Got the Kansas City Blues

Because of travel and then, more recently, illness, we've not an a jam session for a couple of weeks. So this is a chance to reach back in the archives for a tune from an earlier session. Like this one, from last summer when our Missouri buddies Dave Para and Cathy Barton dropped in. This was at the end of the evening, when they took a ride on the first number ever recorded by the great Delmore Brothers in 1931.

Midnight Special

Our weekly jam sessions often let us get reacquainted with old friends. And sometimes the old friends are old tunes. We hadn't played that great old Leadbelly standard "Midnight Special" for five or six years, but one autumn evening recently it just sort of felt like the right song for the right night. Oh, it took us a minute or two to remember how we used to do it, but after a chorus or two, it drop right back into the groove.

Ron Eldridge Gets Flooded

It's always interesting when dye-in-the-wool bluegrassers wander into one of our jam sessions. There's usually one of two possible reactions when they get a whiff of The Flood's thick jumbo of blues, swing and jugband music. They either about-face and head back to the door or they grin and grab a seat at the table. (The good ones even bring their own spoon.) You'd be hard-pressed to find a better bluegrass player today than Ron Eldridge. Ronnie grew in our area, started playing his daddy's fiddle in the late 1960s and by the mid-'70s was playing with the locally legendary Sweeney Brothers band. In the 1980s, Eldridge struck out for Nashville and has been there ever since, a solid citizen in that famed music scene and a frequent performer on The Grand Ole Opry. But last night it was The Flood's turn and Ron showed us he could put the BLUE(S) in bluegrass.