The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast

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...

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 general...

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 m...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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. L...

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 unc...

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 part...

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 w...

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. Aft...

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. Pictur...

“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 favorit...

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 composi...

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 i...

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,...

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 r...

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 b...

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, Jo...

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...

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 1...

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 them...