The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast

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 Fl...

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 se...

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, puh CAN … well, yeah, we’ll still know what you’re talking about, but we’ll also know you’re not one of us. How t...

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 ea...

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 Li...

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 un wrapped 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 ma...

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 reall...

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 a...

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 o...

At a good rehearsal — and, heck, that’s just about ev ery 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 ex...

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 ve...

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...

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 followi...

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...

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 Braden...

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 tha...

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 Coun...

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 t...

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-dri...

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 p...

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...

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 Rive...

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...

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 ar...

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 Go...