x

75% of people globally want unbiased news (Pew Research) but are concerned they're not getting that.

Get balanced coverage with Symby. See how stories are covered across diverse outlets and spot when one side covers a story the other skips.

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

3:01

"Amelia's Waltz"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2025/09/30

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

en

3:47

Auditioning for the New Album

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2025/09/26

Danny Cox and Randy Hamilton brought us this tune a year or so ago and as it matures, it just keeps enriching The Flood’s bloodstream.Not only that, the song is very much on target to be included on the next Flood album when work begins on that project in the months ahead. Give it a listen in this take from a recent rehearsal.About the SongAs noted in an earlier Flood Watch article, “Deep River Blues” is usually associated with the late, great Doc Watson, who included it on his self-titled debut

en

5:12

Ramblin' On About Jack Elliott

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2025/09/19

Brooklyn-born Elliott Charles Adnopoz had only just started calling himself “Ramblin’ Jack” in the early 1950s when he came upon a new hero in the wilds of San Francisco.This was a couple years after Elliott had met in his first and most influential mentor — the legendary singer/songwriter/poet Woody Guthrie — whose work and philosophy would shape the 20-something Jack’s long life as an itinerant folksinger.Enter Lone CatA few years after Woody, Elliott rambled all the way across the country and met

en

5:01

Celebrating Maceo Pinkard

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2025/09/12

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 MaceoIn fact, this year marks the 100th anniversary of the

en

4:39

Remembering Chu Berry

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2025/09/05

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

en

5:21

Lovin' Us Some Chris Stapleton

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2025/08/29

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

en

5:05

"The Ballad of Tom Kromer"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2025/08/23

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

en

2:13

Friendly Spirits in the Band Room

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2025/08/22

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

en

7:08

Hoagy and Ray Strike Gold in Georgia

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2025/08/15

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

en

2:30

"Dooley"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2025/08/08

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

en

3:31

"I Never Cried ('Til My Baby Got on That Train)”

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2025/08/01

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,

en

3:19

"Spooky"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2025/07/25

“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 IVBut 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

en

3:22

Lulu Rides Again!

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2025/07/19

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

en

3:14

"Eight More Miles to Louisville"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2025/07/18

Country music legend Grandpa Jones’ signature song — “Eight More Miles to Louisville” — started out celebrating a journey that was nearly twice as long and to an entirely different city.About a decade before Grandpa recorded his tune, Alton and Rabon Delmore of Alabama’s famed Delmore Brothers were playing their “Fifteen Miles from Birmingham” on live radio shows as the duo trekked across the South.That song was never a big hit for the Delmores — by then, they had many hits, including “Got the

en

3:22

Color It Blue

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2025/07/12

Turning to a tune from the late 1960s at the end of this week’s rehearsal, Randy Hamilton makes a solid case for the color blue. His performance of Danny O’Keefe’s folk-rock classic “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues” also inspires Artie Fish, chief of our crack graphics department — The Floodoodlers — to come up with something appropriately moody to illustrate those moments in Pamela Bowen’s video. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to

en

4:19

Lady Be Better

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2025/07/11

George Gershwin’s “Lady Be Good” has been in The Flood repertoire for more than a quarter century. And lately the song has taken on a whole new life, ever since Danny Cox brought ‘round a better bunch of chords. Listen to Dan and the guys just rocking the socks off the thing!As reported earlier, Gershwin’s perennial 1924 party tune, “Lady Be Good” is a rarity among jazz standards in the Great American Songbook, surviving the transition from the loose Dixieland style of the “Roaring Twenties” to the

en

4:10

About That Frankie Kerfuffle

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2025/07/05

When the Bowens’ new neighbor Baylee Parsons and her mom, Jill, heard that The Flood was rehearsing on Wednesday night, they dropped by to test the waters (ooo! See what we did there?) The first tune the guys played for these lovely Flood first-timers illustrated the band’s longtime interest in old-time string band music. They turned to their usual go-to guy — Charlie Poole — and his “Leaving Home,” a 1927 winking, nodding retelling of the classic Frankie and Johnny story.Pamela’s video of the tune

en

3:47

"Darcy Farrow"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2025/07/04

The lyrics start like no song we’d ever heard back in the 1960s (or, well, since): Where the Walker runs down to the Carson Valley plain…The words also speak of pretty lights at nights “in Yerington town” and about a young woman whose beauty was toasted by strangers “where the Truckee runs through … (and) in Virginia City too…”Magical were all those names of Nevada rivers and tiny towns on the range. They were especially evocative to a bunch of teen-aged Easterners who had grown up watching

en

4:31

"Dink's Song (Fare Thee Well)"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2025/06/27

Folklorist John A. Lomax found this song in 1909 when he made his first field trip to the Brazos area of Texas for Harvard University.“I found Dink scrubbing her man's clothes in the shade of their tent across the Brazos River from the A. & M. College,” Lomax wrote when he and his son Alan published the song 25 years later in their seminal 1934 work, American Ballads and Folk Songs.Harvest Professor James C. Nagle had been the supervising engineer of a levee-building company during that first trip,

en

3:03

Chick Singer Rocks Bahnhof's

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast ·

2025/06/21

It is always a party when Michelle Hoge — the Floodster whom the late Joe Dobbs years ago lovingly dubbed “Duh Chick Singer”— is in the room, and she was very much in the room Thursday evening for the band’s latest visit to Huntington’s Bahnhof WVrsthaus & Biergarten.Actually this wasn’t Michelle first time to perform at the wonderful 7th Avenue venue. Back in 2017, she was among the Floodsters who played in the beer garden on a spring evening soon after the cool cafe open.But this week’s

en

228 results

Similar Podcasts

Pasquale Maassen Soundcloud

Pasquale Maassen

Marian Klose

Marian Klose

sevenism

sevenism

Goldfinger

Goldfinger

Fairground Sounds

Mechanical Music Radio