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PODCAST

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast

Each week The 1937 Flood, West Virginia"s most eclectic string band, offers a free tune from a recent rehearsal, show or jam session. Music styles range from blues and jazz to folk, hokum, ballad and old-time. All the podcasts, dating back to 2008, are archived on our website; you and use the archive for free at: http://1937flood.com/pages/bb-podcastarchives.html 1937flood.substack.com

music music history

All Episodes

2:43

"Drive In"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2023/06/16

Guitarists Jerry Reed and Chet Atkins had a special, productive musical bond.Reed rather famously lived in the moment, often writing wonderfully tasty riffs and licks only to forget them the next day when he moved on to a new project. By contrast, Atkins was a detail-driven professional and a successful producer.Chet appreciated, completed and recorded many of Jerry's pieces after practicing and polishing them to perfection. “Drive-In,” which our Danny Cox explores in this week’s podcast, is a prime

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6:28

"Summertime"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2023/06/09

Barefoot Days have arrived, a season so sweet and easy that it has its own anthem.“Summertime,” from George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, is perhaps the perfect jazz standard. Unforgettable lyrics. A melody that seems to be from a dream. Like magic, the song sounds new every single time, no matter how many times you’ve heard it.And you’ve heard it many times. “Summertime” is one of the most recorded songs of all times; in fact, Guinness World Records is aware of more than 67,000 individual recordings

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4:35

"You're No Good"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2023/06/02

“You’re No Good,” the opening song on Bob Dylan’s 1962 eponymous debut album, was written, not by the 19-year-old genius, but by one of his heroes, Jesse “Lone Cat” Fuller.Legend has it that Dylan saw and heard Fuller perform that song himself in 1960 at Denver’s Exodus coffeehouse shortly after it opened in the basement of the Raylane Hotel. The venue was managed by the late folk singer Walt Conley.Bobby in DenverA few months earlier, Dylan was still back in Minneapolis’s Dinkytown bohemian

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4:57

"Castle of Dromore (October Winds)"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2023/05/26

Our story begins nearly 200 years ago on an Irish hillside overlooking the Kenmare River in County Kerry, where a massive manor house was to be built for the Mahony family.The Mahonys had long wanted a castle atop that hill. In the early 19th century, John Mahony made the decision to build a large home there, but he lost heart for the project when his boat — returning from London with lead for the roof and wine for the cellar — sank in the river, in full view of the intended site.After that, the

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3:02

"Walk Right In"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2023/05/19

Among the tunes we’ve got on tap to share at Sal’s Speakeasy this weekend is one with a curious history. A monster AM radio hit in the early 1960s, it actually was originally a jug band tune recorded many decades earlier.Back in the 1920s, a remarkable roots musician named Gus Cannon co-wrote “Walk Right In” for his hot new band, Cannon’s Jug Stompers, to record for Victor Records.Already an established entertainer in the first years of commercial recording, Gus Cannon had a life story that reads

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6:52

"The Dutchman"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2023/05/12

What is probably America’s best-known song about the Netherlands — “The Dutchman” — was written by a man who had never been there.“The song has in it almost everything I'd ever read or heard, in school and in the library, about Holland,” composer Michael Peter Smith told a fan in 2010, about 40 years after he wrote the song at the very start of his career.Did he ever consider singing it in Holland? Oh, hell no!“Can you imagine,” Smith said, “the reception a Dutch singer would get in New York City

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5:41

"Lazarus"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2023/05/05

When Joel and Ethan Coen needed help with the soundtrack for their fabulous 2000 film, O Brother, Where Art Thou? they turned to respected artist/producer T-Bone Burnett, a famous champion of long-forgotten folk music. Thinking about how the film was to be set in Depression-era Mississippi and to open with a scene of an escape from a prison chain-gang, Burnett studied some legendary field recordings by American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. There he found a gem.From the Library of Congress

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4:06

"Good Time Charlie's Got the Blues"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2023/04/28

It’s a song that has just never gotten the respect it deserves. It was back in 1967 that Washington State folkster Danny O’Keefe wrote “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues.”O’Keefe waited four years to record it, putting it on his 1971 self-titled debut album. That effort was largely ignored, so he gave the tune another shot the following year with a slower, more downbeat arrangement for his second album, O’Keefe. This version did a bit better, especially when it also was released as a single. The

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5:36

"Deep Ellum Blues"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2023/04/21

For more than a hundred years, the Deep Ellum section of Dallas has been known for music. Well, that and, in its raucous youth, uh, S-I-N…Today that lively entertainment district also vibrates with street murals, quirky art galleries and long-time concert venues for indie performer.But, like a family’s black sheep uncle, Deep Ellum has a sketchy, colorful resume. If you hop in your time machine and zip back to the 1920s, your walk down the streets on Deep Ellum would mean rubbing shoulders with

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2:51

"Back Up and Push"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2023/04/14

This is the story of a song’s evolution from ragtime composition to folk song, then from blues to bluegrass.We begin in 1900. Danish-born American violinist/composer Jens Bodewalt Lampe, inspired by Scott Joplin’s hot new “Maple Leaf Rag,” composed his own syncopated piece, which he called “Creole Belles,” published in Detroit by Whitney-Warner.A child prodigy (he became the first chair violinist for the Minneapolis Symphony when he was just 16), Lampe was exploring this exciting new type of music

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3:36

"Singing the Blues"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2023/04/07

Purists love to tell us that many songs with “blues” in their title — “Blues in the Night,” “Birth of the Blues,” “Lovesick Blues” — technically are not blues at all. (Shoot, even the great “St. Louis Blues,” while it certainly opens with a traditional 12-bar blues structure, wraps up with 16 bars in a habanera rhythm that its composer W.C. Handy called his “tango section.”)Of course, many of these cited songs aren’t meant to be blues, but to be about having the blues, and 1950s classic rocker

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4:41

"France Blues (Hey, Lawdy, Mama, Mama, Hey, Lawdy,...

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2023/03/31

It was April 1927 when a pair of blues singers from Mississippi named Little Harvey Hull and Long Cleve Reed walked into a Chicago studio to record the first of a half dozen tunes they’d leave there over the next few weeks.Joining them for the session was guitarist Sunny Wilson, whose song "Hey! Lawdy Mama/France Blues" was among their first. The trio was billed on the label as “The Down Home Boys” when the disc was released the following month by Black Patti Records, a new short-lived company

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5:04

"Corrina, Corrina"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2023/03/24

Known to Bob Dylan’s earliest fans as the B side of his first single, “Corrina, Corrina” appeared briefly in record stores in late 1962. However, versions of that wonderful 12-bar blues already had been rattling around America’s musical consciousness for at least a half century before that.In 1918, Roger Graham published a song called “Has Anybody Seen My Corrine?” In the next decade, Corrina was being flirted with by Vernon Dalhart and Wilbur Sweatman, by Blind Lemon Jefferson and Bo Carter of the

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4:08

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2023/03/17

In Floodlandia, we celebrate this day by channeling the grand, green spirit of William Butler Yeats. We do several songs based on verses by this beloved Nobel laureate. Our favorite is “Down by the Salley Gardens,” which Yeats published in his 1889 volume The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems.In notes about the work, Years once said the poem was "an attempt to reconstruct an old song from three lines imperfectly remembered by an old peasant woman in the village of Ballisodare, Sligo, who often

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3:02

"Windy and Warm"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2023/03/10

Composed more than 60 years ago by the great John D. Loudermilk, “Windy and Warm” is a one of the late 20th century’s most loved virtuoso pieces for fingerstyle guitar players.It was first recorded and released in the spring of 1961 by legendary guitarist Chet Atkins. In fact, the story goes that the tune came into being specifically because Chet wanted something that sounded old-fashioned, something in the old Merle Travis tradition."I'm getting too deeply into jazz,” Chet was reported to have said

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4:51

"Solid Gone"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2023/03/03

Flood fan Orville Picklesimer had a kind comment on a recent podcast. “Well done!” he wrote after listening to the Feb. 17 broadcast of our take on “I Am a Pilgrim,” adding, “ I was fortunate to see Doc (Watson) do this one, and The Flood’s cover pays homage to Doc and adds its own personal flavor.”“It doesn’t need more cowbell,” he said, “but I’d like to hear more resonator on future projects.”Well, you don’t have to ask us twice! But FirstIf you’re not up on your grand guitar history, you might

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4:07

"Blue Skies"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2023/02/24

Our story begins with the star of a new show who is unhappy with the song her upstart writers have given her to perform. In a panicky phone call, she persuades a more established composer to come up with something she thinks will be more worthy of her talents.The show, in fact, turns out to be a dog — vaudeville’s “Betsy” has only 39 performances between December 1926 and January 1927 — but oh, that song! Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies” was an instant hit with the audience on the “Betsy” opening

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4:48

"I Am a Pilgrim"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2023/02/17

When Merle Travis recorded his beloved (and never-out-of-print) Folk Songs from the Hills album in 1947, he included a version of “I Am a Pilgrim” that would inspire decades of loving imitations by artists such as Bill Monroe and Doc Watson, Johnny Cash and The Byrds.Some people figured Travis must have written the song himself — after all, the same album included two of his best-known originals, “Dark as a Dungeon” and “Sixteen Ton” — but actually “I Am a Pilgrim” is a traditional gospel tune that

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4:31

"Sister Kate"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2023/02/10

Authorship of “Sister Kate,” one of the first famous songs of the Roarin’ Twenties, is a musical mystery.The composer of record is New Orleans bandleader/violinist Armand Piron, who had a publishing partnership with Clarence Williams. However, Piron’s credits for the song frequently have been disputed, most famously by trumpeter Louis Armstrong, who always claimed he wrote the tune himself. Armstrong contended he sold the song for an overcoat (which he received) and a few dollars (which he did

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6:37

"Jamaica Say You Will"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2023/02/03

Jackson Browne has always called the first song on his 1972 self-titled debut album a kind of modern fable.His inspiration for “Jamaica Say You Will" was a girl who worked in an organic food orchard on California’s Zuma Beach, across the street from the Pacific Ocean, "like the Garden of Eden,” Browne once told an interviewer, “and she was a kind of Eden-like girl, too.”In the lyric, the girl leaves with her father to sail out into the world, “but my ship had not found the sea, as it were," Browne

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234 results

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