Rest in Peace, Rog Samples

It's been a tough four and half months for the Family Flood. In the space of 20 weeks, we've lost two of the four founding members of our band, the eldest and the youngest. Back in September, fiddler Joe Dobbs passed away and now last weekend our dear friend and bandmate Roger Samples ended his five-year battle with cancer just a month after his 66th birthday. Last night was The Flood's first weekly gathering since getting that sad news and much of the evening revolved around stories about our old companion and about the songs we learned with Rog during his decade with us in those earliest days.

Misty

Doug Chaffin is having such a good time with his new guitar and it's inspiring us to revisit tunes we've not played in a while -- and others we never really worked out. For instance, a week or so ago, Doug started noodling around with Erroll Garner's perfect jazz standard, "Misty," then Michelle Lewis jumped in on the vocal and the rest of us just happily went along for the ride.

Crazy

Sometimes you just have to wait, you know? We're always on the lookout for great ballads with which we can feature Michelle Lewis' wonderful voice, and for years we've wanted to do the Willie Nelson classic, "Crazy," which, of course, the great Patsy Cline made famous in 1962. Well, for some reason the song just didn't seem to want to become a Flood tune …. until last night. Ah, it was one of those evenings when it finally started coming together.