Charlie Bowen remembers a conversation he once had with his old buddy Jim Strother. It was decades ago and the two of them were reminiscing about a time even earlier.

“Remember,” Jim said, “when you’d see a fella ramblin’ along carrying a guitar case, and he’d have his coat collar turned up against the wind and a cap pulled down over his eyes.

“Just one look and you knew everything you needed to know about that guy.” You know, it probably wasn’t always spitting snow, but it certainly is in today’s fanciful memory of that scene. And the soundtrack? Then and now? Why, it was always an early Bob Dylan tune, wasn’t it? Like this one.

Those memories came roaring back at last week’s rehearsal when the first tune that popped into the guys’ heads that evening was “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” a song that Charlie loved from 1963’s Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album.

Learning

To this day Bowen still remembers Strother using the same song to patiently try to teach him the “Merle Travis pick” whose alternating bass characterized so much of 1960s folkdom.

Curiously, the young Dylan said he himself was still learning his composition. “It’s a hard song to sing,” he told journalist Nat Hentoff, who wrote the liner notes for the album. “I can sing it sometimes, but I ain’t that good yet.”

Bob noted that he didn’t yet know how to “carry myself” the way veteran musicians like Big Joe Williams, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and Lightnin’ Hopkins did.

“With those older singers,” Dylan told Hentoff, “music was a tool, a way to live more, a way to make themselves feel better at certain points. As for me, I can make myself feel better sometimes, but at other times, it’s still hard to go to sleep at night.”

As repored here earlier, Bob said of “Don’t Think Twice” that a lot of city singer “make it sort of a love song — slow and easygoing — but it isn’t a love song. It’s a statement that maybe you can say to make yourself feel better. It’s as if you were talking to yourself.”

For more about the song’s history, click here for an earlier Flood Watch article.

More Music? Step Right Up!

If all this ramblin’ down the foggy ruins of time has you in the mood for more Dylan tunes, boy, do we have you covered! Our free Radio Floodango music steaming feature has an entire “Bob Dylan Birthday” playlist with more than an hour’s worth of Flooderiffic Bobby bits. Click below to check it out.

And if you’d like to put even more Floodified folk in your Friday, tune into the band’s free Folk Channel:

About a hundred tracks from decades of jam sessions, rehearsals and gigs are waiting for you there. Click here to turn us on.

Public Floodify

Finally, in case the heat wave breaks next week and you feel like stepping out again, mark Thursday, July 23, on your calendar.

That’s when the band rolls back into good ol’ Bahnhof WVrsthaus & Biergarten, 745 7th Avenue. Come on down for good food, good tunes and a great jump on your weekend! We play from 6:30 to 8.

While last week’s rehearsal was our first time to play with the remarkable fiddler John Ace, that evening was likely the last time that Floodster Emeritus Dave “Bub” Ball will get to jam with his old friend.

It was only at the end of the evening we learned that John — after two decades of snow-birding it from Virginia to Florida — is at a new crossroads in his life, set to move permanently to New Hampshire to be near his daughter.

In fact, just hours after the last notes were played that night, Ball drove Ace to the depot so he could board a train for his Alexandria home. After that, Dave turned the car south for his long drive back to his home with his wife Yvonne in Jupiter, FL.

“John and I will stay in touch,” Bub said in an email this week, “but with him in New Hampshire and me about 1500 miles away, the odds are we won’t be able to get together again.”

A train song seemed like the most appropriate choice for the last number of the night and we picked one of the best in our repertoire.

Bub and John’s Journey

As reported here recently, in 2005 John Ace sold his house and car and moved to the sea, living full time on “Four Aces,” his 36-foot fiberglass Cabo Rico sailboat. From then on, he divided his time between summers in Virginia and winters in Florida … and/or the Bahamas, Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, Mexico … wherever the winds carried him.

Now, though, “at 76 traveling becomes a factor,” Bub said of his old friend.

Bub met John about three years ago during one of those winter treks to warmer climes.

“The band he was playing with at the time, Gypsy String Revival, needed a fill-in bassist and gave me a call,” Ball recalled. “He and I became friends and started playing jams together.”

Later, when fiddler Paddy King, one of the original 3 String Circus members, couldn’t make a renaissance fair gig, John filled in.

“He spent Thanksgiving and Christmas with us here and we became close friends,” Bub recalled. “We played many Faire gigs together.”

This summer The Flood got to meet John because Bub needed a fiddler to share the stage with him at the Lewisville, WV, renaissance fair. “John just happened to be in Alexandria, a five- or six-hour train ride to Alderson,” Ball said. “Soooooo, John filled in, and brilliantly I might add.”

About the Song

Featured in this week’s podcast, those last notes of our last evening with John and Bub are from “Yellow Dog Blues,” W.C. Handy’s 1915 masterpiece that speaks so elegantly of the passages in life. As reported earlier, it is the song that brought a classic line to the blues world, talking about going to “where the Southern cross the Yellow Dog.”

For more on the history of this grand old tune, see this earlier Flood Watch article.

And for more of John Ace’s fine fiddling with The Flood during his West Virginia trek, click here and here.

Meanwhile, in Flood Movie News…

Well, Georgia is on our mind these days. Randy Yohe’s award-winning “These Boys” documentary about The Flood has been selected to participate in Augusta’s 12th annual Black Cat Picture Show film festival.

Black Cat is the Georgia city’s only adjudicated international festival for independent films, hosted at Le Chat Noir theater, a 100-seat black box theater in downtown Augusta.

This recognition now brings to a half dozen the number of honors the film has received this year.

As reported earlier, the picture has been praised by two French festivals — ARFF Paris // International Film Festival and the Cine Paris Film Festival — as well as here in the States by The East Village New York Film Festival and Texas’s Austin International Art Festival. Also the Appalachian Film Festival screened the documentary as the featured film on the opening night.

Right now “These Boys” is working its way through film festivals like these, but we look forward to sharing the completed film with everyone later this year. We’ll keep you posted.

Click here to read more about the work on “These Boys.”

Recognizing a tune that many of us think ought to be the national anthem, The Flood is celebrating America’s 250th birthday with Woody Guthrie’s most beloved song, as seen in Pamela Bowen’s video below:

Just nine years after President Herbert Hoover signed a 1931 congressional resolution to make “The Star Spangled Banner” the country’s official anthem, Woody wrote “This Land Is Your Land.”

About the Song

Guthrie — having only recently landed in a fleabag boarding house in New York City after rambling and roaming, hitchhiking and hoboing across the country from California — wasn’t thinking about targeting the anthem as he wrote “This Land.” However, he did have another song in his sights.

Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” recorded by Kate Smith in 1939, famously irked him — Woody thought it just didn’t tell America’s full story — and his 1940 composition was inspired as a protest against that tune.

The reason for his ire? Well, everywhere that Woody had wandered in his long trek across the country, he heard “God Bless America” roaring from jukeboxes and radios. For him Berlin’s song was too sappy, too blindly patriotic, too cut off from the hard-knock life that many Americans were facing as the Great Depression dragged into its 10th year.

Guthrie wrote his song as almost a parody. “And I don’t mean that in a humorous sense,” his daughter Nora Guthrie has said. “I mean that strictly in the literal sense of parody as a response to something.”

Woody’s original title was “God Blessed America for Me.” Nora notes, “He crossed it out later and called it ‘This Land Was Made for You and Me.’ See, the parody turned into a more mature comment.”

The Melody

Woody borrowed the melody, as he did for most of his songs. “He tended to write words first, and later on picked out a tune,” said Pete Seeger, Guthrie’s long-time friend and rambling partner.

“Woody once said, ‘When I’m writing a song and I get the words, I look around for some tune that has proved its popularity with the people.’”

In this case, the melody of “This Land” is very similar to “Oh, My Loving Brother,” a Baptist hymn that The Carter Family had recorded a decade earlier as “When the World’s On Fire.” That same melody also had inspired the Carters’ own “Little Darlin’, Pal of Mine” a couple of years before that.

“Missing” Verses

In penning the lyrics to “This Land is You Land,” Guthrie, true to his original mission of protest, included several verses critical of the American economic system. Then, according to biographer Joe Klein, “he completely forgot about the song, and didn’t do anything with it for another five years.”

By the time Woody debuted the song on his weekly radio show in 1944 at the height of World War II, he had revised it, softening the criticism and nixing the more controversial verses about businessmen’s greed and disregard for the needy.

Of this and later self-editing, Woody’s daughter said, “This is the early ‘50s, and [U.S. Sen. Joseph] McCarthy’s out there, and it was considered dangerous in many ways to record this kind of material.”

“Like most of the things, if we’re talking about my dad,” Nora added, “it gets very complex here.”

Noting that when The Weavers recorded the song in the mid-1950s, they also sang only the first three verses, “which, in one way, was very, very helpful to my dad, because we had no money. So thank God that they recorded something, and our family was able to get some royalties from that.”

More recently, a growing number of singers have dusted off one or two of Guthrie’s “lost” lyrics, as The Flood does in this rendition from a recent rehearsal, ending with:

As I went walking I saw a sign there  And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”  But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,  That side was made for you and me.

Legacy

Forty years ago a 1947 release of “This Land is Your Land” on the Asch record label was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. In 2002, it was one of 50 recordings chosen by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry.

In 2009, Pete Seeger joined rocker Bruce Springsteen to sing it from start to finish as part of President Barack Obama’s inaugural celebration.

In 2021, it was listed by Rolling Stone magazine among its “Top 500 Greatest Songs of All Time,” and just last year it was put at No. 11 on its list of “The 100 Best Protest Songs of All Time.”

Cap’n John Guests on This Podcast

Meanwhile, back to this week’s podcast, we have a guest artist. As reported earlier, fiddler John Ace from Alexandria, Va., accompanied Floodster Emeritus Dave Ball to the latest Flood rehearsals to sit in. With Dave, John was on the way from Florida for gigs in Lewisburg, WV.

Of Fourths Past

Finally, over the years Independence Day has played an important part on many a page in The Flood’s scrapbook. For instance, playing for a Huntington community party during the nation’s bicentennial 50 years ago this weekend was a sweet memory in the band’s first decade. Read all about it and other Fourths by clicking below:

Happy Birthday, America!

When the room needs a respite from the band’s frequent fare of loud and raucous tunes, Randy Hamilton and Danny Cox always have just what the doctor ordered.

Friends since high school, these two seem to be able to read each other’s mind when it comes to music. Just listen to how they make this 60-year-old Danny O’Keefe composition sound like something they themselves just wrote.

As reported here earlier, O’Keefe, a Washington State folkster, wrote “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues” in 1967, but its early trips to the recording studio were largely fruitless.

Danny’s own recordings of the tune in 1971 and ’72 were generally ignored. But then the following year the song played a part in the turning point in another artist’s career.

When Waylon Did the Song

That’s when country music star Waylon Jennings had started getting restless, wanting to wrestle creative control away from the slick, over-produced “Nashville Sound” establishment that he had grown tired of.

The seminal Good Hearted Woman album, quickly followed by Ladies Love Outlaws and Lonesome, On’ry and Mean were Waylon’s personal declaration of independence, establishing him as a prominent representative of the new “outlaw country” movement.

Watching and listening from the sidelines, O’Keefe later said that Jennings’ cover of “Good Time Charlie” on that third of those albums was his absolute favorite version of his own song, capturing the groove and swagger he had always intended.

And O’Keefe’s lyrics — about aging, watching friends drift away and using “pills to ease the pain” — perfectly fit the rugged, hyper-honest persona of the burgeoning outlaw movement.

When Willie Answered

A half dozen years later, Waylon’s fellow outlaw Willie Nelson also took a turn with the tune, but his take of “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues” gave it a much different vibe.

On his 1979 collaborative album with Leon Russell, One for the Road, Willie treated the song as an intimate, jazz-infused acoustic prayer.

In his characteristic style of singing slightly behind the beat, Willie captured the lyrics’ quiet, lonely acceptance of sitting in an empty room after the party is over, much as Randy and Danny do in this rendering from a recent Flood rehearsal.

For more on the history of this lovely tune, see this earlier Flood Watch article.

Mid-Year Report

So, we’ve reached the midpoint of 2026. If you’d like a sample of what the Floodisphere has been sounding like so far this year, tune into Radio Floodango.

Its “Hear by Year” section enables you to aim your time machine at the podcasts of any specific year since 2009. Click to here to reach the 2026 tunes.

Rabon Delmore never learned to drive a car, so it was always his older brother Alton behind the wheel as they tooled between gigs in the early days of their career during the Great Depression.

That routine played a big part in The Delmore Brothers’ prolific songwriting life. As he later described it in his autobiography, Truth Is Stranger Than Publicity, Alton would hum melodies while he drove and he and Rabon would harmonize on new verses as they occurred to them.

Riding shotgun, Rabon acted as the editor and scribe. He wrote down the words on the fly, adding, deleting and refining the lines to fit the duo’s signature syncopated rhythm.

Because of this practice, the Delmores’ songs were well polished by the time they got to a recording studio to preserve them for later generations of fans. It also gave them an edge in other ways too.

Brown’s Ferry Debut

For instance, while “Brown’s Ferry Blues” wasn’t released on record until 1934, the song had began developing in their minds four or five years earlier, and it served as their secret weapon at a crossroads moment in Athens, Alabama: the February 1930 Limestone County Fiddlers’ Convention at the Old Athens Agricultural School.

The poverty-stricken brothers arrived carrying their guitars in makeshift cases that their mother had sewn out of cotton picking sacks on with their names were painted in pokeberry juice. Facing stiff competition — including a tie-breaker with three heavily favored local girls — their well-honed tune sealed the win.

“We had ‘Brown’s Ferry Blues’ down pretty pat,” Alton wrote in his memoir. “In fact, we could play it then just as good as we ever did... When we did it, the people really went wild and we won that contest without any question or any doubt. And that started us on our way to the Grand Ole Opry and the big record companies.”

Whither Brown’s Ferry?

The title of the tune, incidentally, was inspired by Alton and Rabon’s deep roots in northern Alabama, named after an old ferryboat that crossed the Tennessee River about 30 miles south of their home in Elkmount, Ala.

Alton’s book noted the old crossing was a place he and Rabon loved to visit when they were growing up in their lean years as a tenant farmer’s sons.

By the way, decades later that peaceful river spot of the 1920s underwent a massive transformation. In 1973, the Tennessee Valley Authority opened the Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant on that exact site, turning the idyllic old-time ferry landing into one of the largest nuclear power facilities in the country.

Song Legacy

The song “Brown’s Ferry Blues” was a milestone in establishing Alton and Rabon as one of the most influential duos in early 20th century American music history.

In December 1933, the Delmores traveled to Chicago for their first recording session with RCA Victor’s budget label, Bluebird. “Brown’s Ferry Blues” was recorded on the first day and sales quickly made the number a hit.

The pair soon became the most popular act on the Grand Ole Opry. Starting in the mid-1930s, they recorded more than 80 sides for Bluebird.

The shadow of “Brown’s Ferry Blues” followed them. In 1943, when Alton organized an all-star gospel quartet at WLW in Cincinnati alongside Merle Travis and Grandpa Jones, they chose as the group’s name “The Brown’s Ferry Four.”

Flooding the Ferry

Dave Peyton, Roger Samples and Charlie Bowen used to play this tune back in the 1970s when the band was just getting started at the Bowen Bashes.

But the song only recently has come back into the Floodipshere. Here it is from a recent rehearsal, featuring Danny Cox’s guitar and Jack Nuckols’ fiddle.

Our Flood brother Danny Cox and his sweet wife Tami are on vacation this week, but before they hit to the road, we had to give them a good Flood set-off. Here’s a little traveling music, the last tune of last week’s rehearsal.

About the Song

When Merle Travis included “I Am a Pilgrim” on his seminal 1947 Folk Songs from the Hills album in 1947, listeners assumed he wrote it. After all, the same album included two of Travis’s best-known original compositions, “Dark as a Dungeon” and “Sixteen Ton.”

Actually, though, “Pilgrim” is a traditional gospel tune that has deep roots among white and African-American musicians alike.

As we reported earlier, Kentucky-born Travis had a mentor: legendary fingerpicking stylist Mose Rager of Muhlenberg County. Legend has it that Mose's brother Lyman learned "I Am a Pilgrim" while in jail when he heard it being sung by a black prisoner in a nearby cell.

As Asheville, NC, musician/author Wayne Erbsen has noted, “I Am A Pilgrim” was recorded “by 14 African-American groups before it was even a gleam in Merle Travis' eyes."

For more on the story’s curious history, see this earlier Flood Watch backgrounder.

More from the Danny Channel

Has today’s podcast got you in the mood for more from Danny Cox’s fertile musical mind? Us too! So, come with us to the Danny Channel in the free Radio Floodango music steaming service. Click here to give it a spin.

For Your Next Road Trip

Speaking of travelin’ music, remember that your friends in The Flood have created a road-friendly play list. Click below to read all about that:

Woody Guthrie once wrote that a song is just “a conversation fixed up to where you can talk it over and over without getting tired of it.”

“When you sit down with a couple of friends,” he continued, “and you’ve all got your guitars parked under a shade tree or in an old kitchen, you aren’t trying to show off. … You’re just talking.

“One guy tells a story with his strings, and the next guy nods his head and matches it with a little lick of his own. It makes the world twice as level and half as steep.”

That is a concept that The Flood certainly embraces. And nothing demonstrates it better than this week’s podcast, featuring the guys’ latest take on the rockin’ “Opus One.” This particular musical conversation — taken from the opening moments of last week’s rehearsal at the Bowen house — is really saying, “Damn, man, it’s good to see y’all again!”

Pete’s Two-Cents’ Worth

Woody’s old friend and young protégé Pete Seeger also knew a thing or two about that kind of wordless musical chat. “It’s an effortless shorthand,” he wrote in his book, Where Have All the Flowers Gone.

“You look across the circle and catch an old friend’s eye just as the harmony locks into place,” he wrote, “and there’s this quiet, shared smile that says, Yes, this is exactly where we’re supposed to be. It’s the sound of community in its purest form.”

Pete said it even better in one of his “Johnny Appleseed Jr.” columns in the good old Sing Out! magazine: “You realize that the song is just a vehicle for the affection in the room. It’s a way of saying ‘I’m glad you’re here’ without having to make a formal speech about it. It fills you up and stays with you long after the instruments are put back in their cases.”

Jive Talk

Such wordless wordiness is even better defined in the jazz world, where improvisation is the mother tongue. Musicians might have played a tune a thousand times before, “a melody so old it felt like part of the weather,” Geoff Dyer wrote in 1991 in his seminal But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz in a passage about listening to old friends play.

“But they didn’t just play it,” he recalled. “They pulled it apart like an old clock to see how it worked from the inside. … It was a language made entirely of nods, shifts in weight, a sudden drop in volume … that told everyone, let’s go down this alleyway for a second.

“Listening to them,” Dyer remembered, “was like watching people walk through a dark house they’d lived in for 40 years — they knew exactly where the furniture was, so they could dance through the rooms without ever bumping into a thing, even with the lights completely out.”

Brain Business

Famed neurologist Oliver Sacks was fascinated with how music affects the mind. In an essay called “The Common Pursuit,” reflecting on lifelong bonds forged by musicians, he reached a lovely conclusion.

“They do not play to impress,” Sacks wrote. “They play to inhabit a space they built together 50 years ago. To sit in a room and witness this is to realize that music is not merely an acoustic phenomenon, but a profound architecture of memory and shared love.”

Meanwhile, About This Week’s Tune …

As reported earlier, “Opus One,” written by Sy Oliver, became a huge late World War II-era hit for Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra. Dorsey recorded it as an instrumental on Nov. 14, 1944.

The following summer, the signature vocal version was released by Anita O’Day in an all-star session. Drummer Gene Krupa led the big band and trumpeter Roy Eldridge accented O’Day’s vocals.

For more on the song’s history, click here to read the earlier Flood Watch backgrounder.

More from This Groove?

If today’s musical conversation has you wanting more from The Flood’s jazzier selections, drop by the free Radio Floodango music streaming service and click into the “Swingin’” channel.

Three summers ago when Charlie Bowen took his first tremulous steps into the world of banjocity, he bought a six-string banjo … and immediately got grief.

“That ain’t no banjo!” one friend declared. “That’s just a guitar with delusions of grandeur. You can play dress it up all you want, man, but you’re not playing a banjo.”

“Okay, now, wait a minute,” Charlie protested. “If a banjo’s got four strings, it’s a banjo, right?”

“Sure,” the friend conceded. “That’s a tenor banjo, like the late, great Chuck Romine used to play.”

“And if it has five strings, it’s a banjo?”

“Well, of course. That’s God’s own old-time and bluegrass banjo.”

“But,” Charlie persisted, “if it’s got six stings, it’s NOT a banjo?!”

“Nope,” the friend insisted. “You can call it a ‘banjitar’ if you’d like or ‘ganjo,’ but don’t be calling it a banjo.”

“You know what, old buddy?” Charlie concluded. “You are a banjo bigot!”

But despite his brave front, Bowen finally caved to the peer pressure. The six-string banjo (which by then he had lovingly christened “Buzzkill”) was retired to a lonely closet. In its place Charlie bought his first five-string and began to learn tunes.

Truth be told, Bowen has fallen in love with the instrument, practicing every day, even starting to work the five-string into a corner of The Flood’s repertoire on a song or two (or three…).

Schooled by Seva Venet

By the beginning of this year, Buzzkill had been pretty much forgotten. That is, until last month when Charlie and Pamela traveled to New Orleans for a wonderful Road Scholar program built around the annual French Quarter Festival, four solid days of memorable music.

A highlight the whole long weekend was when legendary clarinetist Dr. Michael White played a private concert for the Road Scholar folks at their hotel. Sitting in with White’s quartet that morning was renowned New Orleanian Seva Venet, who was holding down the rhythm section with his six-string Vega banjo.

During the intermission, Charlie chatted with Venet, who said that he was quite aware of how provincial some banjo fanciers could be. However, Seva said, the six-string banjo has a proud legacy all its own. In fact, the banjo of choice for most players of early jazz and blues was the six-string.

Johnny St. Cyr, he noted, famously played his six-string in Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven groups as well as with Jelly Roll Morton’s various ensembles. Legendary New Orleanian Danny Barker and early bluesman Papa Charlie Jackson also played the six. Even jazz superstar Django Reinhardt started out playing a six-string banjo in the dance halls of Paris, long before he cemented his legacy as the pioneer of the gypsy jazz guitar.

The secret to playing the instrument, Seva said, is that, while it is tuned like a guitar, it’s not played like one. Don’t pick it like a guitar, he said, but play it high on the neck where the slapped chords can sing out.

And, like his hero Danny Barker, Venet likes to add color to his chords by playing 6ths and 9ths and other variations on the usual banjo choices.

Buzzkill Bounces Back

Inspired by hearing and watching Seva Venet play that morning, Charlie came home from the New Orleans Road Scholar outing eager to bring Buzzkill out of the retirement, especially on The Flood’s old hokum tunes like this week’s podcast selection, “Tear It Down.”

As noted earlier in Flood Watch, a lot of the hokum tunes that The Flood has always loved were born far to the south of us, in place like Memphis and New Orleans.

So it’s always a treat to find a song that grew a little closer to home. This tune traces back to a youngster named Bob Coleman — Kid Cole, they called him — from the west side of Cincinnati. It was 98 years ago this very month that Bob recorded it in Chicago.

More Hokum?

Finally, if more hokum music is what you need to make your Flood Friday complete, remember we’ve got a whole channel waiting for you on the free Radio Floodango music steaming service.

Just drop in and click the “Hokum” button or, better yet, take the express route by clicking this link to jump to it directly.

Since it is Memorial Day weekend, we wanted to offer something appropriate in this week’s podcast.

Of course, in the Floodisphere, our spiritual inclinations generally lean more toward a rambunctious New Orleans jazz funeral than to a little church in the wildwood. So, here’s jubilant little hymn from your friends in The Flood.

The Jazz Funeral Tradition

Blending strong European and African cultural influences, the jazz funeral predates the birth of jazz itself. The tradition traces hundreds of years further back to Louisiana’s colonial era when military-style brass bands often were hired to play during funeral processions.

This European element merged with West African spiritual practices, incorporating the belief that celebrating after death pleases the spirits who protect the dead.

Jazz joined the mix at the beginning of the 20th century, and by mid-century the jazz funeral was crossing ethnic and religious boundaries in New Orleans.

How It Happens

Marching from the church or funeral home to the cemetery, the band initially plays somber dirges and hymns.

A dramatic shift in tone occurs after the deceased is entombed and the hearse departs. That symbolic moment “cuts the body loose” and the music quickly becomes more upbeat and swinging, featuring lively, raucous tunes (like another Flood favorite, “Didn’t He Ramble?”)

This final phase brings on cathartic dancing as attendees celebrate the life of the deceased. Onlookers form the famous “second line,” twirling parasols and handkerchiefs in the air as they step off to the band’s rousing cadence.

About the Song

This week’s song — “Just a Closer Walk wirh Thee” — is often associated with jazz funerals, but, as we reported here earlier, this custom actually is a relatively recent development.

New Orleans’ legendary clarinetist George Lewis, the jazzman most associated with this beautiful song, told his biographer, “The first time I played it was in the The Eureka Band” in 1942. “We heard it on a music box, and a woman asked us to play it for a funeral” for her murdered husband.

When the widow learned that the song her husband wanted to hear on a jukebox the night he died was the new Sister Rosetta Tharpe recording of “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” she asked George’s band to play it at his funeral.

Before that time, Lewis said, the tune was not known in New Orleans; however, after The Eureka Brass Band’s performance, bands have been playing “Closer Walk” at funerals ever since.

And the song itself is surprisingly modern, published in 1940 in Chicago. Click here to read more about the song’s curious back story.

More Gospel from The Flood?

If all this has you craving a little gospelizing by the boys in the band, remember The Gospel Hour playlist in The Flood’s free Radio Floodango music streaming service. To read all about it, click the link below.

The Flood band room is usually a rather raucous place — rocking tunes, loud talk, lots of laughter — but often that mood can turn on a dime to something softer, even almost fragile.

We hadn’t done this old Jackson Browne song for years, but something last week — about watching the beautiful spring evening come falling in, seeing those long shadows rolling down over the newly green leaves outside our windows — brought this song back to mind.

About the Song

“Jamaica Say You Will,” which Browne wrote in 1969 when he was just 20 years old, not only launched the singer/songwriter’s career, but also even helped found the record company that would bring his music to the world.

The story goes that artist manager David Geffen signed Browne in 1970 after listening to a demo of this specific song. Right away, Geffen started searching for a record contact for his new artist.

At one point, he pitched Browne to Atlantic Records president Ahmet Ertegun, saying, “You’ll make a lot of money.” To that, Ertegun reportedly replied, “You know what, David? I have a lot of money. Why don’t you start a record company and then you’ll have a lot of money.”

A year later, Geffen partnered with his old friend Elliot Roberts to create Asylum Records with the help of Ertegun, who put up the initial funds. Atlantic Records distributed Asylum Records with the profits split 50/50.

Jackson Browne was one of first artists whom Geffen and Roberts signed for Asylum, and “Jamaica Say She Will” was the opening track of Browne’s self-titled debut album when it was released in September 1972.

Browne was quickly joined on the new label that same year by Linda Ronstadt, John David Souther, David Blue, Joni Mitchell, Glenn Frey and others.

For more about the song’s back story, see our earlier Flood Watch article by clicking here.

“Jamaica” is one of several Jackson Browne songs in The Flood’s repertoire. As reported elsewhere in Flood Watch, from its earliest days the band has played “These Days” from Browne’s second album, For Everyman.

More Song History?

Meanwhile, if these back stories about songs hit the spot, you might want to browse Flood Watch’s growing archive of articles that explore the history of tunes in the band’s eclectic repertoire by visiting the free “Song Stories” department.

There you can browse songs by their titles or by the time periods in which they were written and/or discovered.