Come All Ye Fair and Tender Maidens

Any musician will tell you that the “meaning” of a song is much more than merely the words. While the lyrics can tell a story, maybe explain the title and conjure up a few images in your head, the real mood, the richness of the tune is in the melody and the harmonies. It’s the notes with which the players fill the spaces around and between all those words.  Now, we in The Flood are frankly in awe of the infinity that Doug Chaffin and Paul Martin have and how each plays in ways that often beautifully complement the other, echoing and building on each other’s musical ideas throughout a tune. You can hear that on this track from a mini-rehearsal last month. The vehicle is our rendition of an old folk song we’ve been playing for years, “Come All Ye Fair and Tender Maidens.” If you listen closely to Doug’s fiddle and then Paul — first on mandolin, then on guitar — you’ll hear conversations that have absolutely nothing to do with nouns, verbs and adjectives.

Doug Chaffin Celebrates Another Birthday

The tribal elder of the Flood clan these days, Doug Chaffin, has been playing music for about 70 years, almost a third of them with us. Since the year 2000, Doug has played a slew of instruments with the band, from upright bass and mandolin to fiddle, but he’s probably most at home with the guitar, the instrument he started playing back in the 1950s with the pickers in his own family. Nowadays, whether on stage with the whole Flood in front of an audience or just kicking back on his front porch at his homestead in the hills overlooking Ashland, Ky., Doug always rocks us. For instance, this track opens with Doug tearing it up on “East Tennessee Blues.” Oh, and by the way, Doug celebrated another birthday recently — he turned 79 last week — but he doesn’t seem to be slowing down much. Witness the way the track ends, with Doug roaring through a little bit of “Black Mountain Rag,” with Danny Gillum and Charlie Bowen huffing and puffing beside him just trying to keep up!

Number 12 Train

It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost a half century since Roger Samples and Charlie Bowen started playing music together. This track starts with a snippet of a tune recorded at a party in late 1974. It was right when Rog and Charlie had just started messing around with Josh White’s great tune, “Number 12 Train.” Oh, it’s even harder believe that Roger has been gone almost five years now. But he’s still very much with us. Evident of that is the rest of this track, recorded back in the March, the last time we were all together in one room before this COVID-19 madness started. Interesting, isn’t it, how the first tune of the evening was a shoutout to that same old blues? This time it features great solos by Doug and Sam and the two Paul’s? The blues run through so much of what The Flood plays, and so does the spirit of Roger Samples.

Let It Be Me

For 15 years now, Michelle and Charlie have looked for tunes we can harmonize on. Well, in these frustrating COVID-19 days, when we’ve not seen more than a couple of our bandmates together at one time — always outside, always socially distanced — this old Everly Brothers song that we came upon earlier this week seems like an especially poignant hymn to how much we all mean to each other. Here then, direct from the Bowen breezeway, complete with the hum of the neighbors’ air conditioners in the background, is our summer morning rendition of “Let It Be Me.”