The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast

Napoleon never heard “Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine,” because, well, it’s not French. The tune might be Scottish. But probably not. Some say it’s an American march. Maybe Irish instead. Or not. One thing is certain: Definitive derivation of old fiddle tunes is not the hill you’ll want to die on. Most of the best-loved melodies have at least a half dozen different names, each usually with its own eq...

Randy Hamilton has brought so much to The Flood’s table in the past dozen years. As the late Joe Dobbs used to say, Randy’s bass is “the heartbeat of the band.” In addition, Randy’s vocals — whether harmonizing or taking the lead — have become a definitive ingredient in The Flood’s sound. And nothing demonstrates that better than a tune from this week’s rehearsal, captured in this video by band ma...

A half century after the United States won its independence from Britain, Canada was rocked by two armed uprising known as the Rebellions of 1837-38. The revolts failed, resulting in many rebels being deported to Australia and Tasmania as political prisoners facing hard labor or hanging. Others escaped such reprisals by going into exile in the US. Sympathy for these disenfranchised French Canadian...

One of the best songs written about West Virginia in the past half century was created by a man who was nicknamed for a state two time zones away. Bruce “U. Utah” Phillips wrote “The Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia” in 1971 while reflecting on a visit to the Mountain State years earlier. "We were driving in an old car that had a bad leak in the radiator,” Phillips recalled in a story on his w...

Whenever Floodster Emerita Michelle Hoge makes one of her rare treks back to West Virginia, it’s a good excuse to try to land a gig somewhere at which the band’s beloved “chick singer” can be the guest star. This time the good folks at Charleston’s Edgewood Summit retirement community accommodated that mission, and yesterday the entire Family Flood rolled into that gorgeous facility for an afterno...

Hokum bands of the 1920s and ’30s created a brand of urban folk tunes called “jug band music” that famously blended the sounds of the plantation and the church with those of the swing, swerve and sway of nascent jazz. And no one did it better than those Flood heroes The Memphis Jug Band, formed in 1927 by Beale Street guitar/harmonica player Will Shade. Shade was also known as Son Brimmer, a nickn...

Texan Cindy Walker already was a well-established songwriter in the fall of 1955 when she attended Nashville’s annual disc jockey convention. By then, she had worked with Bing Crosby, not to mention Gene Autry and Bob Wills. She had even scored her own hit in 1944 with her recording of Wiley Walker and Gene Sullivan’s "When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again." But Cindy Walker’s greatest contributio...

Spring in Appalachia is notoriously fickle. One minute the sun is promising an early wakeup call for the dogwoods and the redbuds; the next minute, snow is mocking our optimism. Last week started, for example, with a lovely, bright preview of April. However, in midweek, The Flood’s weekly rehearsal was greeted by clouds, biting winds and cold rain. By the time the guys packed up to head home, ice...

For many decades, whenever anyone at a Flood gathering was celebrating a birthday, the guys turned to David Peyton to lead them in a rousing rendition of … no, oh, hell no, not THAT song… (Does this bunch really look like “Happy Birthday to You” people?) No, Br’er Peyton suggested a much more appropriate nativity-observing song for the Flood flock. Not only that, Dave enhanced the tune with his ow...

For a half dozen years beginning in the late 1990s, The Flood always greeted March’s arrival with an annual road trip into the mountains. Providing an evening of music, jokes and stories, the band would entertain a roomful of visiting volunteers, kindly students who had come more than 600 miles from Milwaukee’s Marquette University to use their spring break helping with assorted post-winter chores...

Coming in from the wind and cold of a rainy winter’s night, it was cozy and bright in the band room last Thursday evening. Here are two tunes from the late 1960s that Pamela Bowen captured with her phone during the weekly rehearsal. The video opens with Randy Hamilton leading the crew on Danny O’Keefe’s soulful “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues” followed by a gentle rendition of a long-time Flood...

We remember the night Joe Dobbs wandered into The Flood band room a couple of decades ago and said, “Hey, do you know the song ‘Satin Doll’ ?” Boy, was he asking the right guy. Charlie Bowen grew up in a home full of his dad’s jazz records by Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington and Count Basie and his mom’s Harry James and The Mills Brothers. In BowenWorld, “Satin Doll” was as much a part of the ho...

Around campfires North and South, many of the tunes played and sung during the Civil War were the work of a 35-year-old Pennsylvanian who was America’s first full-time professional songwriter. By the time the war started, Stephen Collins Foster — who as a youth taught himself to play the clarinet, guitar, flute and the piano — had published more than 200 songs. His best ones — “Oh Susannah,” “Camp...

Shortly after he recorded “Peggy Day” — exactly 56 years ago today , in fact, an appropriate choice for Valentine’s Day! — Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone magazine, “I kind of had The Mills Brothers in mind when I did that one.” A laugh was shared by Dylan and RS Editor Jann Wenner over that thought. However, the remark later really would resonate in the world of The Flood, which has taken much music...

Even a rainy winter’s night can be fun at one of Huntington’s hottest venues, the remarkable Bahnhof WVrsthaus & Biergarten on 7th Avenue. The band hit the Bahnhof stage early Thursday evening, a dozen hours after a night of torrential storms that soaked and raked the entire tri-state from midnight onward. “Listening to The Flood after a flood?” mused by hardy fan at a ringside table. “Well, I can...

What an amazing year 1966 was in music. Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde hit the racks. So did The Beatles’ Revolver , The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds , The Stones’ Aftermath and so many more. Into this stellar crowd quietly strolled Hums of the Lovin’ Spoonful , the third studio album by Greenwich Village’s own folk-rock mavens. Today the disc just barely makes it onto a list of the top 50 albums of that lush...

At a coffeehouse in Ashland, Ky., 50 years ago this week , Dave Peyton and Charlie Bowen continued their new mission to spread the good news about the work of young singer-songwriter John Prime. As reported in an earlier article here , Charlie and Dave had been listening this this Chicago-based folk wunderkind ever since his 1971 first album. The two, later joined by Flood co-founder Roger Samples...

If your mom (or your grandma or maybe great-grandmother) was a Bobby-soxer in the 1940s, she probably danced to this tune . Sociologists call the bunch born in the 1930s “The Silent Generation” — a term first used in a 1951 Time magazine story to describe their alleged cautious and passive nature — but, well, seriously? Anyone who ever saw them dance didn’t think they were all that darn docile. Af...

For the past month, the world has been fascinated by a new movie about a 20-year-old with a head full of ideas rolling from the North Country into New York City in 1961 and changing music forever. The Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown just yesterday scored eight Oscar nominations, including nods for best picture, best director, best lead and supporting actors, best sound and more. It already had...

All kinds of stories are told at the weekly rehearsals. Some are shared for laughs. Others are merely melodies and improvisations. Some come with pictures. And some — like this one — are the tales that are many times older than all of us. As reported here earlier , traditional versions of “Pretty Polly” were on some of the first discs made by Appalachian musicians at the dawn of the recording indu...

In the early 2000s, Joe Dobbs expanded his operations at his Fret ‘n Fiddle’s music store in downtown St. Albans to include a recording studio that he and his young staff dubbed “The Bunker.” The idea was that at the very least Joe could use the facilities to record some or all of the episodes for his ongoing “Music from the Mountains” radio show . What he really hoped, though, was that the new st...

Often the first notes of the evening set the pace, the mood and the tone for the entire rehearsal. As you’ll hear on this track , Danny Cox walked into last week’s session ready to set the Floodometer on sizzle. And it certainly worked. The Flood has been doing this great old 1920s jazz standard for only a couple of years now, but it’s already become one of the band’s go-to tunes for a good time,...

One of the most curious and complicated characters on the great American musical landscape is Thomas A. Dorsey. A deeply religious man, Dorsey often is called “the father of gospel music,” because he inspired a movement that popularized bluesy gospel songs in churches across America starting in the mid-20th century. Some 3,000 songs — a third of them gospel — were written by Dorsey in his 90 years...

Hoagy Carmichael was not quite 28 years old when he wrote what music historians consider THE song of the 20th century. Just how big is “Stardust” in the Great American Songbook ? * Well, for starters, this is a song that has been recorded as an instrumental or a vocal more than 1,500 times. * Forty years after its publication in 1928, it was still earning more than $50,000 annually in royalties. *...

If there’s only one day a year when you are nostalgic, it’s probably Christmas Eve. After all, the older you get, the more you likely realize that the best part of Christmas Present often is enjoying memories of Christmases Past. The Flood’s memories usually come with a soundtrack as well. Merry Christmas, dear friends! Another Holiday Helping? And if you’d like a little more fa-la-la-la-Flood in...