The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast

When Hoagy Carmichael wrote this song on a cold, stormy night nearly a century ago, he couldn’t have known how many people would find a special warmth in his new tune . Just listen to the solos in this take from last week’s rehearsal and hear how Danny Cox , Sam St. Clair and visiting bassist Ian Nuckols each finds his own comfort in the congenial chords of “Georgia on My Mind.” About the Song As...

Here’s a song that was very important to a young Marty Robbins back in 1956. Fresh out of the Navy, Marty was working at a local TV station near his home in Arizona. That’s when an established star — West Virginia native Little Jimmy Dickens — discovered him and brought him to Columbia Records. A few years later, Robbins was the first performer to record “Singing the Blues,” which, as reported her...

Whenever Michelle Hoge comes back to visit her old band mates, as she did last week , this tune is among the ones we trot out. Just listen to how Michelle’s superb harmonies seal the deal on this song that Ivory Joe Hunter recorded 77 years ago this month. The Extraordinary Mister Hunter As reported here earlier, on Oct. 1, 1949, Ivory Joe recorded a 12-bar blues that was released a year later as...

Say “Sloop John B” to most baby boomers and their likely response is, “The Beach Boys!” They’re not wrong. But they’re also not right enough. Not by a long shot. It turns out the tune that Brian Wilson and his lads put on their beloved Pet Sounds album was decades older than everyone on that room in 1966. About the Song In fact, it was a century ago that “Sloop John B” — which tells a story from t...

In the autumn of 1963, as students were adjusting to a new school year, a song that hit the charts sparked the imagination of all the aspiring folksingers in our area. Radio stations throughout the Huntington-Ashland-Ironton area 63 years ago this fall seemed to hourly played Bobby Bare’s new song. “500 Miles Away From Home” had a special local interest, because Bobby is famously one of us. We all...

As much as we try to use the rehearsals to work out arrangements to our regular tunes, we never drift too far away from The Flood’s original loose jam session vibe. That means there’s always room for those “sometimes kinda tunes,” like this one , heads-up, top-down and just flat-out rattling and rolling into the sunset! About the Song “Darlin’ Companion” was written by John Sebastian and was first...

When George Hamilton IV suffered his fatal heart attack a dozen years ago this week, the first song The New York Times mentioned in his obituary was “Abilene.” Indeed, that son g was a turning point in Hamilton’s life. Recorded in March 1963 at RCA’s Studio B in Nashville, “Abilene” was the biggest hit of George’s long career, helping him transition from a pop teen idol of the 1950s into a traditi...

Here’s the latest treasure that Randy Hamilton and Danny Cox have brought to The Flood’s table, a Charlie Starr composition from Alabama that resonates powerfully in our own Appalachian hills as well. “One Horse Town” debuted 14 years ago on The Whippoorwill , the critically acclaimed third studio album of Starr’s Southern rock band, Blackberry Smoke. While many country anthems predictably romanti...

Here’s an audio snapshot of the end of last week’s rehearsal. We’d just had a wonderful evening singing with a Flood sweetheart, Charlie Bowen’s lovely cousin Kathy Castner , who had made one of her rare visits in from Cincinnati. At the beginning of this track you hear folks packing up their instruments and saying their goodbyes. But at the same time, over in the corner, Danny Cox and his guitar...

Here’s a tune that will be on the set list tomorrow night when The Flood opens the festivities at this year’s Diamond Teeth Mary blues festival in downtown Huntington. It’s a 1913 composition by the great Shelton Brooks. And if that name sounds familiar, you might be remembering last week’s podcast when we talked about Brooks’ best-known composition, the phenomenal “Darktown Strutters’ Ball.” As n...

The story goes that a century or so ago there was a strange annual ball in Chicago. A model of irony, it was a fancy affair in the city’s sordid South Side, financed by wealthy society folk but reserved for the community’s prostitutes and their sugar daddies. Some believe that songwriter Shelton Brooks so loved those tales that he celebrated this modern equivalent of the medieval carnivals of misr...

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...

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 19...

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 wee...

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 k...

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...

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...

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...

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 an...

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 al...

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...

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 stri...

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 cultu...

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 o...

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, O...