This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 The sing-along — “if you know it, sing it!” as we say around here — is fundamental to folk music. 

As the folk music guiding spirit, Pete Seeger, once said, “I rather put songs on people’s lips than in their ears.” 

 
And for us, there’s no better sing-along than this tune, which the newest Floodster Jack Nuckols brought us about a year ago.

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 Danny Cox and Randy Hamilton brought us this tune a year or so ago and as it matures, it just keeps enriching The Flood’s bloodstream. 

 
And it’s right on target to be included on the new album when we start work on that in the coming months. 

It’s an old Doc Watson tune. Here’s the latest take from a recent rehearsal. It’s “Deep River Blues.”

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

Honestly, we don’t remember when we first started doing this song. It was back when we were youngsters at those good old folk music parties in the ‘60s. 

A decade later, the tune was firmly entrenched when The Flood came together. And we were still playing it in 2001 when we recorded our first album, on which it’s the closing track. 

 
That was a good call, because we often use this song to close out a show, since it gives everybody in the band one more solo before we call it a night, as you can hear in this take from last week’s rehearsal. Here’s our latest take on Jesse Fuller’s “San Francisco Bay Blues.”

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 Newcomers here were surprised by last week’s podcast, which celebrated native West Virginians who became legendary jazzmen. “I’m sorry,” one of them said, “but to me the idea of West Virginia conjures up fiddles and banjos. I’ve never thought of it for jazz.” 

He’s forgiven for not realizing the diversity of the Mountain State’s musical tradition. For instance, this is the 100th birthday of the greatest jazz standards of all times, and it was written by Bluefield, WV, native son, Maceo Pinkard. Yes, she might have been a Georgia peach, but our Miss Brown was a West Virginia girl at heart!

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 Joining The Flood repertoire, some songs fit in right away, while others — like this 90-year-old Don Redmond classic — take a little time to settle in, but when they do, wow — they’re as comfortable as an old shoe.

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

Our latest iteration of this song has been eight years in the making. 

Randy Hamilton brought it to us in the spring of 2017 and had already worked out the basic arrangement in his head, but it took a while to get the instrumentation right. 

For instance, Jack Nuckols, whose drumming is so fundamental this track, didn’t arrive until a couple of years ago, about the same time that I began learning a bit of banjo. 

Now Jack’s snare drum and my five-string could provide a little counterbalance to the sweet solos by Danny Cox and Sam St. Clair.

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 A lot of ghosts stalk our rehearsal room nowadays, but to a man they are a happy bunch of haunts. 

And we have table set aside for photos of all of our old band mates who have passed on. But more than mere pictures, it’s their music that keeps our old comrades alive. 

 
Here’s one of the late Dave Peyton’s favorite tunes that’s never left us since he first brought to this very room 20 years ago.