The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast

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 —…

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 d…

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 tr…

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 pictu…

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 writ…

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 aroun…

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 r…

“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. Wit…

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 num…

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 decad…

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 Charli…

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 bunc…

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 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 Yeri…

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 t…

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 th…

There are few sure things nowadays, but one thing we can guarantee is that today somewhere in the Mountain State this song is being sung, whistled, hummed or at least thought of about every 15 minute…

People began to think Bessie Smith must be some kind of witchy woman. After all, they said, how else could she have recorded a song about the devastating Great Mississippi River Flood weeks before it…

Summer is wonderful, of course — and much appreciated after that seeming endless winter — but it brings a bit of blues to the band room. That’s because when the temperature’s rising and the livin’ is…

If you were ever lucky enough to catch one of the late Dave Van Ronk’s shows, you almost certainly heard “Green Rocky Road,” which became sort of his theme song over the years.

He’d perform it in a va…