The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast

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. Loui…

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 …

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 b…

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 S…

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 a…

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 …

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…

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 a…

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 …

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 …

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 …

“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, t…

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 …

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…

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 …

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 …

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 r…

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…

When a friend recently asked us what song has the longest association with The Flood, we had to stop and think. Several old-timers are still in the band’s repertoire.

The Carter Family-inspired “Soli…

“Honeysuckle Rose,” an absolute anthem of the Roaring Twenties, was born in a New York speakeasy almost a hundred years ago.

The story of the song’s roots is related by Barry Singer in his biography o…