig was a Saturday night dance in his hometown of Westwego, Louisiana. When a combo hired from New Orleans hit town minus an ill clarinetist, Arodin ran barefoot through mud and oyster shells to grab his own clarinet.
From his 16th birthday onward, Arodin was rarely at home. First, he was hired on the riverboats, then he eventually made it to New York City where he worked with Johnny Stein's Original New Orleans Jazz Band beginning in 1922. (In the mid-'20s in that group he played with the young still-unknown Jimmy Durante.)
The Hoagy Carmichael Connection
It was during Sidney’s New York years that he met his famous collaborator. As Hoagy Carmichael wrote in his 1965 autobiography, Sometimes I Wonder, it was a mutual friend, Harry Hostetter, who introduced them.
“Harry met a lot of musicians in the Broadway area,” Hoagy wrote, “and he came running up to me one night.”
“‘This guy, Sidney Arodin, plays a pretty clarinet and he’s got a tune you gotta hear, Hoag.’”
“‘Where?’”
“‘Over on 56th Street in a clip joint.’”
That night, Hoagy and Harry dropped in. “It was a shabby brick-front walk-up on the second floor,” he recalled, “and the only customer was a balding man of about 55 with a hired girl on each arm, drinking champagne. They must have clipped this gent for five hundred at least before they let him out. Harry and I were guests of Sidney’s, so none of the girls glanced our way.
“Sidney played his tune and I was highly pleased,” Carmichael wrote. “I knew Harry couldn’t be wrong. In the ensuing weeks, I wrote a verse and a lyric and titled it ‘Lazy River.’”
Carmichael went on, “The ambition of every songwriter was now accomplished, although I didn’t know it then — that of having in his folio something on the order of a folk song that could be played and sung in most any manner, something that could be sung all the way through by drunken quartets or by blondes over a piano bar.”
Carmichael made the very first recording of “Lazy River” in 1930 for Victor with Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Joe Venuti and Red Norvo. That was followed in 1932 with cover versions both by Louis Armstrong and by Phil Harris.
One of the most beloved rendering of “Lazy River” came in 1942 with The Mill Brothers’ Decca recording, but, hey, there is no shortage of versions to choose from. It is one of the most recorded numbers in the Great American Songbook, and hundreds of covers of “(Up A) Lazy River” have been released, and are still coming out today.
Sid’s Last Years
In the 1930s, Arodin returned to Louisiana to gig with combos assembled by assorted New Orleans trumpeters, including Wingy Manone, Sharkey Bonano and Louis Prima. But for his last seven years starting in 1941, Arodin's health failed and his musical appearances became less frequent.
Curiously, while he cut quite a few sides with quite a few groups during his playing career, Sidney himself never recorded his most famous song.
Doug and The Jazz Box
Our take on the tune: Our buddy Doug Chaffin wasn’t feeling too swell earlier this week when Randy Hamilton, Danny Cox and Charlie Bowen landed on his doorstep. However, we brought with us a secret medicine just guaranteed to make him feel better. It was Charlie’s new guitar, a sweet 2016 D’Angelico Excel — a hollow-body arch top jazz box — which we immediately put into Doug’s experienced hands.
Well, after Doug strummed a chord or two, we could hear him already smiling behind his face mask. Listen to him just swinging in the living room on this great old jazz standard.
More Doug? Coming Right Up!
If you’d like to spend a little more time with Doug Chaffin in your ears, check out to the Doug Channel on our free music streaming service, Radio Floodango.
A couple dozen Doug-enriched tracks await you. Click here to get started.
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One of America’s greatest train song was first recorded by a cowboy band, a bunch of real Oklahoma wranglers who were not only good musicians, but also, as one of their earliest backers said, could “ride or rope anything that has horns, hide or hair.”
On May 11, 1926, members of Otto Gray’s Cowboy Band traveled from Ripley, Oklahoma, to St. Louis to wax two sides for Okeh. Their first number was issued as “Pistol Pete's Midnight Special,” named for their lead singer, guitarist Dave “Pistol Pete” Cutrell.
The group, which toured tirelessly until its breakup in 1936 — often traveling in Cadillac sedans made look like railroad locomotives, complete with cow catchers — became America’s first nationally famous cowboy band. A success on the theater circuits of the era, they were touted for their showmanship with whip and rope tricks, their music and varied repertoire, their flashy costumes and their visual humor.
About the Song
That first song from their Okeh session became even more famous. “Midnight Special” is a traditional folk song thought to have originated among prisoners in the South.
The lyrics first appeared in print in 1905 in an article published by African American scholar Howard Odum. Two decades later, in 1927, Carl Sandburg offered two different versions in his classic folk music collection, The American Songbag. That represented the first published versions of the song’s music and words.
Also in 1927, Louisiana-born blues artist Cryin’ Sam Collins recorded the song for Gennett Records. Incidentally, his was the first version to refer to the train’s “ever-lovin’ light.” After Collins, the world would have to wait a few more years for Huddie Ledbetter (“Lead Belly”) to fully establish the song’s prison cred. In 1934, he recorded a version of “Midnight Special” at Louisiana’s Angola Prison for John and Alan Lomax, who then mistakenly reported Lead Belly as the song’s author.
The Lomaxes, in their book, Best Loved American Folk Songs, told a credible story identifying the Midnight Special as a train from Houston shining its light into a cell in the Sugar Land Prison. They said Ledbetter's version was a ballad “to match ‘Hard Times Poor Boy.’ Like so many American folk songs,” they added, “its hero is not a man, but a train."
About That Light…
There always has been a bit of controversy over what it means for that "ever-lovin' light" to shine on you.
Some folks says it is about some kind of salvation, that the light of the train that could take you away from those prison walls. In this context, it is reminiscent of the imagery of such gospel songs as “Let the Light from Your Lighthouse Shine on Me.”
On the other hand, Sandburg had a darker view. The poet believed the light meant that the subject of the song would rather be run over by a train than spend even one more night in jail!
Either way, as Bob Dylan once said in another context, "imagine it would be some kind of change."
Our Take on the Tune
Nineteen years ago, when we went into the studio to record our third album with the late George Walker engineering, “Midnight Special” was the first number we laid down. After that, though, for some reason the tune just sort of drifted out of our collective consciousness.
Until lately. Our old buddy, Floodster Emeritus Paul Martin has been dropping into the jam sessions recently, and that’s got us revisiting some of the folkier corners of our repertoire. Here’s a moment from a week or so ago.
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Gotta get my old tuxedo pressed, gotta sew a button on my vest,
'cause tonight I've gotta look my best, Lulu's back in town!
Okay, you probably never heard of a songwriter named Harry Warren. But we bet that you know —and can even hum — many of his tunes.
Warren was nominated 11 times for the Academy Award for Best Original Song, and he won three of those Oscars, for “Lullaby of Broadway” in 1935, for “You’ll Never Know” in 1943 and for “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” in 1946.
In a career spanning six decades, Warren wrote more than 800 songs. Besides those Oscar biggies, Warren’s better known pieces include novelty tunes like “Jeepers Creepers,” “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby” and “Chattanooga Choo Choo” (which was the first gold record in history). And ballads like “I Only Have Eyes for You” and “There Will Never Be Another You.”
He also penned signature tunes like “That’s Amore,” which Dean Martin claimed as his own, and — best of all! — “At Last,” which simply belonged to the great Etta James.
At the Movies
Despite his million-dollar portfolio, Warren remains “the invisible man,” observed journalist William Zinsser, “his career a prime example of the oblivion that cloaked so many writers who cranked out good songs for bad movies."
Uh, LOTS of bad (and, well, some good) movies. Harry Warren songs have been featured in more than 300 films over the years. He wrote the music for the first blockbuster film musical, 1933’s “42nd Street,” choreographed by Busby Berkeley, with whom Warren often would collaborate.
But perhaps an even greater claim to fame for our generation is that fact that Warren songs starred in no fewer than 112 Warner Bros., Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons.
Welcome Home, Lulu!
In 1932, Harry went to work for Warner Brothers studio, where he was paired with an old friend, lyricist Al Dubin.
Over the next six years, the two would churn out five dozen songs for 33 musicals, including a long-time favorite of ours.
“Lulu’s Back in Town” was first performed by the Mills Brothers in the 1935 musical “Broadway Gondolier.” While the film was a highly forgettable Dick Powell-Joan Blondell vehicle, the song itself had legs, especially when it was recorded that same spring by Flood hero Fats Waller, who charted with “Lulu.”
Subsequently, the song charmed everyone from Mel Tormé and Wingy Manone to Art Tatum to Oscar Peterson.
In the Floodisphere, an especially influential rendition of the song was Leon Redbone’s performance on his 1975 “On the Track” debut album. Our first recording of it was 20 years ago on our 2nd album. And Lulu has has come back to visit us with each new configurations of the band.
Our Take on the Tune
We’ll be returning next week to one of our all-time favorite local venues, playing for the good folks up the hill at Woodlands Retirement Community. It’s a wonderful place where we’ve played regularly for the past 20 years or more.
And this time, our old buddy, Floodster Emeritus Paul Martin, is back to sit in with us. Here’s something we’re dusting off for the evening … you know, just in case Lulu is in the audience.
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Born in New York City in the waning years of the 19th century, Harry Akst started out as a vaudeville pianist, backing Nora Bayes as she belted out tunes like “Shine On, Harvest Moon.”
In 1916 Harry enlisted in the army, and while at Camp Upton in Yaphank, NY, on Long Island, he befriended another young composer, Irving Berlin. At the end of World War I, Akst and Berlin collaborated on the No. 2 recording of 1921, "Home Again Blues.”
Then in 1925, Akst teamed up with lyricists Sam Lewis and Joe Young, to write “Dinah,” one of the most recorded songs from the Roarin’ Twenties. As noted in last week’s podcast, "Dinah" was introduced by Ethel Waters at the Plantation Club on Broadway within a year of its composition. It went on to be recorded by everyone from Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, Cab Calloway and Josephine Baker to Bing Crosby, the Mills Brothers and the Boswell Sisters to Chet Baker, Thelonious Monk and Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli.
Enter “Am I Blue?”
So our Harry already was a well-established songsmith when four years later he wrote “Am I Blue?” Right off the bat, it was another hit for Ethel Waters, this time in 1929’s “On With the Show,” the first all-talking, all-color feature length movie in history.
“Am I Blue?" was Waters’ biggest hit (No. 1 for two weeks) and became her signature tune. Her Columbia recording, waxxed with a studio orchestra on May 14, 1929, was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2007.
Over the past 90+ years, Hollywood has fallen madly in love with “Am I Blue?” To date, the song has appeared in more than 40 movies, four in the year 1929 alone.
Our particular favorite is Hoagy Carmichael’s saucy 1944 performance of the tune for Lauren Bacall in Howard Hawks’ “To Have and Have Not.” More recently, the song has been used in “Funny Lady” (1975 ), “The Cotton Club” (1984 ) and this year’s “Downton Abbey: A New Era.”
It probably was the celluloid success of “Am I Blue?” that prompted Harry Akst’s decision to leave his native New York City for the West Coast, settling in Hollywood in the late ’20s to work on dozens of movie scores over the next three decades.
Harry even got a little screen time himself. You can catch glimpses of him as “Jerry” — rehearsal pianist, show pit orchestra conductor and concertmaster — in 1933’s “42nd Street.” (Some of the same footage also was used later in “Gold Diggers of 1937.”)
Multiple Genres
A wide variety of styles have been applied to “Am I Blue?” over the years.
Jazz artists from Billie Holiday to Grant Green covered it. Proto-rockers Eddie Cochran and Rick Nelson both recorded renditions in 1957. Rhythm and blues versions were done by Ray Charles in 1959 and Fat Domino in 1961. Many women song stylists -- Linda Ronstadt, Cher, Brenda Lee, Bette Midler, Dinah Washington, Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Rita Coolidge — have covered the song. George Strait even had a No. 1 country hit with it.
Our Take on the Tune
A lot of those renditions presented the tune slowly and deliberately, but that’s not our style. Anyone who knows us knows The Flood is not really dirge-friendly.
In fact, years ago, our beloved co-founder Dave Peyton said that if The Flood had a spirit animal, it probably would be Leon Redbone. So, our take on “Am I Blue?” is how we imagine Brother Redbone would do it.
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In the genesis of American popular music, few moments are as important as one that occurred exactly 100 years ago tonight.
Louis Armstrong was just 20 years old — nervous and apprehensive — when he stepped off a train from his New Orleans hometown into Chicago’s Illinois Central Station just before midnight on July 8, 1922.
“Anybody watching me closely could have easily seen that I was a country boy,” Armstrong wrote in his first memoir, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (1954). “I thought to myself: ‘Huh. I don’t think I am going to like this old town.’” But that old town certainly would like him.
Louis might never have gotten on that train in the first place — after all, he already had seen so many talented musicians come back to New Orleans broke and licking their wounds — but he had been called to the windy northern city to play second cornet with his long-time idol, the legendary Joe “King” Oliver in his Creole Jazz Band.
We’re all so lucky the wide-eyed young man made that trek. It was the first step in Louis Armstrong’s birth as America’s first music superstar.
In Chicago, Armstrong would steadily outshine the rest of King Oliver’s band. Before long he created his own Hot Five and Hot Seven bands. Their records throughout the 1920s and ‘30s document jazz’s rapid early evolution, and they fill hundreds of pages in The Great American Songbook.
What Song to Feature?
So many great songs! It was hard for us to choose just one we to play to celebrate this momentous centennial.
After all, many tunes in The Flood’s repertoire are ones that we first heard on an Louis Armstrong recording, ranging from “St. Louis Blues,” “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “Sunny Side of the Street” to “All of Me,” “Basin Street Blues” and “Wonderful World.”
We finally settled on one of the Louis’s own favorites.
“Dinah,” the biggest hit for Tin Pan Alley composer Harry Akst, was just five years old when Louis Armstrong recorded it for Okeh in 1930. The trumpeter’s love the tune is apparent in the fact that for the next 40 years, he would perform it in most of his numerous live shows and on his radio appearances.
The ultimate anthem to the sweetheart of the Roarin’ 20s, “Dinah” was introduced by singer Ethel Waters at the Plantation Club on Broadway within a year of its composition in 1925. It then went on to be recorded by everyone from Fletcher Henderson, Cab Calloway and Josephine Baker to Bing Crosby, the Mills Brothers and the Boswell Sisters to Chet Baker, Thelonious Monk and Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli.
Curious Footnote
Incidentally, one singer — Fanny Rose Shore — became so identified with the song in the late 1930s that when radio DJ Martin Block could not remember Shore’s name one night, he called her “that Dinah girl.” The label stuck and became her stage name; she would be “Dinah Shore” for the next 50 years.
Our Take on the Tune
On this track, as we’re sitting with “Dinah,” we bet you can hearing the grins going around the room!
Listen to all the musical bantering, from Veezy playfully comping behind the vocals to Danny’s happy passing chords under the solos.
As Louis himself might say, joy comes in many forms — and some of them you can hum!
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We were already having a righteous good time at Doug Chaffin’s house earlier this week when suddenly in walked a young guitar player who would ratchet things up to a whole new level of coolness.
Now, Josh Woods is old friend of our newest Floodster, Danny Cox, but it turns out his roots go even deeper than that. That’s because we learned that Doug Chaffin used to regularly jam with Josh’s dad, John Woods.
Needless to say, there were lots of stories between the tunes that night, with Danny, Josh and Doug remembering mutual friends over the years. At one point, there was even a phone call from Josh’s dad, affording Doug and John a chance to chat for the first time in a while.
The Les Paul
Shoot, even the classiest guitar in the room got in on the magic.
Now, before Josh even arrived that night, Doug already had brought out the wonderful old Gibson Les Paul that his own father bought him back in 1958. (The guitar was brand new, of course, when Doug got it as a teenager; heck, Doug even still has the sales receipt for that transaction!)
These days, this classic instrument seldom leaves the protection of the Chaffin home, and when Josh settled into the chair at his side that night, Doug put this honey of a Gibson into the young man’s hands to play the whole evening. The symbolism wasn’t lost on any of us: the guitar that had been present at jam sessions with the father was now being played by the son.
Want to hear it?
Here are Danny and Josh trading choruses on some down-home blues, including our rendition of Ray Charles’s “Hard Times,” the 1961 single Atlantic released to promote the darn-near perfect The Genius Sings The Blues album.
It was quite a night.
Postscript
By the way, if you’d like to know more about the song “Hard Times” and the album on which it was born, click button below to see an earlier Flood Watch entry.
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It has been pretty convincingly argued that “That’s All Right, Mama” was the world’s first rock ’n’ roll song (and subsequently the soundtrack of countless tales of teenage rebellion from the 1950a onward).
However, should we be honoring the tune’s composer and first performer — blues singer Arthur Crudup in 1946 — or the song’s more famous interpreter, Elvis Presley, who introduced it to a wider world in 1954?
“Big Boy” Crudup, who started his blues career in the late 1930s in Mississippi, recorded his composition in Chicago on Sept. 6, 1946, incorporating some traditional blues verses first recorded 20 years earlier by Blind Lemon Jefferson. Released as a single by RCA Victor in 1947, the record was less successful than some of Crudup’s previous recordings.
Still, some experts today consider the Crudup recording to be the "first rock and roll song." Among them is Southeastern Louisiana University rock historian Joseph Burns, who notes this song even “could contain the first ever guitar solo break."
In early March 1949, Crudup’s recording made even more history when it was re-released as RCA's first rhythm and blues record on its brand new 45 rpm single format (hitting stores on bright orange vinyl, incidentally).
Enter Elvis
Meanwhile in Tulepo, fellow Mississippian Elvis obviously heard Crudup’s record.
On the evening of July 5, 1954, during an otherwise uneventful recording session at Sun Studio in Memphis, Presley began improvising an up-tempo version of the song during a break. Right away, Bill Black jumped in on string bass. The pair was soon joined in the jam by Scotty Moore's guitar.
Producer Sam Phillips, alert to the suddenly upbeat atmosphere, asked the three to start again so he could record it. (Elvis fans like to say that the resulting rendition is not identical to Crudup's because it was at least twice as fast as the original.)
Crudup was credited as the composer on the Sun label when the record was released days later as Presley's debut single. In 2004, a Rolling Stone magazine article argued Presley's recording is the first rock ’n’ roll record. Rebutting that claim in the same year, The Guardian characterized Elvis’s record as simply one of "the first white artists' interpretations of a sound already well-established by black musicians almost a decade before. It was a raucous, driving, unnamed variant of rhythm and blues.”
Take your pick. Meanwhile, despite legal battles into the 1970s, Crudup reportedly never received royalties for his work. An out-of-court settlement was supposed to pay him an estimated $60,000 in back royalties, but that never materialized. He died in 1974 without seeing the money.
Big Boy Crudup has been honored with a marker on the Mississippi Blues Trail. And for his part, Elvis acknowledged Crudup’s importance to rock ’n’ roll when he once told a reporter, "If I had any ambition, it was to be as good as Arthur Crudup.”
Our Take on the Tune
It was a grand and goofy night at the Bowen house last night, full of stories and wisecracks and ambling down wondrous strange new musical pathways, turning up numbers like this granddaddy of all things rock ’n’ roll that just came running out to greet us about mid-evening.
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Legend has it that this fine old folk song was born among the roustabouts who loaded and unloaded steamboats on the Ohio River at the turn of the last century.
Hundreds of contemporary versions of “Alberta, Let Your Hair Hang Low” exist, including one by The Blues Project and another by Bob Dylan. Decades earlier, the great Lead Belly recorded four different versions of the song between 1935 and 1948.
But the very first trace of the song was collected at an unknown date by Kentucky-born musicologist Mary Guthrie Wheeler. In the 1930s, while teaching at Paducah Junior College, Wheeler began to document and study the songs of the former roustabouts who worked on the Ohio, Cumberland, Mississippi and Tennessee rivers. She published “Alberta” in 1944 in her book “Steamboatin’ Days: Folk Songs of the River Packet Era.”
“It was late in the afternoon when I reached the street on which Gabriel Hester lived,” Wheeler recorded in that book. Neighbors who sat fanning themselves on small porches directed the writer to Gabe’s house, where she was invited to wait for him. “Bless the Lord, honey,” his wife said, “he don’t never mind singing, and he just loves to play on the box.”
Moments later, when he arrived, “the old man obligingly … touched the guitar strings with gifted, untrained fingers, (and) sang the lovely melody of 'Alberta, Let Yo' Hair Hang Low’.”
Hester also told Wheeler that music of all kinds was central to the lives of riverboat roustabouts when he worked on the Ohio. They always sang when they were working, he said, remembering how the passengers liked hearing songs in the evenings and usually dropped coins down from the upper decks when music came up to them from below.
Our Take on the Tune
A fresh set of ears — especially if they’re as attuned as Veezy Coffman’s — can hear something new in something old. Just listen to all the new opportunities that Veezy’s tenor sax finds in this dusty old folk melody. And then listen to how that inspires Dan Cox and Sam St. Clair to new exploration in their own solos.
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Sons of a tenant farming family, Alton Delmore and his baby brother Rabon grew up dirt poor in Elkmont, Alabama, in the 1920s, but they were rolling in another kind of riches: Music, the melodies and lyrics they heard it all around them and that they would bring to the rest of us.
The boys’ mom, Mollie Delmore, wrote and sang gospel songs for their church. When Alton and Rabon later fashioned themselves in one of America’s first supergroups, The Delmore Brothers, they helped create the still-emerging genre of country music by blending those tight gospel-style harmonies with blues and the quicker guitar-work of traditional folk music.
The Delmores made their first recording for Columbia in 1931 ("I've Got the Kansas City Blues" and "Alabama Lullaby" which became their theme song.)
Two years later, they signed a contract with Victor Records budget label Bluebird, and for it on Dec. 6, 1933, they recorded the tune that they called “I Got The Big River Blues.” Music historians think the song probably was inspired by the cataclysmic flood of 1927 along the lower Mississippi River, a landmark moment in American history — and in music history — which left a trail of loss and damage through at least 10 states.
It was a song that helped The Delmore Brothers become regulars — and soon the most popular act — on radio’s then-new Grand Ole Opry variety program.
Enter Doc Watson
Meanwhile, over in North Carolina, Doc Watson was 10 years old when that Delmore Brothers record came out. Young Doc — well, he was still “Arthel” to everyone in Deep Gap, NC, back then — was already interested in music, playing harmonica and teaching himself banjo, and he was three years away to starting his mastery of the guitar.
The story goes that one day Watson’s father, hearing Arthel plucking chords on a borrowed guitar, promised to buy the boy his own guitar if he could teach himself a song by the end of the day. The youth taught himself The Carter Family’s “When the Roses Bloom in Dixieland,” and a week later he was the proud owner of a $12 Stella. (He would be a few years before he got his D-18.)
But back to the song, Watson always said he first heard the song from the Delmores, but he fashioned his famed 1964 rendition as he thought his hero Merle Travis would play it, with a heavy emphasis on the thumb being used to thump out a driving bass line. (For that Vanguard Records album, he also renamed the song “Deep River Blues,” which is why a lot of us thought Doc wrote it.)
In an Acoustic Guitar magazine interview a few months before his death in 2012, Doc said he wanted to play the tune as soon as he heard it, but that he couldn’t manage to make it sound good enough with just one guitar… that is, until about 1939 when he first heard that cool Travis picking style on the radio. He said he figured that if he could get that big bass working, maybe he could at least do the song. And he did and he did.
Our Take on the Tune
Throughout the winter and this spring, our newest band mate, Danny Cox, has been having one-on-one weekly jam session with his old buddy, bassist Randy Hamilton, and sometimes they bring tunes they’ve work out to the regular weekly Flood rehearsal for the rest of us to get in on the fun.
Now, over the the years, we’ve tried to work out a Flood arrangement of “Deep River Blues,” but it never really took, until recently when Randy and Danny brought in what they’d wrought. And as you can hear on this track, we’re all pretty excited about it. Click here to hear our first take on “Deep River Blues,” with Randy singing the lead!
Postscript for the Folkies Amongst Us
Finally, if this is the sort of tune that soothes your soul, then you’re probably — like us — unreconstructed folkies. If you’d like another serving or two (or 20 or so), check out the band’s Folk Channel on our Radio Floodango music streaming feature 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