The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast

Charlie Bowen wrote this song about 30 years ago with the idea that The Flood would perform it some day, even though at that particular moment, the future seemed rather uncertain for the band he had helped create two decades earlier . As reported earlier , in the period between the mid-1980s and the early ‘90s, life had started interfering with Flood dreams. As band members began drifting off in d...

At this week’s rehearsal, Pamela Bowen, our manager/videographer, captured a couple more of the tunes that we are considering for inclusion in that new album we hope to start working on later this year. And, without our intending it, the two songs she videoed just happened to share the theme of rainy days and sunny days. That’s a hoot, even if it was unplanned. About the Songs The first song on to...

Rehearsal is always important, of course, but sometimes leaving a song alone for a while also has interesting effects. For instance, it’s been probably a year or more since the Ray Charles classic “Hard Times (Who Knows Better Than I)” has made an appearance at a Flood rehearsal. It’s a great tune, but for some reason it just didn’t come to mind for while. However, the song hasn’t been stagnating,...

Canada’s folk music scene in the 1960s produced legends — from Gordon Lightfoot and Ian Tyson to Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen and Neil Young — and that remarkable community also nurtured a whole world of talented acolytes. One such folkie follower was British-born David Wiffen. Growing up singing skiffle with the Kingston-upon-Thames-based Black Cat group, Wiffen at age 16 moved from Claygate, Sur...

Here’s another tune that is campaigning to be included on the new album we hope to start recording later this year. We’d like to hear what you think about it. As we noted earlier , we’ve loved “Peaceful Easy Feeling” ever since the late Roger Samples taught it to us back in the early 1970s when he joined Dave Peyton and Charlie Bowen t o help start The Flood . But it now being a new century and al...

Today most of us don’t know the name Marion Harris, but Grandma probably did when she was a teen-ager listening to that new-fangled radio in the parlor. Songs that summed up the transition from the stodgy, gaudy Gilded Age to the brave new world of The Jazz Age were often the recordings of Marion Harris. Her tunes like “Jazz Baby” and “They Go Wild, Simply Wild, Over Me,” “A Good Man is Hard to Fi...

A third of a millennium ago, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary about a New Year’s party at which he hear the “little Scotch song of Barbary Allen….” Scholars often cite that Jan. 2, 1666, entry as evidence that this famous ballad — which tells the tale of a beautiful woman who denies a dying man's love, then dies of grief soon after his untimely demise — already was hundreds of years old by the time...

What a wonderful time we had yesterday afternoon with our friends at Alchemy Theatre when we launched the Spring Floodango. The stage was full. All five Floodsters — Charlie, Sam, Randy, Dan and Jack — were on hand. Joining them was the band’s beloved “chick singer,” Floodster Emerita Michelle Hoge, who drove in with her husband Rich from their Loveland, Ohio, home near Cincinnati just for the gig...

The afternoon we have been waiting for has finally arrived. The Spring Floodango hits the stage at Alchemy Theatre today. The show starts at 2:30. Tickets are $20 and and all the proceeds go to support the wonderful work of Alchemy Theatre. As noted earlier , tickets will be available at the door OR you can order them online. Here’s the link for online ordering. Location, Location, Location If you...

Ours is a band that was born at a party and born TO party . Whether we’re at home in our band room at the Bowen House, settled in the living room of somebody else’s house or on stage at a gig, the party tradition that started more than a half century ago continues today. And our next opportunity for a public party will be this very weekend when we launch the Spring Floodango this Sunday afternoon...

Floodango fever swept back into the WSAZ-TV studio this afternoon. On the heels of Monday morning’s visit to the station’s Studio 3 show , Flood and Alchemy Theatre folks were back in front of the cameras there this afternoon to talk with Tim Irr and Susan Nicholas about our big Spring Floodango show set for 2:30 p.m. this Sunday. As you’ll see in the above video, these First Look at 4 anchors sat...

Susan Nicholas and Taylor Eaton and all the good folks at WSAZ-TV’s Studio 3 this morning gave some sweet attention to our Spring Floodango show set for 2:30 p.m. this Sunday at Alchemy Theatre. As you’ll see in the above video, the anchors sat down with Charlie Bowen of The Flood, Michael Murdock of Alchemy and Douglas Imbrogno, Sunday’s special guest artist, to talk about what folks can expect t...

We learned this tune from the late Floodster Emeritus Bill Hoke , who — like many other people — said he first heard it at a folk festival some time in the early 1990s. It has been about 25 years ago now. Bill stopped off to visit at the Bowen House while on a trek from his Abingdon, Va., home to Dayton, Ohio, to see his dad. We can still picture him there in The Flood band room, picking up Charli...

The legacy of a really good party ought to be another party! And we had a really good party last New Year’s Eve at Alchemy Theatre when the good folks at the Geneva Kent Center for the Arts hosted The 1937 Flood’s 50th birthday bash. We are thrilled that our friends at Alchemy want us back for an encore. Mark your calendar — Sunday afternoon, April 21 — we’re going to welcome Spring 2024 with a wh...

In blues parlance, the term “easy rider” is code for … oh, well, for many things. Maybe a rovin’ gambler or a lover, maybe a pimp … (Y’all just talk among yourselves and let your imagination gallop away with ya.) Easy riders started appearing in blues songs more than a century ago. W.C. Handy famously featured an easy rider in his great “Yellow Dog Blues” back in 1915. But, as we noted in an earli...

She promised meet him after work, but she never showed up. Disappointed, he did what you do if you’re an aspiring composer: He put it all down in a song. A scene like that plays out every day somewhere in America. But it’s not every day that the resulting song becomes one of the most cherished tunes of the decade. Coffeehouse Roots “Peaceful Easy Feeling” began life on the cold linoleum floor of a...

We know precious little about pioneer bluesman James “Boodle It” Wiggins. We don’t know when or where he was born, or even precisely when in the 1930s that he died. No pictures of him are known to exist. Some folks say he was “discovered” in Dallas by R. L. Ashford, a scout for Paramount Records. Fellow blues artist Big Bill Broonzy always said his friend Wiggins came from Louisiana. We do know th...

We really appreciate the feedback and suggestions we’ve been getting so far from all y’all about some of the songs we’re considering for the new album. Here are a couple more we thinking about including. Whaddaya think? At last week’s rehearsal, Pamela Bowen videoed two very different tunes . First is our take on the jazz standard “But Not for Me.” As reported here earlier , George and Ira Gershwi...

St. Patrick’s Day has always been special to us, so it was particularly sweet six years ago tonight when the opening show for the 2018 season of “Route 60 Saturday Night” — the monthly musical variety bash for which The Flood was the house band — fell on March 17. To put a Celtic curl on the night, we dusted off some favorite songs from The Old Sod. As you’ll see in the above video, we opened the...

Before rock ’n’ roll was a thing, it was rhythm and blues that was perking up the ears of a generation of young radio listeners, and tops among the early R&B songwriters was Ivory Joe Hunter, the original “Baron of the Boogie.” Ivory Joe — by the way, that wasn’t a nickname or a stage handle, but his given name (he always said that when he was born his parents thought he "looked just like the baby...

When our friend Ed Light dropped in from the Baltimore area this week to sit in with The Flood for the very first time, he did something no one else has ever done: He wrote us a song! And we were so…. uh, well, you know, “honored” is not exactly the word we’re probably looking for here. But, considering the text that Brother Ed chose for his sermon, we were certainly dumbstruck by his discernment...

Otis Blackwell already was an established songwriter in June 1959 when he changed the life of a young doo-wop singer from Alabama. One of the top 1950s songsmiths whose work influenced early rock and roll, Blackwell already had written the sultry “Fever,” which was to be the signature hit for Peggy Lee. He also had penned “Great Balls of Fire” for Jerry Lee Lewis, not to mention “Don’t Be Cruel,”...

When Adele recorded “Make You Feel My Love” in 2008 for her debut album 19 , many of her fans assumed she wrote it. After all, the British superstar-to-be had written or co-written all the other songs on that disc. However, more cosmopolitan ears in the crowd knew the truth, that this song had a distinguished pedigree all its own. In fact, it was Bob Dylan who wrote “Make You Feel My Love” for his...

Ah, memories. It was an autumn night 52 years ago, and Pamela and Charlie Bowen went to a theater in downtown Huntington is see the new Cicely Tyson/Paul Winfield movie called Sounder . What a wonderful film, and Charlie especially loved the bluesy musical score performed by Taj Mahal, who also played the character “Ike” on screen. Charlie loved it so much, in fact, that he started haunting Davids...

We thank all y’all for your feedback last week on our plans for the new album . Your thoughts and suggestions on the tune we asked you about — “(When She Wants Good Lovin’) Baby Comes to Me” — are so helpful. So, now can we get your thoughts on another song we’re considering? “Am I Blue?”, featured in the video above, is a tune we often trot out at the start of a rehearsal so everyone can limber u...