This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 Here’s a tune that will be on the set list tomorrow night when The Flood opens the festivities at this year’s Diamond Teeth Mary blues festival in downtown Huntington. 

 
It’s a 1913 composition by the great Shelton Brooks. And if that name sounds familiar, you might be remembering last week’s podcast when we talked about Brooks’ best-known composition, the phenomenal “Darktown Strutters’ Ball.” 

As noted last week, by the time Brooks wrote that, his songwriting chops were already firmly established with songs like this one, which was performed by everyone from Sophie Tucker and Mae West to Tampa Red, Georgia Tom and Frankie “Half Pint” Jaxon. 

Here’s The Flood’s take on “I Wonder Where My Easy Rider’s Gone.” 

Remember, the Diamond Teeth Mary Medicine Show will be rocking downtown Huntington tomorrow night in the beautiful Heritage Station, 210 11th Street. The Flood takes the stage at 6 p.m.

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 We had our old buddy Jim Rumbaugh in the band room recently. Jim will be sitting in with us when The Flood plays at the latest Diamond Teeth Mary blues festival next week. 

Last week, after we’d worked on the blues tunes we’ll do for the show, we switched this rocking old Roaring Twenties number from Shelton Brooks. 

It all went well until I tried to tag it with a classic Chuck Romine ending. Hey, who knew there’d be spelling?!

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 As we start thinking about what The Flood should play for its set at this year’s Diamond Teeth Mary blues festival here in Huntington, one song seems like a natural. It’s a near-century-old tune that touched the lives of two great West Virginia jazzmen. 

Big band composer Don Redmond, who hailed from the eastern part of the Mountain State, wrote the song in 1929. 

Then a dozen years later, the phenomenal saxophonist Chu Berry from Wheeling recorded it in his very last studio session. Here’s The Flood’s latest take on Redmond’s great “Gee, Baby, Ain’t I Good to You?”

 
Remember, we’ll be at the Diamond Teeth Mary festival Saturday, Aug. 22 at Heritage Station, 210 11th Street in beautiful downtown Huntington. The Flood is honored to open the festivities with its set at 6 p.m.
 

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 Surely, no innovation in modern human history has gotten so deeply into our psyche, into our hearts and minds. Railroad imagery fills our art and music, symbolizing so many beginnings … and endings. 

 
Here’s a train tune from our folk-infused youth.

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 The late Dave Peyton inspired Charlie Bowen to write this song. 

 
Railing against the relentless ravaging of our state, he’d say, “Sometimes I think the worst thing that ever happened to West Virginia was when somebody discovered coal.” 

And what bothered him almost as much was the paralyzing grief felt by generations of Mountain State natives, a communal sorrow for not being able to stop the rape of our home.

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 An old friend, Jim Strother, once said, “Remember back when you’d see a fella ramblin’ along carrying a guitar case, and he’d have his coat collar turned up against the wind and a cap pulled down over his eyes. With just one look you knew everything you needed to know about that guy.”

 
And the soundtrack in your head when you saw that was always an early Bob Dylan tune, like this one.

This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

 There’s nothing like a good old train song to capture the crossroads in a man or a woman’s life. Here’s one of the best in our repertoire.

"Yellow Dog Blues" was the last tune of our night with John Ace, the wonderful fiddler introduced to us by Floodster Emeritus Dave "Bub" Ball.