Jam Logs, the Podcast of The 1937 Flood

We’re all eager for this weekend as we settle in again as the house band for another great Route 60 Saturday Night show. This month’s guests are two wonderful singer-songwriters — a newcomer to our stage, Emily Kinner, and a regular crowd favorite, Rob McNurlin. We’ll also have some thoughts from our resident storyteller, Dave Peyton, and Michelle Lewis will share the emcee mike with our guest co-host Paul Callicoat. Meanwhile, what is The Flood’s role in all this? Oh, it’s up to us to provide the educational content for the evening, like, well, this little history lecture we’re preparing. Join us this Saturday night, April 21. Admission is $5, and this month all proceeds go the help the good work at Branches Domestic Violence Shelter. The 90-minute show starts at 7 p.m. at Route 60 Music Co., 60 Peyton Street in Barboursville.

The Flood has had a long-time long-distance infatuation with the Utah Phillips song “The Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia” for — oh, goodness, for 40 years we’ve loved that song! Well, ever since we first heard Bill Hoke, Susan Lewis and David Holbrook sing it in their Kentucky Foothill Ramblers days at parties back in the mid-1970s. But we in The Flood never really liked how we did the song until recent years, when Michelle and Randy brought the vocal chops to the band that could handle it. Now at last the song is a regular for us. Check out this rendition from a recent rehearsal, especially the great solos by Doug and Paul and by our visitor for the evening, Jim Rumbaugh, sitting in on harmonica.

There are many advantages to having weekly rehearsals, but one of the less obvious ones — even to us — is that regular practice sessions provide a kind of insurance against lost songs. What usually happens is that between the tunes on the schedule for rehearsing, someone starts noodling with a bit of melody. “What is that?” someone else will say. “Why, that sounds like …. Oh yeah! Remember…” and away we go. A case in point is the beautiful Eddy Arnold tune, “You Don’t Know Me.” When Michelle brought it to us five years ago, it became an instant hit with the band, making it onto the next CD we were set to record. But then, for some reason, the song just slipped away — until a couple of weeks ago when a bit of fortuitous fiddling between songs brought it back to our collective memory. Here’s Michelle’s take on the tune from last night’s rehearsal. Oh, and by the way, that’s the great Jim Rumbaugh on harmonica; Jim’s sitting in with us for a gig this weekend because our regular hamonicat, Sam St. Clair, is on vacation this week.

Some nights you just don’t want it to end. You’ve been playing for an hour and a half, folk are standing up and stretching and looking at the door, and then someone says, “Aw, just one more,” and everybody grins and sits back down again. Last night’s just-one-more tune was this one, our upbeat version of that old traditional piece, “Careless Love,” though, truth be told, in The Flood’s hands, “Careless Love” always feels less careless and more carefree.

One of the of the many joys of being together each week is sharing our common musical memories, and when it comes to Doug Chaffin, well, the man’s got a lot to share. Doug started playing music some 60 years ago with his family and then with some of those great local rock bands. Old-timers around here remember a rockabilly band called The Montereys, named a rather nice Mercury automobile. A teen-aged Doug Chaffin played lead guitar with them. Anyway, it’s a treat for us that Doug revisits his rock ’n’ roll roots when we play things like Bruce Channel’s 1950s rock anthem “Hey, Baby.” But then Doug can turn on a dime and bring out his soulful side on on the very next tune. It’s like having another voice singing along with the harmonies. Listen to how he weaves together all of the music strands to wrap up the Bob Gibson-John D. Loudermilk classic, “Abilene.”

The Flood is all fired up for the launch of the big second season of “Route 60 Saturday Night” at 7 p.m. THIS Saturday night at Route 60 Music Co., 60 Peyton St. in Barboursville. The guest artists for this big opening show are two great duets, Holly and the Guy and The Shadowshaker Band. We’ll also have another fine story by the resident storyteller, Dave Peyton, and all proceeds from this month’s show go to help the good folks at CONTACT of Huntington. Now, since this particular show falls on St. Patrick’s Day, you know the The Flood, as your house band, has gotta have a few Irish tunes in the lineup, like this great old sing-along from The Old Sod, “The Wild Rover.” Erin Go Bragh!

We’re gearing up for the launch of the big second season of “Route 60 Saturday Night,” the new music variety show at Route 60 Music Co., where The Flood is the house band. The show is on the third Saturday night each month, meaning the next show will be on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17. And to celebrate in style, we want to dust off a few songs from The Old Sod. Now, “Down By the Salley Gardens,” with lyrics by William Butler Yeats, has been in The Flood repertoire for 25 or 30 years — in fact, it’s on our first CD released all the way back in 2001 — but the tune has had a beautiful rebirth with harmony that Michelle has brought to the verses. Just listen! And remember, mark your calendar. We’ll be at Route 60 Music Co., 60 Peyton St. in Barboursville on Saturday, March 17, 2018, for the start of the new season of “Route 60 Saturday Night!”

Wow, we have a blue moon this month. Now, the term “blue moon” generally means two full moons in the same month. (In this case, the first full moon is this Thursday and the second full moon will be on Saturday, March 31.) Yeah, I know — it’s just a little public service announcement from your friends in The Flood. Anyway, to get you ready for all your blue moon frolicking, here’s a lunar tune from last night’s rehearsal.

The folk process in music is interesting. Sometimes tunes begin in the foggy ruins of time, as Bob Dylan might say — uh, DID say, actually — and then make their way into contemporary songs. For instance, Jimmy Driftwood’s “The Battle of New Orleans”(“in 1814, we took a little trip…”) began life as a fiddle tune called “The 8th of January,” which is still played by the pros today. And sometimes the folk process works in the other direction. In other words, a composed tune enters the hearts and minds of traditional musicians and takes on a false narrative of antiquity, sort “going native.” A case in point in the Canadian-American tune called “Ookpik,” which began surfacing on the fiddle contest circuit in the 1970s with rumors ancient roots among Native Americans. After all, the name itself is an Inuit word for “snowy” or for “Arctic owl.” Well, despite all those stories about this being some time-honored Eskimo waltz, “Ookpik” was written by a late British Columbia fiddler named Frankie Rodgers, who actually published it in a book of his compositions in 1965. Okay, fine, but whatever it provenance, it’s a beautiful melody, one that Doug Chaffin brought to us a few years ago. On this track from a couple of weeks ago, Doug starts the tune with his rich, warm guitar, then we hand it off to Paul Martin’s mandolin while Doug switches to his fiddle to bring the song to sweet conclusion.

Our old friends Linda and Wendell Dobbs once recommended a tune to us … well, wait a minute. We know the actual date! It was July 12, 2012, at the start of the Joe Dobbs book tour. Yeah, it’s weird, the things we remember, but we were doing a show and a reading in Ashland, Ky., at the Paramount Arts Center, and, during a break, Wendell said, “You know, you guys oughta try doing ‘A Taste of Honey.’ It’d be a good song for you!” Well, we did give the song a spin at a couple of rehearsals, but then, you know how it is —things happened and we got distracted and “Honey” just sort of went back on the shelf. Until earlier this month, when we got a hankering for another little taste of honey. It was as if the tune had to wait for Doug Chaffin and Paul Martin to season it with their beautiful solos, as you’ll hear in this track from a recent rehearsal. So, then, this is for Wendell and Linda. We don’t forget; it’s just that sometimes it takes us a while to remember! By the way, we remembered the actual date of Linda and Wendell’s suggestion because of a new project we’ve launched, a kind of online scrapbook of stories, pictures, audios and videos called “Five Decades of Floodishness.”  Come to our web site — www.1937flood.com — to check it out.