Beale Street Blues

“Beale Street Blues” has been in our musical blood stream for a very long time. In fact, by the time we finally got this wonderful jazz number onto a Flood CD — it’s on our 2003 “I’d Rather Be Flooded” album — we’d been doing the song in shows for quite some time. That was in part because we were hooked on the version that one of our string band heroes, the great Charlie Poole, worked up. Poole called his 1928 version “Ramblin’ Blues.” But even then the tune was an old-timer. Composer W.C. Handy had published it 11 years later — in 1917 — and immediately all the hot new jazz bands started playing it. And, boy, has the song had a long life, recorded in the past 70 years by everybody from Duke Ellington and Tommy Dorsey to Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole. In 1974, writer James Baldwin used the song’s key line — “If Beale Street could talk” — as the title for one of his classic novels, which a couple of years ago director Barry Jenkins brought to the screen in an Academy Award-winning movie. Here then, from a recent rehearsal, is our revisiting of the song, with with great solos by Doug Chaffin, Paul Martin, Sam St. Clair and Vanessa Coffman. It’s “Beale Street Blues.”

Over the Rainbow

Last night was a busy rehearsal with a lot of new tunes on the table to try out. But the highlight of the night came when we revisited a song that’s been in The Flood’s swirl for a long time now. It was a couple of decades ago when the late Joe Dobbs got us playing “Over the Rainbow” as an instrumental. In fact, it was a favorite track on the “Fiddle and The Flood” CD that Joe brought out in 2001. Then it kind of went dormant for a while, until a few years ago when Michelle Lewis brought it back to us as a vocal. Well, last night the tune took another good turn when Vanessa Coffman gave us a couple of rich, lush choruses that showed us her tenor sax could open up even more dimensions to the song. Here are Michelle and Vanessa and “Over the Rainbow.”

Backwater Blues

Often when Huntington’s hits a rainy patch, as it has it has lately, we’re reminded of the opening line of a classic Bessie Smith blues from the 1920s, “It rained five days and the sky turned dark as night.” Well, since the soak and the sog were much on our minds last night, we just set it all down in a blues, so everybody could testify, starting with Michelle Lewis’s original (patent pending) call and response to my vocals, then a double round of solos from the whole congregation, Doug Chaffin and Sam St. Clair, Vanessa Coffman and the two Pauls, Paul Martin and Paul Callicoat. Here’s The Flood talking about a flood, just riffing on “Backwater Blues.”

Our 500th Episode

This episode of the podcast is about the podcast itself. It was 12 years ago when our harmonicat Sam St. Clair first suggested we try our hand at what at the time was still a relatively new idea: to have a weekly podcast, featuring a tune from a recent Flood rehearsal with maybe a little bit of commentary as an introduction. We thought it would just be a little hoot, perhaps a fun diversion to while away a couple of cold winter months. Honestly, we never imagined we’d still be doing this thing all this time later, but, well, the podcast caught on. These days we have listeners throughout the country and even around the world, from England to Brazil to Japan and elsewhere. And today marks the 500th episode. Now, 499 episodes ago, when we started this long, strange trip, the first song we ever featured was our funky rendition of a tune we had only then started playing around with, W.C. Handy’s 1914 jazz classic, “St. Louis Blues.” So, to celebrate today’s episode number 500, let’s revisit that song. Here’s the year 2020 edition, with Michelle’s lead vocal and solos by Doug, Paul and Vanessa. It’s “St. Louis Blues.”