The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast

Born in New Orleans in 1899, Alonzo "Lonnie" Johnson was one of America's great blues and jazz artists, touring with Bessie Smith, recording with Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, with Charlie Christian and Eddie Lang, with stride piano giant James P. Johnson and so many more. He was a guitar pioneer. In fact, blues historian Gérard Herzhaft believes Johnson was "undeniably the creator of the gu...

When The Flood first started doing this song some 40 years ago, Charlie’s sweet mother asked where such an odd little tune came from. We didn’t want to tell her the truth. “Mom, it was a popular party song in the late 1920s.” Well, that wasn’t a complete lie. It’s just that the “parties” where this song was born started very late at night and were in a part of town where nice girls generally didn’...

Bob Dylan was 20 years old, lovesick and lonely in 1962. His beautiful girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, had prolonged her stay in Italy indefinitely, and Bobby wouldn’t see her again for almost another year. Consequently, Suze figured prominently in a number of early Dylan verses, including some of his best love/angst songs of the period, including "Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” "One Too Many Mornings" and "B...

Midway through his seven-year stint with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, the brilliant arranger/composer Sy Oliver wrote this tune, which became a huge late World War II-era hit for the band. The chart-topping sensation — which Sy called simply “Opus No. 1” — went on to be radio hits for many other performers as well, from Gene Krupa and Harry James to the Mills Brothers and the Four Freshmen. Sid Gar...

Ashland, Ky., native Clyde McCoy and his orchestra recorded this song for Columbia in 1933 and then for the next half century he continued to perform it in front of crowds all over the country. In fact, “Tear It Down” was one the trumpeter’s two most requested numbers, second only to his signature song, Clarence Williams’ “Sugar Blues.” When Clyde moved from Columbia to the new Decca label in 1935...

The story of Charles Joseph “Buddy” Bolden — also known as King Bolden — is the story of jazz itself at its very beginnings. A trumpet player in New Orleans in the first years of the 20th Century, Bolden influenced several generations of jazz players. No recordings of Bolden exist, but the great Jelly Roll Morton called him “the most powerful trumpet player I’ve ever heard.” This tune was Bolden’s...

The melody had three daddies — in 1944 bandleaders Duke Ellington and Harry James collaborated with alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges to develop the tune — but it was those sassy lyrics that made the song: I never cared much for moonlit skies, I never winked back at fireflies, But now that the stars are in your eyes, I’m Beginning to See the Light! Those words came from the smart pen of the great Don...

We have great memories of attending folk festivals over the years. One of the fondest is the time we heard the original Red Clay Ramblers back in 1977. That was just a few years after that great old band formed, and it drove up to play a festival in Grayson County, Ky. We in the fledgling Flood had bought The Ramblers’ new album, and we were simply blown away by its second track. How astounding it...

A hundred years ago, much of America was having a wild and crazy party. Forgot about the labor wars. Forgot about the spread of Jim Crow and the KKK marching in Washington. Forgot about the doors banging shut on immigrants. Don’t be a party pooper, jake. The war was over. The plague of the “Spanish Flu” was declining. The stock market was soaring. Oh sure, alcohol was still prohibited, but… shhhhh...

Of all the tunes we do, none is more evocative than “Autumn Leaves.” Joseph Kosma’s post World War II composition quickly became a jazz standard in America from the 1950s right up to today. “Autumn Leaves” actually is the tale of two torch songs,” music journalist Bill DeMain notes. “The original, written in French as “Les Feuilles Mortes” (meaning, “Dead Leaves”), was a dark lament of lost love a...

We tend to think of Duke Ellington and his orchestra as the epitome of cool, sophisticated jazz. “Mood Indigo.” “Caravan.” “Black And Tan Fantasy.” “Sophisticated Lady.” But Duke and the guys also could get down and party, especially when the festivities were organized by his lead trumpeter, Cootie Williams. Williams, a Mobile, Alabama, native, was just 18 when he joined Ellington’s orchestra in 1...

Americans know “Pretty Polly” as the short, tragic story of a young woman who is lured into the forest and murdered by her brutal lover, who then buries her in a shallow grave and runs away. Actually, though, the oldest versions of this song — which has its origins almost 300 years ago in Great Britain — needed up to 36 verses to tell its grim story. In the original English ballad — called “The Go...

The only blue moon of 2023 appears later this month, so it’s high time we dusted off our latest rendition of the world’s best-loved anthem to this particular astronomical event. “Blue Moon” came into being around 1934 after famed composers Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart were brought from New York to Hollywood by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and commissioned to produce songs for a film called Hollywood Par...

Our version of this traditional tune originated with Roger Samples and the quiet picking sessions he and Charlie Bowen had back in the mid-1970s. They had been listening to David Bromberg’s then-new debut album, on which they both liked Bromberg’s arrangement of something that Philadelphia folkie called “Dehlia.” But of course, as usual, Samples had his own ideas for the song. Crafting a new melod...

When we roll into Sal’s Speakeasy tomorrow night for The Flood’s monthly gig, we’ll bring with us a tune that has been rocking audiences for more than eight decades. And that, brothers and sisters, is the definition of a hit! Bob Russell’s Big Break Our tale begins with a young man named Bob Russell who was making his living in New York as an advertising copywriter, but who also nurtured a love fo...

Looking for songs to play in our nightly pre-show set as Alchemy Theater’s wonderful Bright Star musical enters its final weekend tonight, we hit on one of the oldest tunes in The Flood’s repertoire, a rollicking number that relates the deeds and misadventures of a rambling ne’er-do-well named Buster. It was nearly 50 years ago when we first heard “Didn’t He Ramble?” Dave Peyton and Charlie Bowen...

The Flood is honored and thrilled to be invited by Mike Murdock and Nora Ankrom to be part of their Alchemy Theater’s new production of the musical, Bright Star . This evening is opening night! The show runs for the next two weekends, July 7-9, 14-16 at Huntington’s new Geneva Kent Center for the Arts at 68 Holley Ave. Doors open at 7 p.m. each evening. In addition, there is one matinee performanc...

Okay, up front let’s just get this out of the way. We don’t know what “sugaree” is, or why you would want to shake it, or what’d happen if you did. And apparently nobody else knows either. Our Story Begins… Let’s start our story in the mid-1960s, when folk music legend Elizabeth Cotten recorded her new album, Shake Sugaree . “That’s more my grandchildren’s song,” Libba Cotten later told Mike Seege...

Sixty years ago this summer, Ironton, Ohio, native son Bobby Bare started work on his debut album for RCA Victor. The LP’s title track — “500 Miles Away from Home” — would turn out to be one of the best-selling singles in the 88-year-old Bare’s long career. Composition of the song is generally credited to folksinger Hedy West, who is said to have put it together from fragments of a melody she hear...

Guitarists Jerry Reed and Chet Atkins had a special, productive musical bond. Reed rather famously lived in the moment, often writing wonderfully tasty riffs and licks only to forget them the next day when he moved on to a new project. By contrast, Atkins was a detail-driven professional and a successful producer. Chet appreciated, completed and recorded many of Jerry's pieces after practicing and...

Barefoot Days have arrived, a season so sweet and easy that it has its own anthem. “Summertime,” from George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, is perhaps the perfect jazz standard. Unforgettable lyrics. A melody that seems to be from a dream. Like magic, the song sounds new every single time, no matter how many times you’ve heard it. And you’ve heard it many times. “Summertime” is one of the most recorde...

“You’re No Good,” the opening song on Bob Dylan’s 1962 eponymous debut album, was written, not by the 19-year-old genius, but by one of his heroes, Jesse “Lone Cat” Fuller. Legend has it that Dylan saw and heard Fuller perform that song himself in 1960 at Denver’s Exodus coffeehouse shortly after it opened in the basement of the Raylane Hotel. The venue was managed by the late folk singer Walt Con...

Our story begins nearly 200 years ago on an Irish hillside overlooking the Kenmare River in County Kerry, where a massive manor house was to be built for the Mahony family. The Mahonys had long wanted a castle atop that hill. In the early 19th century, John Mahony made the decision to build a large home there, but he lost heart for the project when his boat — returning from London with lead for th...

Among the tunes we’ve got on tap to share at Sal’s Speakeasy this weekend is one with a curious history. A monster AM radio hit in the early 1960s, it actually was originally a jug band tune recorded many decades earlier. Back in the 1920s, a remarkable roots musician named Gus Cannon co-wrote “Walk Right In” for his hot new band, Cannon’s Jug Stompers, to record for Victor Records. Already an est...

What is probably America’s best-known song about the Netherlands — “The Dutchman” — was written by a man who had never been there. “The song has in it almost everything I'd ever read or heard, in school and in the library, about Holland,” composer Michael Peter Smith told a fan in 2010, about 40 years after he wrote the song at the very start of his career. Did he ever consider singing it in Holla...