Here’s another tune that Danny Cox has brought to us from his decades of lovingly listening to Chet Atkins and Jerry Reed’s famous recordings.

One of Jerry’s composition, “Baby’s Coming Home” is a standout tune that was introduced on 1974’s landmark Chet Atkins Picks on Jerry Reed album.

As reported here earlier, Atkins and Reed were not only esteemed guitarists but also good friends who shared a profound musical chemistry. A major figure at RCA, Atkins was instrumental in bringing Reed to the label.

The album testified to Atkins’ continued endorsement of the younger man’s talent, showcasing interpretation of 10 of Reed’s unique and often humorous compositions.

Chet and Jerry were known for their distinct fingerpicking styles, drawing inspiration from pioneers like Merle Travis and incorporating their own original, complex techniques. This is what attracted Danny Cox to their work when he was still just a teenager learning to pick.

About the Song

Jerry Reed wrote “Baby’s Coming Home” around the time Chet was coming up with the plans for his 1974 tribute album. Atkins’ rendering of the song is the first track of the disc’s B side.

Incidentally Jerry himself performed on only two of the album’s tracks (”Squirrely” and “Mister Lucky,” and sadly not on “Baby’s Coming Home”). However, a few years later, he and Chet did pick the tune together on TV. That wonderful, light-hearted segment was preserved on this YouTube video:

A Muppet Moment

By the way, four years later, “Baby’s Coming Home” made a curious comeback. This time with a tuba-and-banjo-heavy Dixieland-flavored arrangement, the song was the soundtrack for a sketch called “Lunchtime” during Episode 316 of The Muppet Show. Check this out:

More Atkins-Reed Collaboration

Chet Atkins Picks on Jerry Reed reminded many fans of Chet’s Grammy-winning 1970 Me and Jerry release, an all-acoustic, instrumental album that featured the two buddies teamed up on a range of songs, from country and pop covers to original instrumental workouts.

Several decades later, this collaboration was followed by another celebrated joint effort, the 1993 Grammy-winning Sneakin’ Around album.

More from Danny?

If all this has you in the mood to put a little more Danny Cox into your Flood Friday, drop by the free Radio Floodango music streaming service and give the Danny Channel a spin.

Click here to check it out!

Educated ears in the summer of 1957 were still trying to decide if this new rock ’n’ roll thing was really music’s future or was just a passing fancy.

Two summers had passed by then since the new sound burst upon the American scene. The ear-opening “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley & His Comets was quickly followed by Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” and Little Richard’s “”Tutti Frutti.”

The following summer the rock kept rolling, when The King arrived. This new kid, Elvis Presley, topped the charts for weeks on end with “Heartbreak Hotel,” with “Hound Dog,” with “Don’t Be Cruel.”

But by 1957, the cigar-chomping bigwigs in the record company boardrooms still weren’t sure. Not sure sure, you understand.

The Summer Doldrums

After all, traditional pop crooners seemed to be staging a comeback. Perry Como (of all people!) hit No. 1 with “Round and Round.” Pat Boone scored with the languid “Love Letters in the Sand.” Debby Reynolds had a hit with “Tammy.” Holy schlock, Batman, even Elvis seemed to be getting goo-goo eyed all of a sudden with “(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear.”

So, the question in ‘57: where were summertime’s rebels? That year the cool kids had already packed up their beach towel and gone on back to school by the time rock’s Next Big Wave hit:

— Sept. 9, 1957, Buddy Holly and The Cricket, “That’ll Be the Day.”— Oct. 11, 1957, Everly Brothers, “Wake Up Little Susie.”— Oct. 21, 1957, Elvis, “Jailhouse Rock.”— Dec. 21, 1957, Danny and the Juniors, “At the Hop.”

But even before that fall, diehards could dig a little deeper in the radio playlist for up-and-coming rockers. Jerry Lee Lewis was howling away with “A Whole Lot of Shakin’.” Fats Domino was still down there somewhere with “I’m Walkin’.” Jackie Wilson was right on deck with “Reet Petite.”

About This Week’s Song

And languishing even further down on the summer music charts — oh, somewhere around No. 24 or so — was the subject of this week’s podcast. It’s The Flood’s favorite souvenir from the Summer of ‘57: The Coasters’ wonderful “(When She Wants Good Lovin’) My Baby Comes to Me.”

As reported here earlier, this winking and nodding Jerry Leiber-Mike Stoller composition was a minor hit for The Coasters. It did resurrect nine years later when a little known group called The Chicago Loop took it for a spin and got to No. 37 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

But in the Floodisphere, we much prefer a different pressing of the song released one year earlier.

Favorite folksinger Tom Rush’s 1965 self-titled debut Elektra album included a version of the tune accompanied by bassist Bill Lee along with John Sebastian (of The Lovin’ Spoonful) and Fritz Richmond (of The Jim Kweskin Jug Band.)

This track, captured at last week’s rehearsal, features the arrangement we’re working up to include on the new album when we start recording in the weeks ahead.

Fourteen years ago this week, The Flood had a wonderful evening with a local legend, a gentle soul named Mark Keen. Visiting from his Pittsburgh home, Mark sat in on harmonica for a rollicking evening of blues.

Growing up in Huntington, Mark and a long-time Flood buddy, guitarist Randy Brown, went all through school together here back in the ‘70s.

Mark didn’t get back to Huntington very often, but when he did, Randy brought him around to jam with The Flood on the evening of Nov. 9, 2011. The video above — shot by Flood manager Pamela Bowen — is a homage to that night.

The Keen Family

It was one of Mark’s rare visits back to his hometown since his father’s death. Leonard Keen died in 2009 at age 94 after nearly 50 years of running a fixture on Huntington’s 9th Street, Keen Jewelers.

Born in Cincinnati in 1914, Leonard served in the U.S. Navy and during the Great Depression worked for the federal Works Progress Administration.

In a story in his “Lost Huntington” column in The Herald-Dispathc, local historian James E. Casto quoted Keen as saying, “My wife was a native of Huntington. So during a visit to her parents, we decided that Huntington would be a good place to open a store.”

Keen and his wife Betty Ann moved from Louisville to Huntington and in April 1958, Mayor Harold Frankel helped cut the ribbon at their new store, which was located at 322 9th St. Exactly 20 years later, on April 16, 1978, after urban renewal forced the jewelry store to relocate, Frankel again did the honors, helping Keen cut the ribbon at a new location, just down the street at 419 9th St.

Leonard and Betty’s son Mark was born in 1952 and grew up in Huntington, a talented drummer and harmonica player who performed with bands here and later in the Pittsburgh area.

Mark’s Passing

After The Flood’s delightful jam that November evening at the Bowen House, we never got to see Mark again. A half dozen years later, he passed away at 65 at home in Oakmont, Pa., of natural causes.

Following a celebration of Mark, he was interred at Huntington’s Spring Hill Cemetery.

From a thousand miles away, Matt Whyte has been a Flood fan for at least a decade and a half, but until recently he was never in the same room with the band.

Instead, Matt always had to limit his Floodifying to singing along with the albums he received from his mom, JoAnn McCoy.

But he was attentive to his studies. We know that because last week when he and JoAnn finally traveled from their Bradenton, Fla., homes to reach the Bowen House for his first in-person Flood encounter, Matt was so well-versed that he had specific requests for tunes he’d like to hear.

Top of the List

His favorite? Matt has a particular affinity for “Didn’t He Ramble?” a tune that he learned from the band’s 2011 Wade in the Water album.

That rollicking century-old song relates the deeds and misadventures of a rambling ne’er-do-well named Buster:

Mama raised three fine sons, Buster, Bill and me, Buster was the black sheep of our little family….

The opening verse’s second couplet, though, is the one that most resonates with our young Matt:

Mama tried to quit him of his rough and rowdy ways. She finally had to have the judge to give him 90 days!

That struck a chord because nowadays it is Matt himself who often hands out such sentences. You see, back in Bradenton, JoAnn’s son is Judge Matthew Whyte for Florida’s 12th Judicial Circuit Court for DeSoto, Manatee and Sarasota counties.

Matt’s Vocal Contribution

Matt even has a favorite part of his favorite Flood tune. The second verse of “Didn’t He Ramble?” begins:

He rambled into a swell hotel, his appetite was stout, But when he ‘fused to pay the bill, the landlord throwed him out.

On the original Wade in the Water album cut, the late Dave Peyton underscored that moment with an emphatic “Get out!”

“I laugh every time I come to that part,” Matt told us at last week’s rehearsal. So it was just natural that when we played his tune for him and we came to that spot, we let His Honor do the honors. You can hear the debut Matt Whyte Solo at 01:39 in this week’s podcast.

A Family Tradition of Floodishness

As noted, Matt Whyte’s Flood interests are a family tradition. Beginning in 2006, Matt’s mom, JoAnn, and her husband, the late Bob McCoy, were often in the room for the weekly Flood gatherings, sharing jokes and stories, smiling at our progress on their own favorite tunes.

The pair was on hand for some important Flood events, from the debut of Jacob Scarr, the 14-year-old guitar savant whom we called “Youngblood,” to the beginning of the weekly Flood podcasts in 2008.

One of the first podcast listeners was Bob when he and JoAnn returned to Florida that December.

Sometimes he and JoAnn even challenged traffic regulations on their drives north, just to reach the room before the music started.

No wonder JoAnn was eager to share her Flood love with her son Matt.

About the Song

When the great Charlie Poole and his North Carolina Ramblers recorded “Didn’t He Ramble?” in 1929, the song already was more than a quarter of a century old, with roots in the New Orleans of Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton.

But, as we reported in Flood Watch a while back, the seeds of the song are planted even deeper than that. For instance, the song’s key lines (Didn’t he ramble? Didn’t he ramble? / Oh, he rambled till the butcher cut him down!) crop in a Texas work song that was published in 1888.

For more on the song and its wild and rambling history, click here to read that old Flood Watch article.

Meanwhile, 800 Songs Along

Incidentally, this is the 800th episode of The Flood’s weekly podcast since it began 17 years ago next month.

That means that the website now has more than 50 hours of free Flood music online, contributed at a rate of four or five minutes a week. Click the link below for details on those developments:

Meanwhile, a few years ago, that deep, broad database of all those Flood tunes inspired us to roll out our most ambitious project to date. Radio Floodango, the free music streaming service, lets you listen to a continuous, randomly generated playlist of Flood tunes whenever/wherever you’d like. For more about that, check out this earlier article.

It’s not easy to make the top dozen in CMT’s “100 Greatest Love Songs,” but that is precisely the placement that the music network awarded to Keith Whitley’s recording of “When You Say Nothing At All.”

The song has a beloved place in our hearts. We remember the Christmas Eve in 1988 when that lovely number hit No. 1 in Billboard’s Hot Country Singles.

And for many of us, that is the sweet tune that first came to mind just five months later in a much sadder moment: when we heard the shocking news that 34-year-old Whitley had died at his Goodlettsville, TN, home.

One of Us

The news hit especially hard in our area. Keith Whitley was a local hero. Born in Ashland, he grew up in the nearby Sandy Hook, Ky.

It seemed like every one of that town’s thousand residents knew Keith, but conversation was almost non-existent on the day of his passing. Words lost out to stunned silence.

Today his memory is permanently etched into the landscape. A street is named “Keith Whitley Boulevard.” A memorial statue stands near the Elliot County Veterans Memorial and Cemetery. Peaceful, it is hallowed ground.

Our Channelling Keith

Some songs are like old friends. This old Paul Overstreet-Don Schlitz tune is certainly like that.

We hadn’t played it in six months or more, and then one sultry night last August, it strolled back into the band room like it had never left. Danny Cox kicked off those familiar first chords. Randy Hamilton stepped up with the opening lyrics, and this was the result.

For more about the history of how this song came into being, see this earlier Flood Watch article.

Often over the years, this tune has conjured up a very specific gig memory for Floodsters.

It dates back to a weekend when the band was invited to the top of West Virginia’s Snowshoe Mountain to be part of a rather swank do (“a wine and cheese affair,” as the late Joe Dobbs liked to call such jobs).

We were on a stage under a huge event tent on the grounds of Snowshoe ski resort in Pocahontas County. The summer evening breeze was sweet. The glasses were tinkling. Then, toward the end of the night, a jolly gypsy troupe of motorcyclists rolled and crashed the party.

We didn’t know what would happen next. For a moment there, it looked to some of us like that edgy turning point in a Tarantino picture.

But just as suddenly, the guys in leather and the guys in suits started mingling together, laughing, drinking, swapping stories. Deep in The Flood’s memory banks to this day are images of that eclectic crowd of bankers and bikers singing along as one on this song.

“Ohhhhh, MAma! Ain’t you gonna miss you best friend nowww!”

About the Song

As reported in an earlier Flood Watch article, Bob Dylan’s “Down in the Flood” was one of many songs that would fill the world’s first great bootleg albums, like the unforgettable Great White Wonder, which made the rounds from 1969 onward. (Nearly all those tracks later were officially released by Columbia Records as The Basement Tapes.)

It turns out that “Down In The Flood” (also known as “Crash on the Levee”) evolved during a specific 1967 jam session at the Woodstock, NY, in the house that the guys dubbed “Big Pink.”

As The Band’s Robbie Robertson remembers it, at that session Bob and the boys started fiddling with an old John Lee Hooker song called “Tupelo Blues,” about the historically devastating 1927 Mississippi River flood.

That tune apparently triggered Dylan’s memories of another song, one from his repertoire in the early years, called “James Alley Blues,” based on a 1927 Richard “Rabbit” Brown recording. Significantly, that song uses the phrase “sugar for sugar, salt for salt,” a line that would find its way into Bob’s own lyric.

For more on the song’s history, click here to read that earlier article.

Our Latest Take on the Tune

Bob Dylan once famously spoke in another 1960s song about “a thousand telephones that don’t ring.”

But that’s hardly a problem for us in our new millennium. On the contrary, we’re all walking around with phones in our pockets that are apt to sound off at the most inopportune moments.

Like in the middle of this track from last week’s rehearsal when Sam St. Clair’s phone chimes in. But our Sam’s an especially cool lad, so you’d that expect even his phone’s ringtone would contribute something special.

And it does. Wait for it: at 02:43, a nifty xylophone audition at mid-song!

More Bobby? Step Right Up!

The Flood does a lot of Bob Dylan tunes, of course. We even have a special playlist of them that we put together for a Dylan birthday observance a few years ago. Click below to read all about it.

When Thomas A. Dorsey (a.k.a. “Georgia Tom”) walked out of a New York City recording studio in the winter of 1932, he ended a highly successful music partnership with Tampa Red (a.k.a. Hudson Whittaker).

Over four years, Red and Tom garnered a happy following for their infectious, highly danceable brand of blues tunes.

In 1928, the two young men had teamed up and recorded for the Paramount label the hit “Tight Like That.” The success of that number — based on Blind Blake’s “Too Tight” and on Papa Charlie Jackson’s “Shake That Thing” — inspired imitators and launched the blues genre known as “hokum,” as reported here earlier,

Whittaker and Dorsey recorded more than 60 sides together, often under the name “The Famous Hokum Boy.” Some of these rollicking tunes have been covered by The Flood over the years, songs like “Somebody’s Been Using That Thing,” “Yas Yas Duck” and “You Can’t Get That Stuff No More.”

And add to that list the last tune that Tom and Red ever recorded together. The composition they called “No Matter How She Done” was waxed on Feb. 3, 1932, and released that spring on Brunswick’s Vocalion label.

Nothing in Red’s sassy lyrics hinted at an end to this lucrative collaboration:

The copper brought her in, she didn’t need no bail She shook it for the judge, they put the cop in jail!

As we noted in an earlier Flood Watch report, when Dorsey left the blues field in 1932 to take up a career as gospel songwriter and choir director, Whittaker continued as a solo blues artist well into the 1940s.

Floodifying It

Flash forward seven decades. When The Flood started doing this song in the early 2000s, we committed what some folk purists consider a sacrilege: We altered both its title and its hook, removing one entire syllable. Instead of Tampa Red’s original “No matter how she done it” lyric, The Flood opted to sing “Any way she done it.”

We’re still doing it that way, in fact, as you hear in this track from a recent rehearsal. And, no, we have no excuse, not really, except an aesthetic one. We felt the revision simply allowed the line to flow more easily off the tongue. (Call your neighborhood linguist and ask about the joys of removing “alveolar taps.”)

One thing for sure: now, as then, the new phrasing does facilitate group singing, as you can hear on the band’s lively original rendering 20 years ago on our Plays Up a Storm album. Click the button below to hear it:

That track, recorded on the evening of Nov. 16, 2002, featured Sam St. Clair, Joe Dobbs, Doug Chaffin, Chuck Romine, David Peyton and Charlie Bowen.

The Bob Wills Connection

While the tune (any way we sing it) has always had a happy hokum vibe, “No Matter How She Done” took a curious turn four years after Tampa Red and Georgia Tom’s inaugural recording.

In September 1936 in Chicago, the song got a cool country treatment by no less a luminary than Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys.

This was just three years after Wills organized the band in Waco, Texas, and set about defining the style of music that’s come to be known as “Texas swing.”

Released as a single in May 1937, “No Matter How She Done It (She’s Just a Dirty Dame)” was recorded in Wills and the Playboys’ second major recording sessions for the American Record Corporation.

The session is particularly important for Wills collectors, because it features the lineup that would define the Texas Playboys sound for years to come, including vocalist Tommy Duncan, pianist Al Stricklin, steel guitarist Leon McAuliffe and drummer Smoky Dacus.

More Hokum, You Say?

Meanwhile, if more hokum music is what you need to make your Flood Friday complete, remember that 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, just use this link to jump to it directly.

Danny Cox has an abiding love for the works of guitar heroes Jerry Reed and Chet Atkins, and the song “Drive In” — which Dan brings to this week’s podcast from a recent rehearsal — beautifully displays those intersecting energies.

As reported here earlier, Reed often wrote wonderfully tasty riffs and licks only to forget them the next day when he moved on to some new project. Atkins, a detail-driven professional and a successful producer, completed and recorded many of Jerry’s pieces, practicing and polishing them to perfection.

It was one of these fertile periods of Jerry’s noodling and Chet’s cultivating that produced “Drive In.” Chet was the first to record the piece, the opening track of his acclaimed 1968 Solo Flights album.

Later John McClellan’s book Chet Atkins in Three Dimensions: 50 Years of Legendary Guitar included a transcription of the tune, further cementing its place in Chet’s legacy repertoire. It’s no wonder that these days that the song is a popular vehicle for aspiring pickers on YouTube.

More from Danny?

If all this has you in the mood to put a little more Danny Cox into your Flood Friday, drop by the free Radio Floodango music streaming service and give the Danny Channel a spin.

Click here to check it out!

The sing-along — “if you know it, sing it!” as we say around here — is fundamental to folk music. As folk music’s guiding spirit, the late Pete Seeger, once said, “I rather put songs on people’s lips than in their ears.”

Pete believed songs offered powerful magic to bring unity. “Get people to sing together,” he said, “and they’ll act together too.”

“Once upon a time,” he said, “wasn’t singing a part of everyday life as much as talking, physical exercise and religion? Our distant ancestors, wherever they were in this world, sang while pounding grain, paddling canoes or walking long journeys. Can we begin to make our lives once more all of a piece?”

We love how Seeger broke that idea down.

“Finding the right songs and singing them over and over is a way to start. And when one person taps out a beat, while another leads into the melody, or when three people discover a harmony they never knew existed, or a crowd joins in on a chorus as though to raise the ceiling a few feet higher, then they also know there is hope for the world.”  

“I’ve often thought,” Pete said, “standing onstage with 1,000 people in front of me, that somebody over on my right had a great-great grandfather who was trying to kill the great-great grandfather of somebody off to my left. And here we are all singing together... Gives you hope.”

About This Song

For us nowadays, there’s no better sing-along than this tune, which the newest Floodster Jack Nuckols brought us about a year ago, a song that stars the beautiful Ohio, which rolls and flows beside our towns and through our hearts.

The song “Shawneetown” is a wonderful reflection on the early history of boating up and down the Ohio River. While it sounds like an old tune, it is largely a 1970s composition by folk artist Dillon Bustin.

As we reported here earlier, Bustin based the first verse and chorus on historical fragments published in 1828 and quoted in Leland D. Baldwin’s 1941 book, The Keelboat Age on Western Waters, including:

Some rows up, but we rows down, All the way to Shawneetown, Pull away — pull away!

Bustin, who combined these fragments, composed the tune and several additional verses for the song we have now.

Shawneetown is in southern Illinois where the Ohio meets the Wabash River. It was the first Anglo settlement on the Ohio, serving as a major trade center and a government administrative center for the Northwest Territory in the early 19th century. Keelboats were the most efficient commercial vessels of the time.

The song’s first studio recording was likely the 1978 rendering by American folk duo Malcolm Dalglish and Grey Larsen. It appeared on their First of Autumn album.

For more history of this good old tune, see this earlier Flood Watch article.

And Even More Song Histories

And speaking of song histories, we have back stories on more than 200 of the tunes we play.

Check out Flood Watch’s free Song Stories section and click on a title to see what we have on file about it. You can browse them alphabetically by song titles or chronologically by the years in which they were written. Click here to give it a look.

In his quarter century with The Flood, the late Doug Chaffin brought dozens of great tunes to the band, and the loveliest of the bunch was one of the last.

The truth is we always listened to everything Doug told us, because his musical instincts were usually right on the money. For instance, whenever we were playing a show and Doug leaned over and whispered, “Hey, maybe we oughta do this song next,” Charlie Bowen revised the set list on the fly, because Doug had a sixth sense about what people would like to hear.

That’s why a half dozen years ago, when Doug told us we ought to learn “Amelia’s Waltz,” we perked up. The song ended up being one of the sweetest tracks on our 2019 Speechless album, as you can hear in the video above.

The piece you hear sounds like an old tune, but it actually was written in 1981 by Bob McQuillen, the late New Hampshire composer, who penned it in honor of the then-three-and-a-half year-old daughter of a friend and fellow musician, a woman named Deana Stiles.

“Amelia’s Waltz” is one of those sweeping melody that sounds like it ought to be the soundtrack of a big, lush movie. And it turns out that the plot of such a movie could easily be based on the tune’s very namesake.

So, Who is Amelia?

Considered the dean of contra band music in America, the late Bob McQuillen — “Mac” to his friends — wrote some 1,300 tunes in his 60 years of playing. Most of his compositions he named after people or events in his New England life, and the song named “Amelia’sWaltz” is one of his best.

Besides having a gorgeous song named for her, Amelia Stiles’ other claim to fame is that she was born in a New England curiosity, a structure called “The Lindbergh Crate,” and…. well, heck, let’s let Mac himself tell that tale.

A few years before his death in 2014 at age 90, McQuillen was interviewed by a Danish fiddle website about the back story of “Amelia’s Waltz” and here’s what he told them.

“This is sort of complicated,” he began. “After Charles Lindbergh flew across the ocean in the Spirit of St. Louis, the thing was to get the plane back. They took the wings off and put them in one crate and the fuselage in another, then sent the whole thing back to this country aboard ship.

“I don’t know where the wings box went, but the fuselage crate eventually wound up on the banks of the Black Water River in Contoocook, a little town in New Hampshire.” Later, someone added a slanted roof to the crate and turned it into a little cabin in pretty little spot in the piney woods.

“Now along comes Deanna Stiles,” Mac continued, “and she lives in this thing for a while. She also develops a fondness for some dude and out of that we get the emergence of a cute little baby girl, who, because this was Lindbergh’s crate, was named Amelia (after Amelia Earhart). About three years or so after that was when I decided that Amelia ought to have a tune. And that’s how it all happened.”

The earliest recording of the tune we’ve found is John McCutcheon's 1982 release on his Fine Times at Our House album for Greenhays.

And Whither the Crate?

Meanwhile, The Lindbergh Crate has had a moving history of its own (with the accent on the moving….)

Its modern chapter began in 1990, when history lover Larry Ross purchased the structure from David Price of Contoocook. Price had received higher offers, but Ross convinced him to sell the crate for $3,000 when he explained his vision to use it as a museum and an educational tool for children. Ross brought the crate from New Hampshire to his property in Canaan, Maine.

There, Ross restored the 290-square-foot crate in his backyard, adding a new roof, porches, doors and windows, transforming it into the Lindbergh Crate Museum. Inside, he displayed donated Lindbergh memorabilia, including a bust, letters, tapestries and photographs.

For 30 years, Ross hosted an annual “Lindbergh Crate Day” for the community, but during the Covid pandemic, he decided it was time to downsize and sought a new home for the crate.

He connected with Morrill Worcester, founder of Wreaths Across America, whom Ross had previously invited to Lindbergh Crate Day.

Ross felt Worcester’s location in Columbia Falls, Maine, was suitable because the nonprofit’s mission—”remember, honor, teach”— aligned with the crate’s educational purpose.

The Lindbergh Crate was shipped in October 2020 from Canaan and arrived safely at the Wreaths Across America Museum in Columbia Falls. Last year it was moved again to nearby Jonesboro, Maine, where it has been restored by the Worcester family.