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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

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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5:13

"All Out of Season"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2023/01/27

A trope in our part of the world is, “If you don’t like the weather, wait an hour!”The fickleness of what comes from our skies around here — or sometimes doesn’t — was on Charlie Bowen’s mind years ago when he wrote a song called “All Out of Season.” His lyric opened with meteorological musings about a chilly afternoon when “suddenly from nowhere came an April kind of day / and sat herself right down in winter’s way….”Origin StoryThe song originally was performed by a short-lived group called Front

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7:24

"Misty"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2023/01/20

“Timeless” is a much overused word, but were it not, we ourselves would happily overuse in talking about “Misty.” It’s hard to imagine a time when this scintillating melody did not exist. Actually, though, it is a relative newcomer to the Great American Songbook.“Misty” began its life as instrumental. It was 1954 — decades after many of the great jazz standards were born — when pianist Erroll Garner composed the song in the traditional 32-bar format and recorded it with his trio for their Contrasts

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4:37

"San Francisco Bay Blues"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2023/01/13

Almost 70 years ago this year, a street musician named Jesse “Lone Cat” Fuller recorded his new song, “San Francisco Bay Blues,” for the World Song label.Nowadays that particular 1954 recording is a collector’s item, but the world really didn’t start knowing this rocking number until 1962 when Fuller recorded a one-man band rendition, which appeared on a Smithsonian Folkways compilation called “Friends of Old Time Music.” After that… well, everybody seemed to know it.Folk singer Ramblin’ Jack

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4:28

"Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2023/01/06

The great jazz innovator Jelly Roll Morton once told folklorist Alan Lomax that “Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor” was one of the earlier country blues to come rambling into the big city of New Orleans. Morton said it was being played in the Crescent City many years before he was born there in 1890. As Jelly Roll further noted, "A pallet is something that — you get some quilts — in other words, it's a bed that's made on a floor without any four posters on 'em.”The song was even known to be favorite

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5:37

"Gee, Baby, Ain't I Good to You?"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2022/12/30

Don Redman — a young man from Piedmont, West Virginia, who did much to create the sound that the world came to know as big band swing — composed “Gee, Baby, Ain’t I Good To You?” just as The Roaring Twenties came to a close. In fact, the song’s first studio recording, featuring Don performing with McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, came out just one week after the 1929 stock market crash that started the Great Depression.The crash even inspired a revision of the song. Andy Razaf’s original words reflected

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3:22

Greensleeves

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2022/12/23

In our country, we often know it as “What Child Is This?” based on a Christmas verse written more than a century and a half ago. But, of course, the tune “Greensleeves” is even more deeply enshrined in our common human experience.One of the oldest melodies we know, the song originally it wasn’t religious in nature at all. On the contrary, its earlier lyrics told the story of a painful romantic conundrum (with some, uh, subtly salacious references).Popular legend even attributes the song to King

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5:43

Today (While the Blossoms Still Cling to the Vine)

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2022/12/16

For decades now, Kathy Castner and her cousin, Charlie Bowen, sing duets whenever they have one of those rare chances to be together. Their musical connection goes back a long way.As a child, Kathy regularly was brought to visit relatives in Ashland. Whenever she was, their grandmother usually assigned her cousin to sing her to sleep at bedtime. (Yes, Grandma Robertson was prescient about Bowen’s mad skills for putting audiences to sleep.) One of the tune the young troubadour brought to bear on the

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4:33

If You Lose Your Money

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2022/12/09

Christmas songs abound right now, but how about a tune for the downtrodden holiday shopper, the weary wielder of the maxed-out debit card?Well, your friends in The Flood can’t pick up the tab, but we can at least give you a blues to suit your mood, brought to you from a recent gig. After a day of rushing around spending money you don’t have to buy things people don’t want, just take our advice: If you lose your money, please don’t lose your mind!Sonny and BrownieNobody ever did the blues better than

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