The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast

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 recordin...

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...

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...

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 violinis...

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 the...

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 Boy...

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...

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 thre...

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, somet...

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.”...

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, t...

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,...

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. Armst...

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 le...

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...

“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 Gar...

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 “F...

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...

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 th...

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 c...

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...

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: I...

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, going way back to when David Peyton and Charlie Bowen were just a modest little duo in 1973. Uncle Dave Macon’s “Way Downtown”...

“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...

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 produc...