This Week's Freebie from The 1937 Flood

This week we feature another long-time Flood standard. When The Flood first started doing this song some 40 years ago and Charlie’s sweet mother asked where such an odd little tune came from, we didn’t want to tell her the truth, so he said, “Mom, it was a popular party song in the late 1920s.” Well, it wasn’t a complete lie; it’s just the “parties” where this song was born started very late at night and were in a part of town where nice girls generally didn’t go.

The song we’ve always called “Yas Yas Duck” is an old hokum jazz tune that’s been recorded under a lot different names over the years. As near as we can figure, the first recording was by the great St. Louis piano pounder James “Stump” Johnson who released it in January 1929 as “The Duck Yas-Yas-Yas.” Later that some year, new versions started cropping up, one recorded by Oliver Cobb and his Rhythm Kings and another by all-time Flood heroes Tampa Red and Georgia Tom.

For us, the tune has become a kind of connective tissue between today and our old jug band roots of the 1970s and ’80s. That’s why we put it on our first commercial CD back in 2001, and why it still gets trotted out regularly at rehearsals, just so newer members of the band can learn it.

This track, from a rehearsal back in early March, was bassist Paul Callicoat’s introduction to The Duck. At the beginning of the track, you’ll hear us telling him where to find the chords in his new Flood Fakebook. Click to hear the tune.