Jam Logs, the Podcast of The 1937 Flood

 The Flood learned its version of this tune from the great Jim Kweskin’s jug band and its 1966 album for Vanguard called “Relax Your Mind.” At last night’s Flood rehearsal, we were doing just that, thank you very much. Here we’ve got Randy Hamilton killing in on the harmonies and double dips of scintillating solos by Sam St. Clair and Danny Cox. As Jim Kweskin says, “I got mine — hope you got yours!”

 If you were trying to make a graphic representation of a Flood rehearsal, your best model would probably be a crazy quilt. In the span of an hour or two, we go from rollicking jugband tunes and blues to re-imaged rock ’n’ roll classics of the ‘50s and ‘60s. And then suddenly: something completely different. Our Randy Hamilton has been doing “Wayfaring Stranger” for a while now, but it’s always changing, depending on what’s new in the room. This week that “new” was Randy’s old buddy Danny Cox — the two of them go back to high school days together! — who for the first brought his sweet, imaginative guitar work to the tune. Meanwhile, Veezy Coffman, who’s usually playing tenor, this time brought her big beautiful baritone sax to the session. Now, that bari can rock us to the very soles of feet, but here Veezy shows us that her horn always has a softer side. Just listen to how she weaves in and out of Randy’s haunting vocals and Danny’s enchanting chords.

 Ask our bass player Randy Hamilton to name his best friends on the planet and somewhere near the very top of that list will be Danny Cox. Now, we’ve been hearing ABOUT this marvelous guitar player for years now. But last night we final got to actually hear him, and oh my! From his Ironton, Ohio, home on a cold winter’s night, Danny tagged along with Randy to the weekly Flood gathering and immediately really warmed up the place. Just listen to him and Veezy Coffman share choruses on this great old Mississippi Sheiks standard, “Sittin’ on Top of the World.”

Nineteen Twenty-Four was a golden year for George Gershwin. After more than a decade on pounding the pavement of New York’s Tin Pan Alley peddling his tunes, Gershwin composed his first major work — “Rhapsody in Blue” — and then that same year he and his brother, Ira, scored their first major hit on Broadway. The musical comedy “Lady Be Good,” which would run for more than 300 performances, was a showcase for a string of Gershwin brother collaborations, like “Fascinating Rhythm” and, of course, that phenomenal title tune. Now, that song — the perennial 1920s party tune, “Lady Be Good” — is a rarity among jazz standards in the Great American Songbook. Not many improvisational vehicles survived the transition from the loose Dixieland style of the “Roaring Twenties” to the smooth swing sound of the 1930s and beyond. But as everyone from Ella Fitzgerald and Mel Tormé to Charlie Parker, Lester Young and Django Reinhardt would demonstrate, “Lady Be Good” has some serious legs. The Flood started doing the song 20 years ago — it’s features on our second album — and our love of the tune really began to blossom when Doug Chaffin switched from bass to guitar to take charge of the lead on the number. Then, good golly, it went into full flower more recently when Vanessa Coffman came along with her tenor sax. Here Doug and Veezy share choruses with Sam St. Clair on “Lady Be Good” at a recent rehearsal.

 New Orleans jazz pioneer Richard M. Jones wrote “Trouble in Mind” about a century ago, and singer Bertha “Chippie” Hill made it a hit with a 1926 recording that had Jones himself on piano and a youngster by the name of Louis Armstrong on cornet. Since then, of course, the song’s been recorded by everyone from Big Bill Broonzy to Dinah Washington and Nina Simone. Music historians even call this tune the anthem of the classic blues genre, but actually its roots go even deeper. At least two different African American spirituals dating all the way back to the 1880s have similar themes in their lyrics. Now, The Flood has been doing “Trouble in Mind” for decades now; recently, Veezy Coffman gave it a whole new feel by bringing her big beautiful bari sax to bear on it. Hey, take a listen.

 We’ve always loved this great old song -- now just about a century old — but we’ll be the first to tell you that there are some very hinky thing about our beloved tune. For one thing, hands down, the best known rendition of it is one of the earliest, the Columbia Records release by the great blues singer Bessie Smith. However, technically, the song’s not a blues. Structurally, it’s much like a vaudeville number or even an old music hall piece than one of the classic 12-bar blues that came out of the Mississippi Delta. Not only that, while “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” became one of the signature tunes of the Great Depression, we’ve learned that it was written actually almost a decade before those trouble times. Here’s how The Flood’s team of crack music detectives has sorted it out. The song was written in 1923 by a piano player named Jimmy Cox, who was indeed pretty well established on the black vaudeville circuit that worked the American roads in the Roaring Twenties. And Bessie Smith, who was just getting her career going in those days, was known to travel that same circuit and might have even performed in Jimmy Cox’s shows. It’s possible, in fact, she learned the song from Jimmy himself. What we know for sure that that by time Bessie Smith went back into the recording studio in the spring of 1929, Columbia was beginning to notice the blues records weren’t selling as well as they had had been and the suits wanted different material. Bessie responded with the Jimmy Cox composition from her vaudeville days. And here’s the final piece of the puzzle. In those days, it took a quite a long time for a record to make its way around the country. By the time it had traveled from New York City to the West Coast, the stock markets had collapsed and the Depression was beginning to wreak havoc. Imagine the listeners being amazed at how prophetic Bessie Smith’s new record was in describing their misery that first Depression winter. Here’s our take on the tune from a recent Flood rehearsal.

 From almost a decade ago — in the early spring of 2013 — here’s the late Joe Dobbs fiddling the last of the many tunes he taught us over his 40 years of playing with us. Now, Joe’s tune here is an old one — it goes back at least 300 years — called “South Wind,” an Irish aire that Joe learned from a nice lady in Beckley, WV. And like many a good Irish tune, it prominently features a few ghosts along the way. The story of “South Wind” goes like this. It’s seems that there was a ghost ship bringing back home the souls of Irish exiles, men the Irish called The Wild Geese who had been killed in battle in foreign wars. As this haunted ship continued around southwestern County Cork, it was driven up the west coast by a southern breeze. And legend has it that the ghosts of these brave expatriates could be heard intoning this particular enchanted tune, which was picked up on the shore by the pipers and the fiddlers who handed down to us today.

 On this Christmas Eve, our gift to you is a beautiful old carol. Now, in our country, we often know it as “What Child Is This?” based on a Christmas verse that was written more than a century and a half ago. But its melody is even more deeply enshrined in our common human experience. In fact, think about it! This tune — “Greensleeves” — is one of the oldest melodies that we in the western world even know. Dating back to at least the Elizabethan period of English history, “Greensleeves” was, in fact, so well known by the time of William Shakespeare that he could refer to it by name three times in his play, “The Merry Wives of Windsor.” Meanwhile, this ancient, beautiful melody started being associated with Christmas and New Year’s as early as the 1680s. And yet, this tune never really seems to get very old, does it?

 Because of travel and all the usual holiday hullabaloo, we couldn’t work out a rehearsal this week, but that’s okay. The lull lets us pick up a tune that got left on the shelf earlier. Here from a gig last month at Heritage Station in downtown Huntington is an old 1950s Coasters number that we learned from folksinger Tom Rush’s treatment of it in the ‘70s. Penned by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the song can be a real head-turner in a public show.

 The mood of last night’s jam session was set before we even walked through the door, because our host, Doug Chaffin, had already gotten a good head start on an amble down memory lane when he dug out his mother’s old guitar. You’ll need some background here. In the 1940s, Doug grew up listening to — and then playing — string band music with his mom and her banjo-picking sister. Years later when he was all grown, Doug bought his mom the best guitar she’d ever play, a big, beautiful Gibson Dove, a study of love in maple, mahogany and rosewood. Well, we’ve not seen that guitar — it’s been in its case for decades — but at its coming out party last night it jumped right into the mix. Just listen to it shimmy on this jive tune from about a hundred years ago.