Jam Logs, the Podcast of The 1937 Flood

We try to keep politics out of the rehearsal room, but this week's news -- that one of the presidential candidates lost nearly a billion dollars and so may not have paid income tax for 18 years -- seeped even down to the Flood bunker, where, you know, we're nothing if not sympathetic to downtrodden billionaires. Chin up, Mr. Got Rocks. If you lose your money, please don't lose your mind.

Being in a band means knowing that the best minutes of the week will be those spent sitting in a circle making music with your friends, each note coming with a chuckle and smile. It's medicine and candy all in one. Here's a little sample of the joy from last night's circle.

There was a somber moment at last night's rehearsal, thinking about our bandmate and running buddy Joe Dobbs. It was exactly a year ago today that he … flew away, as they say in the old hymns, and not a day has gone by in the past year that we haven't thought about him. But, you know, Joe wouldn't approve any kind of morbid anniversary of his death. The man just didn't like funerals and wouldn't go to one -- unless someone roped him into playing at it. So instead, last night we remembered Joe in a few of the rowdy tunes he loved for us to play, like this one.

Rivers are big deal us in the band. We live near them. We play by them and on them and we sing about them. We're always on the lookout for river songs. Two years ago, when we were invited to perform in Marshall University's theater production of "Tom Sawyer," we dusted off this old folk song for our show, "The Water is Wide," and instantly our Michelle Lewis made it her own. Last night in a quiet moment at the weekly rehearsal, we brought it out it again.

Whenever Chuck Romine buys a new banjo -- and he now has five of them, which we think might be the legal limit -- he brings it around to show it off to his old bandmates. Last night the star of the evening was Chuck's gorgeous new Bacon & Day Silver Bell #2. Built in the early 1920s, the banjo had been living in St. Louis until it just recently came to its new West Virginia home, and Chuck brought it out to break in by jamming with the Family Flood.

It's interesting where some songs come from. Taj Mahal's "Fishin' Blues" has never been on a set list for any of our shows, and we've not played in a practice session for years, but last night it just sort of washed up in our collective consciousness somehow as a perfect little warmup tune and everybody just went with it. So, here's a little three-minute snippet of a summer evening in Floodville.

Jackson Browne was just 16 when he wrote "These Days," a song so rich in themes of loss and regret that you would have to believe it had to come from someone at least three times that age. The song was recorded by so many people back in the '70s. Greg Allman has a wonderful rendition, but we always loved the lesser known version recorded by Tom Rush in 1970. Today "These Days" is often a warm-up up tune for The Flood as we're waiting for the rest of the band to arrive for the weekly rehearsal, as it is in this simple track taken from an evening's workout a few weeks ago.

Okay, we're not saying we're getting old and forgetful or anything, but we ARE saying that sometimes we have to, uh, re-learn tunes that we recorded 14 years ago. And too about half today's Flood wasn't even in the band a decade and a half ago so they just haven't not had the same opportunity to forget what some of us have. Anyway, this leads to some interesting each-one-teach-one moments at the rehearsals nowadays, like this from last night's get-together. We join, in progress, "Lulu's Back in a Town," a nifty 1935 tin pan alley number that we put on our second CD -- "The 1937 Flood Plays Up a Storm" -- way back back in 2002. This track is complete with a little 30-second workshop regarding the chords right in the middle of things. Enjoy.

We've been emphasizing our vocals a lot in the last couple of years -- that's only natural with Michelle Lewis and Randy Hamilton singing such powerful harmonies and leads in our newer tunes -- but the instrumental side of The Flood is doing some pretty interesting things too. For instance, a couple of weeks ago, while we were waiting to get the regular rehearsal started, Doug Chaffin and Paul Martin launched into a little musical conversation that the rest of us were pleased to eavesdrop on -- and we thought you'd like to listen in too -- just a nameless blues to pass the time on a summer night.

We're always looking for new tunes that we can jug-i-fy, and sometimes that means digging deep into the recesses of our collective memory. We in The Flood are long-time Bob Dylan fans and recently, while discussing the subject of love and its multitudinous ramifications and variations, we stumbled upon memories of this old Jesse "Lone Cat" Fuller tune that was the opening track of Bob Dylan's very first album, released in 1962, when Bob was not yet 20 years old and still probably learning a thing or two about love himself.