The Ash Grove

Last weekend, Joe and Charlie traveled to Cincinnati to play in the wedding of Charlie's cousin, Andy Dronberger. Andy and his new bride, Melissa, wanted something different than the usual wedding music fare for their big day, so for the bride's entrance at the ceremony, they played a traditional melody, "The Ash Grove." That haunting, beautiful old Welsh tune was still very much on their minds at last night's regular Flood jam session, when Joe shared it with the guys.

San Francisco Bay Blues

The first time we ever heard the kazoo played on the radio was in the mid-'60s when Peter, Paul and Mary took a kazoo break on "San Francisco Bay Blues." And it turns out the kazoo is generally associated with this great old tune. One-man band Jesse Fuller, who wrote the song, took a kazoo solo on his original 1962 recording of it. And then, 30 years later, super-cool Eric Clapton even took a kazoo break when he recorded it. Of course, in The Flood, it's Brother Dave Peyton who's our hoodoo kazoo guru, and last night he spun a little of that old kazoo magic on the tune when it popped up at the jam session.

Ditty Wah Ditty

Precious little is known about Blind Blake. There's only one photograph. We don't even known where he was born or when and how he died. But between 1926 and 1932, Arthur "Blind" Blake left a slew of wonderful blues recordings for Paramount Records. And Blake penned one song that for 80 years now has tickled the fancy of eclectic performers like Leon Redbone and Ry Cooder. Recently The Flood took a ride on the same great song on an evening when our old buddy Chuck Romine dropped by to sit in with us on his tenor banjo.

Heaven's Radio

The Flood's Dave Peyton was a good friend of country music stars Molly O'Day and her husband, band leader Lynn Davis. Columbia Records artists who were signed by the legendary Fred Rose himself, Molly and Lynn were much in demand in '40s and early '50s, but left at the height of their career, deciding instead to devote themselves to their church and gospel music. Dave met them in the 1970s, when Molly and Lynn settled in our town of Huntington and spent their last years performing on a local Christian radio station. Molly's name came up again at a recent Wednesday night jam session when our friends from Australia, Rod and Judy Jones, dropped in and dusted off a Molly O'Day classic. Here, with Joe Dobbs on fiddle, is "Heaven's Radio."