The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast

For dozens of years, a favorite annual event in the Floodisphere has been playing each September at the Fraley Festival at Carter Caves State Park in Olive Hill, Ky. Floodster Emeritus Doug Chaffin — who for decades played bass behind festival founders Annadeene and J.P. Fraley — was a fixture at the yearly gathering almost since its beginning in 1976. A quarter of a century ago when Doug joined T...

The first time Charlie Poole and his North Carolina Ramblers walked into a recording studio in New York City, they blew the doors off the place. It was July 27, 1925, and the first record by the three of them — banjoist Poole, fiddler Posey Rorer, whom he had met in West Virginia eight years earlier, and guitarist Norman Woodlief — sold more than 100,000 copies. That was raging success in anyone’s...

The Roarin’ Twenties were in full swing and the stock market was reaching new record highs a hundred years ago when vaudevillian Jimmy Cox wrote his cautionary tale about the fickleness of fortune and friendship. “Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out" was copyrighted in 1923, but it was another four years before the first known publication appeared, with the 1927 recording by a little known j...

Having known each other since high school, Randy Hamilton and Danny Cox have bonds and shared musical instincts that bring lots of riches to our room. Whenever Randy and Dan put a song on the table — as they did with “Deep River Blues” and “Sunny,” as they did with “Ready for the Times to Get Better,” “Windy and Warm” and “When You Say Nothing at All” — they usually already have an arrangement sta...

Here’s a tune that has touched the hearts and minds of more than a hundred years’ worth of Flood heroes. At the very start of the 20th century, it was one of the best-loved numbers in the repertoire of jazz legend Buddy Bolden down in the hot, dark streets of New Orleans. A couple decades later up in Memphis, W.C. Handy co-opted it, copyrighting a variation after he heard an old guy singing it in...

Dave Peyton and Charlie Bowen could not know it, of course, but 11 years ago this week the pair of them spent their last afternoon with the man who had been their dear friend for nearly a half century, fellow Flood founder Roger Samples . On a perfectly suitable-for-framing Saturday in the summer of 2013, the Peytons and the Bowens trekked from their Huntington homes to Mount Sterling, Ky., to be...

Chatter is everywhere when the band gathers each week for rehearsal at the Bowen House. News, gossip, jokes. But the best conversations usually don’t involve words at all. The Flood Zone — like most tight-knit groups of friends — has developed its own language. It is a shorthand in which a grin and a nod could mean, “Wow — great solo. Cool new stuff!” while a shrug and a chuckle could tell everyon...

In 1938, three years before his death, the legendary Jelly Roll Morton sat down to record a series of Library of Congress interviews with noted folklorist Alan Lomax, who called the results “a virtual history of the birth pangs of jazz as it happened in the New Orleans of the turn of the century.” Along the way, Morton elaborated on his narrative with various songs, including one he called “Winin’...

So much of the band’s repertoire these days is jazzed by Jack Nuckols’ dynamic drumming. Tunes that were thought to be retired from The Flood set lists suddenly are back with a whole new burst of verve. Meanwhile, certain musical muscles that Jack thought were long retired also are being reawakened. That is because The Flood has got Nuckols fiddling again. In the Old Days… Back in the 1970s, when...

In our circle of talented friends back in the 1970s, whenever the moment called for a Charlie Poole song, we knew exactly on whom to call. H. David Holbrook and his powerful, popular Kentucky Foothill Ramblers string band covered the best of the Charlie Poole North Carolina Ramblers songbook, introducing so many of us to that marvelous old-time music of the 1920s. And despite KFR’s pronounced Pool...

A standing joke in our world is that the band makes The Big Bucks from grant money scored by the Flood Education Department, mainly when we tell stories and history of the songs during our shows. That’s a lie, of course. There are not even little bucks in such blather, but we still like to rattle on about what we’ve found in our song research. Last night’s show at Woodlands, for instance, afforded...

Eighty-nine years ago this week, a young North Carolinian walked into a New York recording studio as Fulton Allen and, after recording a few tunes, walked out again as “Blind Boy Fuller.” On the recording of his composition “Rag Mama” and two other songs pressed that day, the young man was accompanied by his mentor and blues tutor, the legendary Rev. Gary Davis. “When I first run across him,” Davi...

It was 19 years ago this week when The Flood met its den mother/soul sister. The irrepressible Rose Marie Riter hired the band to play at her 70th birthday party. The boys in the band knew they were in for something different when she told them the venue for the afternoon’s party: The Lawrence County Airpark, near Chesapeake, Ohio. “The, uh … why?” they asked. Rose intended, she told them, to cele...

When Elvis Presley recorded “Just Because” in 1954 in Memphis’s Sun Studio, the 19-year-old rocker was revisiting a saucy novelty tune that was a monster hit five years earlier for a West Virginian known as “America’s Polka King.” Accordionist Frankie Yankovic — a native of Davis, WV, in Tucker County who recorded more than 200 songs and sold 30 million records — had just returned to his new home...

Often a song has a special meaning that has absolutely nothing to do with either its lyrics or its melody. The Flood’s tight connection to W.C. Handy’s 100-year-old “Yellow Dog Blues,” for instance, dates back to 2020 and the deep, dark days of the Covid-19 epidemic. With the whole world masked and distanced, the band couldn’t get together for its weekly gatherings. It was during the loneliness of...

The Flood is thrilled to be featured in t he latest installment of Armstrong Neighborhood Channel’s Press Room Recordings series of award-winning music videos. Douglas K. Morris and Shane Finster came by the Bowen House on June 27 to take in one of the band’s weekly rehearsals and to chat with Charlie Bowen about the group’s half-century history. The resulting half-hour film — released this mornin...

Rehearsals are not parties. They can be fun and satisfying, but the bottom line is that rehearsals are work sessions. The Flood is always trying to learn new songs, and since that’s where the songs are worked out, some rehearsals are just more fun than others. So the band usually try to end the evening on a high note. At one such rehearsal recently, Charlie Bowen asked if anybody had a tune in min...

The love affair began on a summer night down by the riverside. It was June 2002 and The Flood was already there to make a memory, having been invited to perform as the guest artists with the Huntington Symphony Orchestra as part of its “Picnic with the Pops” series. Listening that night from the orchestra’s string section was a 30-year-old violinist named Noel Sayre, who was making memories of his...

This raucous David Bromberg composition that The Flood has covered since the song’s release in the early 1970s opens with a stream of similes worthy of any precocious English major: She's got eyes like crystal water, Lips like cherry wine, A body like fine brandy, … And a soul like turpentine But the best bit — the capper for the song — is a borrowed line, in fact, one of the greatest lines in the...

Jack Nuckols, our newest band mate, brought us this song, a wonderful reflection on the early history of boating up and down the Ohio River, which flows by the communities in our valley. Hearing it, it would be natural for you to assume that “Shawneetown” is a old traditional tune. Actually, though, it is largely a 1970s composition by folk artist Dillon Bustin. The Song’s Roots True, Bustin based...

In the middle of a busy rehearsal last night, we just had to take a moment out to prepare this little birthday sing-along to our beautiful hilltop homeland. Happy 161st, Mountain Mama! Shoot, gurl, you don’t look a day over a 150! By the way, if you’d like more Floodishness to help you celebrate this West Virginia Day, drop by our free West Virginia Blend playlist in the Radio Floodango music stre...

The Flood rolled into Huntington’s West End last Sunday to enjoy a simply perfect June afternoon, performing at a picnic to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the city’s beloved Sacred Heart Catholic Church. What memories were made! Children and parents playing in the grassy field. Fun competitions for the kids, such as donut-eating contests. Old friends visiting and story-telling over hot food and...

A signature tune from the late David Peyton — the song he called “Furniture Man” — entered the Floodisphere 45 years ago as a wild and crazy sing-along for the folks who attended the latter years of the Bowen Bashes . In fact, the song helped to make memories at the very last of those semiannual music parties at which The Flood was born. Here , from that evening (Sept. 19, 1981), the rocking rendi...

Some songs have very deep roots in the Floodisphere. For instance, the late Joe Dobbs loved this song. In fact, we can remember Dave Peyton and Charlie Bowen jamming on this one with Joe and his brother Dennis at their Fret ‘n Fiddle music shop in its original Huntington West 14th Street location in the mid-1970s. (The song might even have been in the set list when the four opened for Little Jimmy...

We have always found this song incredibly moving, due in no small part to memories of the place and time when we played it in public for the first time. It was seven years ago at our favorite Charleston, WV, venue — Taylor Books — on the evening of Saturday, Aug. 12, 2017. Honestly, had the gig not already been booked for months in advance, we probably would not have wanted to perform that evening...