Some newer immigrants to Floodlandia were surprised by last week’s article celebrating two West Virginia natives — Don Redmond and Chu Berry — who became legendary jazzmen.

“I’m sorry,” one of the new friends confided, “but to me the idea of West Virginia conjures up fiddles and banjos. I’ve never thought of it for jazz.”

He’s forgiven. Many don’t realize the Mountain State’s musical traditions are more diverse than stereotypes suggest.

Meet Maceo

In fact, this year marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of one of the greatest jazz standards of all times, and it was written by an extraordinarily prolific West Virginian who was a major influence in 20th century music.

Maceo Pinkard, born in Bluefield, WV, in 1897, the son of a coal miner and a school teacher, was educated at the Bluefield Colored Institute, class of 1913, and wrote his first major song — called “I’m Goin’ Back Home” — the following year. (Today Bluefield State University holds a festival each year to honor of its famous alumnus.)

Pinkard wrote hundreds of tunes, including many for stage and screen, his greatest being “Sweet Georgia Brown,” which he published in March 1925. Yes, she might have been a sweet Georgia peach, she was mountain girl at heart. Click here for The Flood’s latest take on the tune from a recent rehearsal.

As reported here earlier, the song that would top Maceo Pinkard’s obituary when he died in 1962 at age 65 was co-written with lyricist Ken Casey.

Soon after “Sweet Georgia Brown” was composed, it was introduced to the dancing/singing/humming/whistling public by bandleader Ben Bernie. As that nationally known orchestra did much to popularize the number, Pinkard cut Bernie in for a share of the tune's royalties by giving him a co-writer credit. They both could have retired on the royalties.

But Pinkard was far from done. He went on to compose iconic tunes such as “Sugar (That Sugar Baby of Mine)” and “Them There Eyes,” the latter famously popularized by the legendary Billie Holiday in 1939.

Maceo and Duke

Pinkard also was a mentor to a young Duke Ellington — 20 years his junior — introducing him to New York City’s music publishing industry during the early stages of Duke’s career. That kindness helped Ellington lay the foundation for future success. 

After meeting at Barron's nightclub in Harlem in the spring of 1926, Pinkard took Ellington downtown to "Tin Pan Alley," the center of the music publishing world on Broadway. There Pinkard arranged for Ellington to have his first meeting at Mills Music. Irving Mills later became Ellington's manager and business partner, a critical boost for the careers of both men.

Years later, Ellington said “thank you” to Pinkard by recording some of his early champion’s compositions, including the standards "Sweet Georgia Brown" and "Them There Eyes," highlighting Pinkard's musical legacy. 

Paul Whiteman and Bix Beiderbecke

Paul Whiteman — whose band included Bing Crosby, Hoagy Carmichael, Frankie Trumbauer and Bix Beiderbecke — brought Pinkard in to write material for them. Segregation of the mid-1920s onward thwarted Whiteman’s efforts to hire African-American musicians for his band, but he was determined to play the music of Black composers and Pinkard was his first choice.

For instance, in 1927, Pinkard published "Sugar" and, in June 1928, Whiteman's band was the first to record it, scoring a huge hit. Since then, "Sugar" has been done by everyone from Louis Armstrong to Fats Waller (who performed it on the pipe organ). To this day, jazz artists still cover it.

Beiderbecke and Pinkard became friends and when Bix went out on his own, Pinkard penned "I'll Be A Friend With Pleasure" for his band (featuring Gene Krupa on drums, Benny Goodman on clarinet and Jimmy Dorsey on sax). Recorded in September 1930, it was among the last numbers that Bix recorded before his death at 28 the following summer.

African American West Virginia

Pinkard’s story embodies the resilience and creativity of the Black community of West Virginia’s Mercer County. Growing up in Bluefield, Maceo was shaped by the region’s rich heritage, which flourished around institutions like the Bluefield Colored Institute (now Bluefield State University), a hub of African-American culture in the early 20th century.

Established in 1895, two years before Pinkard’s birth, Bluefield State emerged as a beacon of opportunity for Black West Virginians. Besides providing access to higher education in the industrialized southern West Virginia, it also was a cultural epicenter, hosting luminaries such as Langston Hughes, Fats Waller and Duke Ellington.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Bluefield emerged as a hidden gem on the map of the so-called “Chitlin Circuit,” a national network of venues and businesses that provided platforms for emerging Black jazz and pop musicians during the latter years of institutionalized segregation.

More Jazz from the Floodisphere?

The Flood constantly expands its repertoire of jazzier tunes from the 1920s onward. To sample a randomized playlist from the cooler corner of the songbag, drop by the Swingin’ Channel of the free Radio Floodango music streaming service.

Click here to give it a spin.

The last time legendary Wheeling-born saxophonist Chu Berry was in the recording studio, he gave some jazz love to a song written by a fellow West Virginian.

The date was Aug. 28, 1941, and the tune — one of the four sides that Berry and his jazz ensemble would record that day for Milt Gabler's Commodore label in New York City’s Reeves Sound Studios on East 44th Street — was “Gee, Baby, Ain't I Good to You.”

The song was still relatively unknown. No one else had recorded it in the dozen years since Piedmont, WV, native Don Redmond wrote it for McKinney's Cotton Pickers to wax in 1929.

As discussed here in an earlier article, the Roarin’ Twenties has been good for Don Redman. He was responsible for integrating the rhythmic approach of Louis Armstrong’s playing into arrangements for Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra. In 1927 Redman was wooed away from Henderson to join McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, the house band at the celebrated Greystone Ballroom in Detroit.

When Chu Berry revisited the song in 1941 (to be on the flip side of his version of "Sunny Side of the Street”), it featured ex-Bennie Moten/Count Basie trumpeter Oran “Hot Lips” Page, whose bluesy singing and plunger mute work capped the session.

Incidentally, Page recorded it again in 1944, but even more importantly for the song’s legacy (and to Don Redmond’s checkbook) a year earlier the song was also recorded by an up-and-comer named Nat “King” Cole, who took it to No. 1 on the Billboard Harlem Hit Parade where stayed for four weeks.

Losing Chu

Chu Berry would not live to know any of that.

Almost exactly two months after the August 1941 recording date, he was on his way to Toronto for a gig with the Cab Calloway Orchestra, with which he had played for four years. Heavy fog made visibility poor, and the car in which Chu was a passenger skidded and crashed into a bridge abutment near Conneaut, Ohio, 70 miles northeast of Cleveland.

Berry died three days later from his injuries just a few weeks after his 33rd birthday.

Chu Berry was brought back to Wheeling for his funeral. More than a thousand mourners attended, including Cab Calloway and the members of his band who ordered a massive floral arrangement in the shape of a heart.

At the funeral, Calloway told mourners Chu had been like a brother to him. The big man had charmed the world, he said, with advanced harmonies and smoothly flowing solos that would influence musicians for generations to come. “Chu will always be a member of our band,” Cab said. “He was the greatest.”

Berry’s Roots

Born in Wheeling in 1908, Leon Brown Berry took up the saxophone as a youngster after being inspired by the great tenor man Coleman Hawkins. Berry went on to model his own playing after Hawkins, who would later be quoted as saying, “Chu was about the best.”

By the time of his 27th birthday, Chu had moved to New York where he worked with Bessie Smith, Lionel Hampton, Count Basie and others.

Eventually, he became the featured sax player with the hottest jazz band of the day, Cab Calloway’s legendary Cotton Club Orchestra. In 1937 and 1938, he was named to Metronome Magazine’s All-Star Band.

Younger contemporaries — notably Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie — almost certainly heard Berry up close and personal at the now-legendary Monday night jam sessions at Minton’s Playhouse in New York City, gatherings widely credited for the development of the bebop in the mid-1940s.

Famously, in 1938 Parker — 14 years younger than Chu — named his first child Leon in tribute to Berry.

And the Nickname?

Multiple explanations have been given as to how Leon Berry got his nickname. Music critic Gary Giddins has said Berry was called “Chu” by his fellow musicians either because of his tendency to chew on his mouthpiece or because at one time he had a Fu Manchu-style mustache. Both stories work; take your pick.

Our Take on the Tune

Joining The Flood repertoire, some songs fit in right away, while others, like this one, need a little time to settle in, but when they do, wow — they’re as comfortable as an old shoe.

As Appalachians, we are mighty proud of Chris Stapleton, the 47-year-old Lexington, Ky., native who grew up not far from us in the tiny Johnson County town of Staffordsville in Eastern Kentucky.

To date, Chris has won 11 Grammys, 11 Academy of Country Music Awards and 15 Country Music Association Awards.

Besides that, he also has been named the ACM's Artist-Songwriter of the Decade, and not long ago Rolling Stone magazine included Stapleton among the “200 Greatest Singers of All Time.”

Stapleton had written and/or co-written nearly 200 songs. He has six No. 1 country songs to his credit, including Kenny Chesney’s “Never Wanted Nothing More,” Josh Turner’s “Your Man,” George Strait’s “Love’s Gonna Make It Alright” and Luke Bryan’s “Drink a Beer.” His work has appeared on albums by Adele, Kelly Clarkson, Brad Paisley, Taylor Swift and so many others.

About This Stapleton Song

History lovers also have always populated The Flood camp, so it’s not surprising that this is our favorite Chris Stapleton composition.

“Can You Run?” is set during the American Civil War and tells the story of a young slave pleading with his lover to join him for a dangerous dash to the Union line so that he can join “the freedom line of the Lincoln soldiers.”At one point in the song, he tells her: You know I hate to ask so late But the moment's finally come, And there won't be time to change your mind. Can you run?

Click here to read more about this wonderful work.

Our Take on the Tune

The Flood’s current iteration of “Can You Run?” has been eight years in the making. Randy Hamilton brought the song to the band in the spring of 2017. He already had worked out the basic arrangement in his head, but it took a while to get the instrumentation just right.

For instance, Jack Nuckols, whose drumming is so fundamental to this track, didn’t arrive on The Flood scene until a couple of years ago, about the same time that Charlie Bowen began learning a bit of banjo, so that his five-string could provide a kicky little counterbalance to the sweet soloing by Danny Cox and Sam St. Clair.

Happy with where the song has come, the guys are pretty likely to want to include it among the tunes they record on the new album they hope to start work on this fall. Stay tuned!

More From Randy?

Finally, if you’d like to hear more tunes that feature Randy Hamilton’s vocals, check out the Randy Channel on the free Radio Floodango music streaming service.

Click here to give it a spin!

On a cold night in the early 1930s, a young West Virginian named Tom Kromer huddled in a railway boxcar as it rattled westward across the country.

Hungry, sleepless and surrounded by other men just trying to make it through the night, Tom braced himself against the trembling boxcar wall and scribbled a few observations on a scrap of paper.

Five years later, those notes — scrawled on Bull Durham papers, in the margins of religious tracts in a hundred rescue missions, upon wastepaper scavenged from the cluttered floors of county jails — would become Waiting for Nothing, Kromer’s raw, unflinching autobiographical novel that portrayed America’s dispossessed during the Great Depression.

From Huntington

Tom Kromer’s story begins in Huntington, WV, where he was born in 1906. His father, an immigrant who had spent his boyhood in the coal mines, died young from cancer.

His mother dreamed that her children would escape that hard life through education, and for a while, it looked as if Tom might. He attended Marshall College (later University) off and on, but never managed to finish. When the stock market crashed in 1929, Tom’s tuition ran dry and so did his prospects.

The real turning point came when Kromer left school and set out west, hoping for farm work.

Finding no work, Tom slipped into a life “on the fritz,” his phrase for years spent as a hobo moving from one town to the next from his West Virginia hills to the California coast. Unlike the romantic drifter of folklore, Kromer was, in his own words, “a tramp of circumstances.”

He begged, starved, took shelter where he could. It was not uncommon for him to go days without food. It was brutal. But it also gave him a voice unlike any other.

The Novel was Born

In 1935, he published his acclaimed novel Waiting for Nothing. Written in jagged, stark prose, it asked for no pity, offered no sentimentality. Kromer stripped life down to the details of what it took to survive as a “stiff,” lining up at soup kitchens, hopping freights, making the complicated calculations of what a hungry man might do for a meal.

Critics compared Kromer’s style to Hemingway. His themes were hunger, fear, endurance, and above all, the cruelty of a system that left millions with nothing. He wasn’t interested in prettying up the story.

Kromer’s second novel, Michael Kohler, would have turned to the struggles of working-class families and the violent West Virginia mine wars, but illness stopped him short.

Tuberculosis gnawed away at his health, and by the 1940s, he had retreated to New Mexico with his wife, Janet. After her death in Albuquerque in 1960, Tom returned to Huntington, where his sisters cared for him until his own death in 1969.

Our Song about Tom

For decades, Tom Kromer’s name nearly vanished, even in his hometown of Huntington. But now, through the good works of Marshall University English professor Stefan Schöberlein and his Appalachian literature students, Tom’s work has been rediscovered and brought to a new generation of students.

Reading a recent reprint of Waiting for Nothing, we in The Flood were struck by how Tom’s unsentimental eye fixed on the hungry and the forgotten of the Depression Era. Moved by the novel, the band decided to lend its hand in carrying on the Tom Kromer story by writing and recording this ballad to celebrate Huntington’s long-forgotten native son.

Following the lead of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger and Lead Belly, we set our lyrics to a traditional melody (in this case, a mashup of the thematically appropriate “Tramp on the Street” and the old hymn, “Farther Along”).

We hope the song encourages you to learn more about Kromer and his important work. A great way to start learning is to visit the new Thomas Kromer Digital Archive created by Schöberlein and his students, where you can read all of Waiting for Nothing online for free.

Click here to reach the archive. And if you’d like to own a printed copy of Tom’s novel, that reprint we read is available from Amazon.com.

However you choose read Tom Kromer, we think you’ll see for yourself that even in the darkest corners, someone can be compassionately paying attention.

A lot of ghosts stalk our rehearsal room nowadays, but to a man they are a happy bunch of haunts.

We have table set aside for photos of all our band mates who have passed on. But more than mere pictures, it’s their music that keeps our old comrades alive.

Here, for example, from a recent rehearsal is our current take on one of the late David Peyton’s favorite tunes, with Charlie Bowen and Randy Hamilton handling the vocals and solos by Sam St. Clair, Jack Nuckols and Danny Cox.

The tune — “Georgie Buck” — has never left The Flood band room since Peyton first brought there 20 years ago.

About the Song

As reported earlier, “Georgie Buck” is one of the “play party” tunes that Dave learned from his old friend Aunt Jennie Wilson, the famed clawhammer banjo picker who was born in 1900 in Logan County, WV.

Jennie learned tunes from family members and other musicians in her coalfield community. David always theorized that she learned this one from African American musicians who came to Logan County in the 1920s to work on the railroad and in the coal mines.

Nowadays it is well-documented that “Georgie Buck” in particular — like other mountain music and dance — was influenced by black traditions of rhythmic dance and songs.

A version of the same song, for instance, found its way onto the 2006 debut album by The Carolina Chocolate Drops, whose members reported learning it from the great African-American string band fiddler Joe Thompson.

“Georgie Buck” also was in the repertoire of Chapel Hill, NC, guitarist and banjo player Elizabeth Cotten who, at 67, taught the same song to a 19-year-old Taj Mahal.

An earlier Flood Watch article provided a fuller backgrounder on this good old number. Click here to read that.

Now Let’s Hear from the Haunts!

Before we leave, we really need to give our spirited spirits a turn at the tune.

“Georgie Buck” was featured on Joe Dobbs’ last Flood album, Cleanup & Recovery, recorded in 2013 in Bud Carroll’s Live at Trackside Studios. It showcases Joe’s fiddling and Dave’s lead vocal and soloing, as well as solos by Doug Chaffin and Sam St. Clair. and Michele Hoge singing harmonies with Charlie. Click the button below for that track:

The song that most defined the great Ray Charles’s life and career was written the same year in which he was born.

It was 1930 on cold, stormy night in New York City when “Georgia on My Mind” was written by Hoagy Carmichael and his roommate Stuart Gorrell.

“In a third-floor apartment overlooking 52nd Street,” Gorrell recalled, “with cold feet and warm hearts, we looked out the window, and, not liking what we saw, we turned our thoughts to the pleasant Southland.”

Carmichael later added to the story in his autobiography Sometimes I Wonder. As reported earlier, he got the idea for the tune from his friend saxophonist Frankie Trumbauer, who noted that songs about states were almost always marketable. “Nobody ever lost money writing songs about the South,” Frankie said. “Why don’t you write a song about Georgia? I’ll even give you the first line: ‘Georgia, Georgia….’”

The resulting song was immediately huge in the jazz world, a hit for Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday, for Gene Krupa and Jo Stafford, for Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, Kay Starr, Eddy Arnold and many more. But it was first recorded by Hoagy himself in October 1930 in the last studio session with his buddy and mentor, the legendary jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke.

Enter Brother Ray

Less than a month before Hoagy and Bix’s recording session — and a thousand miles away in southwest Georgia — Ray Charles Robinson was born in the town of Albany on the Flint River.

Today many fans associate “Georgia on My Mind” with Brother Ray’s iconic performance, but the song actually was rather late in coming into his life.

By 1960, Charles had been in show business for 15 years, rocking the world of rhythm and blues. Already he had recorded classics for Atlantic Records, legendary discs like “Mess Around,” “Midnight Hour” and “I’ve Got a Woman,” like “Drown in My Own Tears” and “Hallelujah I Love Her So.”

Whew! And all of those were recorded before his 30th birthday.

How “Georgia” Met Ray

What Ray didn’t have yet in 1960 was a No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100. But now the stage was set.

He had left Atlantic for ABC Records, at which Charles would be recorded and pitched for the burgeoning new crossover market, especially with albums like his two Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music discs. (In the process, Ray also became one of the first black musicians to be granted artistic control by a mainstream record company.)

Central to the start of this new chapter in the Ray Charles story was The Genius Hits the Road, a concept album that paid tribute to different destinations around the country.

Think “New York My Home” and “Blue Hawaii,” “Moon Over Miami” and “Alabamy Bound.” But of course, the cut that eclipsed all the other tracks on the album was Charles’s powerful, emotional interpretation of “Georgia on My Mind.”

And that song had an unusual trip to the studio. The idea of singing Carmichael’s classic came, not from A&R men or fellow musicians, but from Ray’s driver who all the time heard his boss humming the thing.

Jim Crow Ugliness

Charles' hit rendition of “Georgia on My Mind” — the first of his three career No. 1 hits — became the most widely-known version of the tune from that time on. But it came with racism and nasty politics getting into the mix.

Barely a year after his “Georgia” hit the airwaves, Ray was due to play in Augusta, Ga. It was 1961 and Jim Crow laws were still very much in effect in the segregated South. Activists warned the singer that the theater at which the show was booked was strictly reserved for a white-only audience.

Charles decided that no, he would not to play that night. As Elodie Maillot wrote recently in the online Pan African Music site, “Like Sam Cooke and others who refused to sing in front of all-white audiences, he was torn between his mainstream celebrity and his (being) kept in perpetual subjugation by segregationist laws.”

For canceling the Augusta gig, Ray was fined $700 by the show’s producer. After that, it would be years before he agreed to play in Georgia again, “but,” Maillot added, “‘Georgia on My Mind’ became the symbol of his activism.”

It took the state of Georgia nearly 20 years to finally apologize its native son, doing so when it chose Charles’s recording as the official state anthem. Ray returned to perform in Georgia on March 7, 1979, serenading the state’s General Assembly in Atlanta.

Meanwhile, nearly 30 after that and some 200 miles to the south, a bronze statue of Ray Charles was unveiled in his hometown of Albany in 2007 in the middle of a square named for him. But Ray didn’t live to see that; he died four years earlier in Los Angeles.

However, he did live to see Rolling Stone magazine choose his recording for its list of the 50 greatest songs of all times.

Our Take on the Tune

At last week’s rehearsal, Danny Cox and Randy Hamilton did some serious gold mining in this old sweet song.

This track opens with Charlie Bowen and Jack Nuckols laying down the basic melody and rhythm, then just listen as Danny starts spreading out all the riches he’s found in those lovely old chords.

Generations have grown up watching television’s “Andy Griffith Show,” either the original broadcasts that aired from 1960 to 1968 or the infinite number of reruns that still are being broadcast around the world every day.

And for many of us, the best episodes are those in which the bluegrass-picking Darling family comes down from the hills to Mayberry to visit with Andy, Barney, Opie and Aunt Bee.

Most diehard fans know the boys playing and singing as the Darling brood actually were a real-life Ozark-bred band called The Dillards.

Built by brothers Doug and Rodney Dillard on banjo and guitar with Mitch Jayne on bass and Dean Webb on mandolin, the group hailed from Salem, MO, in the early ‘60s.

After some initial success in Missouri, the quartet moved to Los Angeles in 1962, quickly signing with Elektra Records. More importantly, the guys also became clients of the William Morris Agency, whose high-powered connections landed that lucrative Andy Griffith gig starting in 1963.

About the Song

That same year, Rodney Dillard and Mitch Jayne wrote the band’s best-known song. “Dooley” has become an undisputed standard in the string band world after it first appeared on the band’s debut album, Back Porch Bluegrass, release in May 1963.

But before that, the song was introduced nationally a few weeks earlier on the April 29, 1963, broadcast of "The Andy Griffith Show" in a scene showing it performed by the Dillards alongside Andy on guitar.

Recently, Rodney — today at 83, the only surviving member of the original four Dillards — took to Facebook to tell the story of how the song came to be.

“It’s about an old boy from Salem who made moonshine whiskey for 25 consecutive years,” Dillard wrote in his post.

“He would come into town in his pickup truck every Saturday and load five 100-pound sacks of sugar in the back of his truck. He never got caught, never went to jail, but everybody in town knew he was making whiskey. They knew he wasn’t making fudge up there on that ridge.”

“‘Dooley’ has been very, very good to us over the years,” Rodney added.

Following The Dilliards’ initial performance, “Dooley” right away got other high-profiled coverage, starting with The Kingston Trio and by Porter Wagoner, both in 1965.

Exploring Our Eclecticity

Meanwhile, as The Flood begins to think about going back into the studio later this year to record a new album, the guys are doing a lot of genre-hopping, blues one week, banjo the next, an old rock classic followed by some jazz standard from the rich pages of the Great American Songbook.

If you’d like to sample just how eclectic it has been lately, use the free Radio Floodango music streaming service to randomly stream tunes from the past seven months.

Or you can just visit the Podcast pages of The Flood website to scroll and check out recent podcasts from January forward.

And as you browse, if you come upon a tune you’d especially like to see on the new album, please drop us a line and let us know!

When The Flood wanted a closing track for its second studio album in 2002, the guys turned to a tune that Charlie Bowen had just learned from listening to “Below the Salt,” Keith Newman’s legendary radio show on Ohio University’s public radio station, WOUB-FM.

From Athens, Ohio, for 35 years ending in 2012, Newman broadcast all manner of folk sounds, from roots music, old-time and blues to original songwriters and what he called “techno-Celtic.” And on most of those ear-opening Sunday mornings, Charlie was tuned in from the Bowens’ kitchen in Huntington.

It was on Keith’s show that he first heard a 1975 recording by Roy Book Binder and Fats Kaplin of the tune they called “Never Cried ’Til My Baby Got On the Train.”

Falling in love with the melody and those sassy lyrics, Charlie worked it up and bought it to the band, which had it well in hand by the time of its recording on The Flood’s Plays Up a Storm album in November 2002.

Later, when it came time to write the notes for the new album, the guys credited the song to Roy Book Binder, but they could find no further provenance for the tune.

After all, in 2002 Google was just four years old, and at any rate the World Wide Web was not yet all that worldly nor wide, nowhere near the data monster it is nowadays.

Digging up the Roots

Today, though, nearly a quarter of a century later, the web is an awesome thing and quite the boon to anyone eager to search out the genealogy of the songs the world sings.

It turns out that the tune we’re talking about here can be traced back to a blues singer named Blind Teddy Darby, who wrote and recorded it as "Built Right on the Ground," released from a September 1931 session for Victor Records.

Theodore Roosevelt Darby was born in Henderson, Ky., in 1906, though his family later moved to St. Louis when Teddy was 7. Between 1929 and 1937, Darby recorded 20 sides in Chicago under several names (Blind Teddy Darby, Blind Blues Darby, etc.) for labels such as Paramount, Victor, Bluebird, Vocalion and Decca.

Darby lived until 1975 and was “rediscovered” during the folk revival in the 1960s, when he was able to tell his story to song catchers and documentarians.

Darby’s Back Story

In notes for Darby’s collected sides on Documents records, for instance, Mike Row wrote that at 15 Teddy had his first taste of trouble when he “cut a boy with a razor” and was sent to a correctional institution.

Released after 14 months Teddy found work in a barrel factory until around 1926 when he lost his sight through glaucoma. Later an incident over a woman saw him incarcerated again, this time in the city workhouse where he learned to play guitar from one Jesse Riley.

“I really worked on the guitar,” Darby said. “Not much else a blind man could do then.”

Once released from the workhouse, Darby performed on the streets, at house-parties and at a gambling club. In 1929, a piano-playing friend introduced him to Jesse Johnson who was organizing a session for local talent to record for Paramount. That meeting led to eight years of recording sessions.

Johnson also promoted the 1931 Victor session at which Darby recorded “Built Right on the Ground.”

Slowing Down

Darby’s musical activities slowed down after he received his disablement pension in 1939; possibly recording opportunities were becoming fewer anyway. Finally, it was in the mid-1950s when a musician friend was stabbed to death during a fuss over a packet of cigarettes that Darby soured of the music business and that life.

His later years were quieter, as he spent his time as a deacon in his church. However, in 1964 he did record 15 tunes backed by Big Joe Williams. Sadly, though, that material apparently was never released.

Bit More Floodified Blues?

If you’d like a little something else from the band’s blues cabinet, remember the Blues Channel on the free Radio Floodango music streaming service.

Click here to give it a spin.

“Spooky” is a rarity in 1960s pop tunes, because it charted on the Billboard Hot 100 three times in a dozen years with renditions by three different groups.

The song began life as an instrumental. With Harry Middlebrooks Jr., Atlanta saxophonist Mike Sharpe (Shapiro) wrote the song and made the 1967 pop charts with it in the U.S. and Canada.

Enter The Classics IV

But the song is much better known as a vocal by The Classic IV, whose James Cobb and producer Buddy Buie added lyrics about that “spooky little girl like you.”

It was their band’s first big hit, charting in February 1968, No. 3 in the U.S. and No. 1 in Canada.

The group had begun five years earlier in Jacksonville, Fla., as a cover band, playing Ventures numbers and instrumental takes on “Misty” and “Summertime.” After a while, fans started requesting vocals.

“I can sing,” said one of the founders, drummer Dennis Yost, and that led to a whole new chapter in the group’s story.

Relocating to Atlanta in the mid-’60s, The Classics IV landed a contract with Imperial Records. A trio of hit records followed, each with one-word titles, “Spooky,” then “Stormy” and “Traces,” all of which have since become popular cover standards.

The Third Charting

“Spooky” hit the charts for the third time in 1979 when J.R. Cobb and bandmate Dean Daughtry left The Classics IV to be part of the Southern rock band Atlanta Rhythm Section.

There Cobb and Daughtry helped ARS record “Spooky,” again with production assistance by Buie. It was the second of two singles released from Underdog, the group’s 8th studio album. ARS's version of the song hit No. 17 in the US on Billboard and No. 15 on Cash Box.

Gender Bending

But a decade before the ARS recording came Dusty Springfield’s 1968 version of “Spooky.”

Released as a single worldwide except in the U.S., this gender-flipped version was featured prominently in Guy Ritchie’s 1998 film, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Springfield's take on the tune was certified gold in 2024.

There were at least two other gender-bender versions. Lydia Lunch sang of a “spooky little boy” when she included the song on her 1980 Queen of Siam album; Martha Reeves inserted a similar rendering on her In the Midnight Hour album in 1986. The latter is especially fun. In her version, Martha also swapped the line "spooky little girl like you" line with "spooky old lady like me.”

Floodifying It

This song was born at jam sessions, with an infectious rhythm and a couple of funky chords that invite all kinds of improvisation, making it a fine fit for The Flood.

It’s the latest tune that Randy Hamilton and Danny have brought to the band room, complete with those Classics IV lyrics. Here’s a take from last week’s rehearsal.

Jack Nuckols was heading off for a couple weeks of vacation and his band mates wanted to give him a proper sendoff. Pamela Bowen videoed it, the last tune of this week’s rehearsal, a saucy little number that rocked many a party back in Grandad’s day.

“Lulu’s Back in Town” — first performed by The Mills Brothers in 1935, the same year it also was recorded by Fats Waller — was written by Harry Warren. You’re right, that’s not a household name (journalist William Zinsser once called Warren the entertainment world’s “invisible man,” despite his million-dollar portfolio).

But in a career spanning six decades, Warren wrote more than 800 songs, primarily for films, including Oscar-winners like “Lullaby of Broadway” in 1935, “You’ll Never Know” in 1943 and “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” in 1946.

Warren’s better known pieces include novelty tunes like “Jeepers Creepers,” “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby” and “Chattanooga Choo Choo” (which was the first gold record in history). And ballads like “I Only Have Eyes for You” and “There Will Never Be Another You.”

He also penned signature tunes like “That’s Amore,” which Dean Martin claimed as his own, and — best of all! — “At Last,” which simply belonged to the great Etta James.

To learn more about this little-known American master, see our earlier Flood Watch article by clicking here.