All of Me

 Here’s a song that’s celebrating its 90th birthday this year. “All of Me” was written in 1931 by Gerald Marks and Seymour Simons. It was an early hit for vocalist Mildred Bailey, recording with Paul Whiteman’s orchestra, and for Louis Armstrong. Of course, the definitive version came a decade later when Billie Holiday made her great 1941 rendition of it. And then a brand new generation learned the song through Willie Nelson’s inclusion of the tune on his landmark 1978 “Stardust” album, which featured hits of the great American songbook. The Flood started doing the song a couple of decades ago, but it got a new burst of energy at a recent rehearsal in Michelle’s singing twinned with Veezy’s sax solo.

Yellow Dog Blues

 It’s not every song that has an historical marker devoted to it beside the highway. But then it’s not every song that has the privilege of being composed by the great W.C. Handy. It’s hard to imagine what the early days of jazz would have been like without the songs of William Christopher Handy. “Memphis Blues” and “Beale Street Blues,” “Careless Love” and, of course, the immortal “St. Louis Blues.” The Flood does a lot of those songs, and lately we’ve been drawn to one of Handy’s earliest compositions. In 1912 he wrote “Yellow Dog Blues,” which ends with the line “Your easy rider’s gone where the Southern cross the Yellow Dog.” Those are railroad references about the crossing of the Southern Railway and the local Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad, known thereabouts as The Yellow Dog. And to this day, down in Sunflower County, Mississippi, in the town of Moorhead, a bronze plate stands at the very spot memorialized in that classic blues line. So, here’s our take on the tune from last night’s session, with Doug and Veezy burning it up on the solos atop Danny Gillum’s rocking bass line.

Lorena

Often at rehearsals, between tunes we’re planning to work on, Doug Chaffin will just start playing a song that’s been on his mind, and lately that tune has been a sweet antebellum melody called “Lorena.” Now, while the song is of decidedly Northern origins — it was written in Zanesville, Ohio, five years before the Civil War by a young man devastated by a broken engagement with his sweetheart — “Lorena” was equally loved by homesick southerners during the war. In fact, we know from diaries and letters that both sides claimed it as their own. Meanwhile, the song has special meaning for history lovers in our part of the world, because the final resting place for the subject of that lovely ballad — Martha Ella Blocksom, later Ella Johnson — is just across the river from us here, at Woodland Cemetery in Ironton, Ohio. So here, from a recent rehearsal, are Doug, Sam and Veezy contemplating this hauntingly beautiful melody that comes down to us from more than a century and a half ago.
 

Summertime

 George Gershwin’s 1935 composition “Summertime” is probably the most frequently covered song in all the world. Some estimate that there have been at least 25,000 recorded versions, many of them classic jazz renditions, of course, but also in every other genre from disco to reggae. As the centerpiece of Gershwin’s opera “Porgy and Bess,” the song is built around a poem by DuBose Heyward, the author of  the novel on which the opera was based. But besides all these facts and figures, there’s some serious magic going on here, in that even after 85 years, “Summertime” still has fresh musical ideas to inspire, as Veezy Coffman so lovingly demonstrates here in a couple of choruses from last night’s rehearsal.