This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 More than 90 years ago, this was one of the last tunes recorded by our great hokum heroes Georgia Tom and Tampa Red. 

 
But while Tom and Red decided to go their separate ways in 1932, their songs just roll on and on. Here’s one of our favorites.

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 We have a new old saying around here: When it doubt, let Danny do it!  

 
Danny Cox has an abiding love for the works of Jerry Reed and Chet Atkins and his take on “Drive In” from a recent rehearsal beautifully displays those intersecting energies.

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.

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 Danny Cox and Randy Hamilton do some serious gold mining in this old sweet song. 

 
This track opens with Charlie Bowen and Jack Nuckols laying down the basic melody and rhythm, and then just listen to Danny start spending out all the riches he’s found in those lovely old chords.

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 “The Andy Griffith Show” was always at its best when the music-loving Darling family rolled into town. Now, The Darlings were played for the real-life Ozark band, The Dillards. Here from last week’s rehearsal is Randy Hamilton leading us on our take of the Dillards’ greatest tune.  

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

We first recorded this tune nearly a quarter of a century ago, a good old blues written in the 1930s by a Kentuckian named Teddy Darby.
 

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 Here’s a song that was born at jam sessions, with an infectious rhythm and a couple of funky chords that invite all kinds of improvisation. 

 
“Spooky” is the latest tune that Randy Hamilton and Danny Cox have brought to our band room, complete with those Classics IV lyrics.

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 For your Friday Flood fix, here’s a tune we all grew up hearing, Grandpa Jones’s theme song: “Eight More Miles to Louisville.” In this take from this week’s rehearsal, Randy Hamilton sings the lead and we all join in on the choruses.

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 George Gershwin’s “Lady Be Good” has been in The Flood repertoire for nearly a quarter century, aut lately it’s taken on a new life ever since Danny Cox brought around a better bunch of chords. Listen to Dan and the guys just rocking the socks off the thing!

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 This old tune from the mid-1960s hadn’t been played in The Flood band room in more than a decade or so, but when it dropped in at last week’s rehearsal, it fit the moment as comfortably as a good old shoe.
 

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 You know when you’re driving in your car and surfing the stations on your radio, each one offering something bright and different. 

 
That always reminds us of a Flood rehearsal, as the band drifts from some old ’50s rock tune to a blues to a Dylan song to maybe…. well, listen here as Randy Hamilton reinvents this century-long tune, turning it into something as fresh and sweet as a summer breeze.

This week's freebie from The 1937 Flood

 There are few sure things nowadays, but one thing we can guarantee is that somewhere in the Mountain State this song is being sung, whistled, hummed or at least thought of about every 15 minutes today. Happy West Virginia Day, y’all!

 

"This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood"

 We just barely had a quorum on this particular evening — Sam and Jack were still on vacation — but Danny, Randy and Charlie held down the fort and, as we say around here, whenever three or more gather in its name, it’s The Flood.

 

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 It’s kinda hard to get a quorum in the band room when summer travel season rolls around. In fact, it’s been three weeks now since all five of us have been together.

 Here, from that session, was our bon voyage to each other.

 

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 The Flood has gone fully folkie on this one. Jack has switched from his snare and brushes to his fiddle and Charlie’s on the five-string. 

 
We’re paying tribute to Dave Van Ronk’s signature tune, which itself was built round a children’s play party song that known throughout the South for more than a century.

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 Nothing gets us all the the same page faster than a good old jazz standard from the 1930s.

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 Here’s our take on an artifact from the Cold War, a Russian melody that we learned when it made its debut on American radios in the 1960s. 

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 There are a lot of train songs out there, but none of them will take us quite as far as this one. Come with us to where the Southern’ll cross the Yellow Dog!

This Week's Freebei from The 1937 Flood

 Around here, the best night of the week is whatever night we’re all getting together to pick. Everyone always comes in the room ready to rock. But some nights? Well, those night swing even more than usual. 

Last week, for instance, Danny Cox seemed to have a whole barrel of new riffs to try out on his guitar, and Jack Nuckols was absolutely cooking on his snare and high-hat. 

 
And, man, it seemed like Randy Hamilton was rocking before he even got his bass out of the case. Just listen to how Randy’s walking bass lines puts a strut and a glide in this great old Shelton Brooks tunes from the Roarin’ Twenties. 

Shoot, you can probably hear Charlie Bowen grinning while he's singing.

This Week's Freebie from the 1937 Flood

 Charlie first heard this centuries-old fiddle tune 50 years ago when an old friend Jim Strother played it with our favorite local string band, the good old Kentucky Foothill Ramblers. 

He couldn’t imagined The Flood ever playing it. However, a year or so ago, when he started studying the five-string banjo, the same old tune came rolling back in his brain. 

 
About the same time, Jack was dusting off his fiddle, and they worked it up together and then they taught it to Danny and Randy and Sam, who added their own sweet touches, and now the tune is a cool change of pace at our weekly rehearsals.

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 We learned this great West Virginia tribute song in the 1970s, just a few years after Bruce Phillips wrote it. That’s because some of our local heroes — H. David Holbrook’s late great Kentucky Foothill Ramblers — started singing it at those parties where The Flood was born.

 
Nowadays, "Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia" is always on the playlist whenever Floodster Emerita Michelle Hoge is in the room, as she was one night last month.

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 The Flood first started fooling around jug band tunes nearly 50 Springs ago, when the band was still a youngster. Before that, the guys played mainly old folk songs and some Bob Dylan and John Prine and a smattering of radio tunes from folks like James Taylor and The Eagles. 

But then they discovered some fine old recordings by Tampa Red and Georgia Tom, by groups like the Mississippi Sheiks and Gus Cannon’s Jug Stompers, and most especially the great Memphis Jug Band. 

 
Ever since then, The Flood’s music buffet table has been a lot bigger, with tunes like this one from the warmup at last week’s rehearsal.

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 Michelle Hoge brought us this song about a decade ago. It immediately found a place on the next album we were working on and it became a standard feature in most of our shows. 

 
Sadly, these days, we don’t see Michelle so often — she and her husband Rich live more than two hours away — but whenever she rambles back this way, as she did last week, this mid-1950s classic is sure to make an appearance.

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 At last week’s rehearsal, the first take on this tune was slow and bit lifeless, but then Randy Hamilton said, “Let’s try it again,” and kicked it up into a new gear. 

At the start of the track, you’ll hear him ask his band mates what they think. “Yeah!” they all say, then Danny Cox lets his guitar register his vote with some of the most inspired playing the whole night.

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 The word “evergreen” has a special meaning in our band room. It means a tune that’s timeless. Like this Tom Paxton classic. It is 60 years old, but it feels it could have been written last week — or a century ago.

 

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 We still 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 jazz records by Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Harry James. In BowenWorld, “Satin Doll” was as much a part of the household soundtrack and anything on the radio. 

Now, we don’t think Joe really cared about the song’s honored status in the jazz world. But he was tickled by a folksy rendition of it he had just heard by fiddler Stephane Grappelli and David Grisman and was eager to bring the tune into the Flood repertoire. 

 
And it still is. Here’s a take on the great old Duke Ellington-Billy Strayhorn number from last week’s Flood rehearsal.

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 The Flood has always celebrated diversity. We often follow at folk blues with a swing tune or chase a 1950s jazz standard with some 1920s jug band stuff. 

And deep in our DNA are the fiddle tunes we learned from Joe Dobbs and Doug Chaffin. Here’s a tune from around the time of the Civil War that we learned from fiddlin’ Jack Nuckols.

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 This bit of fluff from Bob Dylan’s “Nashville Skyline” album more than a half century ago is one of his least-recorded song, but The Flood has always enjoyed playing it over the decades. 

 
Here’s a happy take on the tune from a  recent rehearsal, featuring solos from everyone in the room.

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 We’re channelling 1966 with this tune. It’s our take on the first track of the third album by the late great Lovin’ Spoonful!

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 If your mother (or grandma or maybe your great-grandmother) was a Bobby-soxer in the 1940s, she probably danced to this song. 

 
It was a hit on the radio for Tommy Dorsey in late 1944, and an even bigger smash the following year for singer Anita O’Day, recording it with a band fronted by drummer Gene Krupa with the legendary Roy Eldridge on trumpet. 

In the Floodisphere,we’ve found that “Opus One” is wonderful way to warm up for an evening of tunes.

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 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 in from the North Country into New York City in the 1960s and changing music forever. 

 
For our tribute to this wonderful Bob Dylan biopic, “A Complete Unknown,” here’s a tune from that period. It’s our version of Bob’s version of “Corrina, Corrina.”

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 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.

When Dave Peyton and Charlie were just starting out as a duo in the early 1970s, they discovered that on this tune, a repeated scale descending from an opening minor chord resonated nicely on the guitar-Autoharp accompaniment to their voices. 

 
Over the decades, each configuration of The Flood has found something new to contribute to this basic arrangement. And it is still happening. Just listen to what Dan Cox and Jack Nuckols brought to the song at a rehearsal earlier this month.

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 Often the first notes of the evening set the pace, the mood and the tone for the entire rehearsal. 

 
Well, as you’ll hear on this track, Danny Cox came into last week’s session ready to set the Floodometer on sizzle — and, man, it worked! 

Now, we’ve been doing this great old 1920s jazz standard for only a couple of years, but it’s already become one of our go-to tunes for a good time, especially whenever Dan’s got new musical ideas to explore.

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 When the whole band can’t get together — like last week, when it was just Danny, Randy and Charlie — it’s an opportunity to explore tunes not usually on the practice list. 

 
Now, in Flood years, this old Ma Rainey song dates back nearly a half century, to when the fellows were just starting to fool with the hokum tunes of the 1920s and ‘30s.