The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast

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 a...

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 pa...

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 H...

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 lik...

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....

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 origina...

“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 son g is much better known...

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 Warr...

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 Sou...

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 vide...

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 Am...

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...

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 r...

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 Prof...

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...

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 heeee...

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 da...

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 la...

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...

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...

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 entir...

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 Tr...

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 sa...

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...

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 d...