The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast

Born in New York City in the waning years of the 19th century, Harry Akst started out as a vaudeville pianist, backing Nora Bayes as she belted out tunes like “Shine On, Harvest Moon.”In 1916 Harry enlisted in the army, and while at Camp Upton in Yaphank, NY, on Long Island, he befriended another young composer, Irving Berlin. At the end of World War I, Akst and Berlin collaborated on the No. 2 recording of 1921, "Home Again Blues.”Then in 1925, Akst teamed up with lyricists Sam Lewis and Joe Young,

In the genesis of American popular music, few moments are as important as one that occurred exactly 100 years ago tonight.Louis Armstrong was just 20 years old — nervous and apprehensive — when he stepped off a train from his New Orleans hometown into Chicago’s Illinois Central Station just before midnight on July 8, 1922. “Anybody watching me closely could have easily seen that I was a country boy,” Armstrong wrote in his first memoir, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (1954). “I thought to myself:

We were already having a righteous good time at Doug Chaffin’s house earlier this week when suddenly in walked a young guitar player who would ratchet things up to a whole new level of coolness. Now, Josh Woods is old friend of our newest Floodster, Danny Cox, but it turns out his roots go even deeper than that. That’s because we learned that Doug Chaffin used to regularly jam with Josh’s dad, John Woods. Needless to say, there were lots of stories between the tunes that night, with Danny, Josh and

It has been pretty convincingly argued that “That’s All Right, Mama” was the world’s first rock ’n’ roll song (and subsequently the soundtrack of countless tales of teenage rebellion from the 1950a onward).However, should we be honoring the tune’s composer and first performer — blues singer Arthur Crudup in 1946 — or the song’s more famous interpreter, Elvis Presley, who introduced it to a wider world in 1954?“Big Boy” Crudup, who started his blues career in the late 1930s in Mississippi, recorded

Legend has it that this fine old folk song was born among the roustabouts who loaded and unloaded steamboats on the Ohio River at the turn of the last century. Hundreds of contemporary versions of “Alberta, Let Your Hair Hang Low” exist, including one by The Blues Project and another by Bob Dylan. Decades earlier, the great Lead Belly recorded four different versions of the song between 1935 and 1948.But the very first trace of the song was collected at an unknown date by Kentucky-born musicologist

Sons of a tenant farming family, Alton Delmore and his baby brother Rabon grew up dirt poor in Elkmont, Alabama, in the 1920s, but they were rolling in another kind of riches: Music, the melodies and lyrics they heard it all around them and that they would bring to the rest of us.The boys’ mom, Mollie Delmore, wrote and sang gospel songs for their church. When Alton and Rabon later fashioned themselves in one of America’s first supergroups, The Delmore Brothers, they helped create the still-emerging