Jam Logs, the Podcast of The 1937 Flood

About 20 years ago this summer, Joe Dobbs asked the boys in his band to come up with a theme song for his show, “Music from the Mountains” which by then had been a huge weekend favorite on West Virginia Public Radio for decades. Honestly, we were fresh out of ideas for a new song until Charlie remembered a tune he had written maybe five years earlier, one he’d never done anything with. So in the summer 2002, we re-appropriated that melody, Dave Peyton wrote some cool new lyrics for it and The Flood just sort of put it all together one evening in the studio. In fact, the show’s producer, George Walker, left the recorder running and happened to capture the moment as that particular sausage was being made. From then on, that theme was used every week until the show ended its quarter-of-a-century run about a decade ago. But long before Joe Dobbs’ passing six years ago, we’d pretty much stopped playing the song. Still, lately that old melody has been on Doug Chaffin’s mind and he’s been urging us to resurrect it. So, as a hoot, we’ve tarted playing a bit with my original composition, a silly little song from the ‘90s that Charlie called “Lovin’ You Would Be So Good for Me.” So, for the record, here’s a little taste of it. From a jam session at the Chaffin house a week or so ago, this is the tune that reinvented itself as Joe Dobbs’ theme song.

 When she’s not playing with The Flood or working on her double-major at Marshall University, our saxophonist Veezy Coffman can often be seen and heard playing solo jazz sets at cool venues all around the Tri-State Area. For instance, she’s performing twice this weekend: Friday night in The Guitar Bar at The Winchester in Ashland, Ky., and then Saturday night back here in Huntington at the New Jockey Club downtown in The Frederick. Now, it was in just such a jazzy solo set that we first heard Veezy a year and a half ago and we couldn’t wait to get her into our band. We learn a lot from this 20 year old, especially about creative listening. Here’s a cool example of what we mean by that. At a rehearsal a few weeks ago, Doug Chaffin started playing “Around the World Waltz,” a tune that he learned from a 1990s Byron Berline album called “Jumping the Strings.” (Oh, incidentally, we were sad to hear of Byron’s death last week; what an amazing, influential fiddler he was!) Anyway, Veezy had never heard the tune before, so at the start of this track, just listen to her listen to it, and then, when it’s her turn, hear how she improvises her lovely impressions of that melody. Of course, Veezy learns some stuff from us too, such as how rock along on a blues with the give and take in an ensemble of band mates who are all just making it up as they go! You can hear it on the second half of this track, after the waltz, in her wailing in the final choruses of “Yellow Dog Blues.”

 Eighteen years ago this month, our late fiddler Joe Dobbs brought a young woman to a rehearsal to meet the band. The plan was to work out just a couple of tunes for her to sing with us at a gig we would be playing that weekend at Snowshoe Resort in the mountains of West Virginia’s Pocahontas County. Now, needless to say, we all fell in love with Michelle — she was Michelle Walker in those days, later to be Michelle Lewis —and that one evening led to a rich musical life together. Now, right now these are very busy days for Lady Michelle — she’s packing up to move away to join her fiancé, Rich, who lives in Loveland, Ohio, just northeast of Cincinnati. But recently she made time to join us at Doug Chaffin’s house for an evening of reminiscing on all her favorite songs from over the years. Here’s a highlight of that night.

 We always love having Charlie’s cousin Kathy Castner sing a few tunes with us. Well, it never happens nearly often enough — usually only a couple of times a year, maybe once in the summer and again at Christmastime, when she comes in from Cincinnati to sit in with the band — and, of course, Kathy’s visits were another casualty of Covid. Because of the pandemic, we’d not seen and heard her for more than a year. But, bless her heart, as soon as the restrictions were loosened earlier this month, Kathy came hightailing it from Ohio to reunite with her extended Flood family. Here’s a sweet moment from that night, Kathy’s take on a 1960 Carole King classic that The Shirelles took all the way to No. 1. For us, this first tune of the evening is pretty strong evidence that whenever Kathy asks, “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” our reply is a rather resounding, “Oh yes!”

 The great Jelly Roll Morton once told folklorist Alan Lomax that the song “Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor” was one of the earlier country blues to come rambling into the big city of New Orleans, that it was being played in the Crescent City many years before he was born there in the 1880s. The song was even known to be favorite of that jazz forefather, the legendary cornetist Buddy Bolden. But it wasn’t only in New Orleans; up in Memphis, Jelly Roll’s rival songwriter, W.C. Handy, must have heard it too, because, well, he re-appropriated big chunks of the same song for his “Atlanta Blues,” which Louis Armstrong put on a disc in 1954. The Flood got its version from a recording made a half dozen years later for Folkways by the late great Boston bluesmen Rolf Cahn and Eric Von Schmidt. Here, then — with some sweet soloing by Veezy, Sam, Randy and Doug — is our little homage to those earliest days of jazz.

 It’s summertime and about a third of the band is out of town right now, on vacation with their families. But hey, if you’ve got Michelle to the wail the vocal and Randy to lay down his signature rock-solid bass line and Doug to roll with the solos, gee, you got everything you need to make for a memorable evening. Here’s a favorite moment from last night’s rehearsal. Doug has switched to his sweet, soulful acoustic guitar and the four of us are grooving along on a Michelle Lewis special.

 If you’d been around in 1932 and had your ears on, you might have  thought that songwriter Hoagy Carmichael had already peaked. Oh, sure, he’d been writing for only for about eight years, but, shoot, by then he’d already published … let’s see… “Stardust” and “Georgia on My Mind,” “Rockin’ Chair” and “Riverboat Shuffle” and “Up a Lazy River.” Those songs right there were enough to warrant a legacy chapter in the Great American Songbook. So, you’d’ve been forgiven in 1932 for not realizing our man Hoagy had another half century of great originals to bring us. Ahead lay … oh, “Lazybones” and “The Nearness of You,” “Heart and Soul” and “Memphis in June,” “Hong Kong Blues,” “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” “Ole Buttermilk Sky,” “In the Still of the Night,” “Skylark.” Heck, we could do Hoagy tunes all night long — and, well, sometimes we do. Here, from last night’s Floodifying, is our first run at one of Carmichael’s 1932 compositions, a sweet, sexy little tune simply called, “New Orleans.”

 It’s been a little more than a year now since one of our heroes — songwriter John Prine — passed away at the start of the dreadful Covid-19 pandemic, and at last night’s Flood gathering, we paused to remember John with one of our all-time favorite Prine composition. “One Red Rose” is all about remembering. In fact, Prine once explained that the imagery in the song came from a childhood memory of time when he was nine years old and he and his family were visiting his cousin Charlie Bill back in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. “It was the back of a general store,” John said. “There was a tin roof and a wonderful thunderstorm going on above and around us. We were telling ghost stories and staying up late, and there was a curtain separating the bedroom from the mature adults' kitchen. Our light was off. Thus, their 'kitchen light fell asleep on the bedroom floor.’” Ah, only Prine would write that line. We miss you, John.

 One of Ray Charles’s first hits was “Mess Around,” released on Atlantic Records back in 1953, but actually Brother Ray was a little late to the party with that tune. Many of the ideas for that song can been heard in a whole mess of New Orleans boogie piano riffs, starting as early as, say, Cow Cow Davenport’s playing the late 1920s. But if you want to go have even further — and, well, we generally do — there are references to dances called a “mess around” as far back the earliest days of jazz. For instance, in his wonderful autobiography called “Trumpet on the Wing,” the great New Orleans jazzman Wingy Manone talked about watching people dance the mess-around at the fish fries of his youth in the Crescent City. Said Wingy, “The mess-around was a kind of dance where you just messed around with your feet in one place, letting your body do most of the work, while keeping time by snapping fingers with one hand and holding a slab of fish in the other!” Now, that’s a picture. Here’s a mess-around we learned from a Memphis Jug Band piece that was actually recorded 91 years this week.

 Two of our all-time favorite musicians — Doug Chaffin and Bob Dylan — both turn 80 this year, Bob next week and Doug in August, and both are still going strong. Well, shoot, more than just going strong, these octogenarians-to-be are both still finding new ideas and inspiring everybody around them to do the same. For instance, check this out. To celebrate this momentous year, last night we dusted off this old Bob Dylan tune off the great “Nashville Skyline” album of 50 years ago. Listen how right from the start, Doug’s guitar work prompts his bandmates — first, Veezy Coffman, then Sam St. Clair — to find interesting new nooks and crannies in their own solos.