Sitting on Top of the World

 Ask our bass player Randy Hamilton to name his best friends on the planet and somewhere near the very top of that list will be Danny Cox. Now, we’ve been hearing ABOUT this marvelous guitar player for years now. But last night we final got to actually hear him, and oh my! From his Ironton, Ohio, home on a cold winter’s night, Danny tagged along with Randy to the weekly Flood gathering and immediately really warmed up the place. Just listen to him and Veezy Coffman share choruses on this great old Mississippi Sheiks standard, “Sittin’ on Top of the World.”

Lady Be Good

Nineteen Twenty-Four was a golden year for George Gershwin. After more than a decade on pounding the pavement of New York’s Tin Pan Alley peddling his tunes, Gershwin composed his first major work — “Rhapsody in Blue” — and then that same year he and his brother, Ira, scored their first major hit on Broadway. The musical comedy “Lady Be Good,” which would run for more than 300 performances, was a showcase for a string of Gershwin brother collaborations, like “Fascinating Rhythm” and, of course, that phenomenal title tune. Now, that song — the perennial 1920s party tune, “Lady Be Good” — is a rarity among jazz standards in the Great American Songbook. Not many improvisational vehicles survived the transition from the loose Dixieland style of the “Roaring Twenties” to the smooth swing sound of the 1930s and beyond. But as everyone from Ella Fitzgerald and Mel Tormé to Charlie Parker, Lester Young and Django Reinhardt would demonstrate, “Lady Be Good” has some serious legs. The Flood started doing the song 20 years ago — it’s features on our second album — and our love of the tune really began to blossom when Doug Chaffin switched from bass to guitar to take charge of the lead on the number. Then, good golly, it went into full flower more recently when Vanessa Coffman came along with her tenor sax. Here Doug and Veezy share choruses with Sam St. Clair on “Lady Be Good” at a recent rehearsal.

Trouble in Mind

 New Orleans jazz pioneer Richard M. Jones wrote “Trouble in Mind” about a century ago, and singer Bertha “Chippie” Hill made it a hit with a 1926 recording that had Jones himself on piano and a youngster by the name of Louis Armstrong on cornet. Since then, of course, the song’s been recorded by everyone from Big Bill Broonzy to Dinah Washington and Nina Simone. Music historians even call this tune the anthem of the classic blues genre, but actually its roots go even deeper. At least two different African American spirituals dating all the way back to the 1880s have similar themes in their lyrics. Now, The Flood has been doing “Trouble in Mind” for decades now; recently, Veezy Coffman gave it a whole new feel by bringing her big beautiful bari sax to bear on it. Hey, take a listen.

Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out

 We’ve always loved this great old song -- now just about a century old — but we’ll be the first to tell you that there are some very hinky thing about our beloved tune. For one thing, hands down, the best known rendition of it is one of the earliest, the Columbia Records release by the great blues singer Bessie Smith. However, technically, the song’s not a blues. Structurally, it’s much like a vaudeville number or even an old music hall piece than one of the classic 12-bar blues that came out of the Mississippi Delta. Not only that, while “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” became one of the signature tunes of the Great Depression, we’ve learned that it was written actually almost a decade before those trouble times. Here’s how The Flood’s team of crack music detectives has sorted it out. The song was written in 1923 by a piano player named Jimmy Cox, who was indeed pretty well established on the black vaudeville circuit that worked the American roads in the Roaring Twenties. And Bessie Smith, who was just getting her career going in those days, was known to travel that same circuit and might have even performed in Jimmy Cox’s shows. It’s possible, in fact, she learned the song from Jimmy himself. What we know for sure that that by time Bessie Smith went back into the recording studio in the spring of 1929, Columbia was beginning to notice the blues records weren’t selling as well as they had had been and the suits wanted different material. Bessie responded with the Jimmy Cox composition from her vaudeville days. And here’s the final piece of the puzzle. In those days, it took a quite a long time for a record to make its way around the country. By the time it had traveled from New York City to the West Coast, the stock markets had collapsed and the Depression was beginning to wreak havoc. Imagine the listeners being amazed at how prophetic Bessie Smith’s new record was in describing their misery that first Depression winter. Here’s our take on the tune from a recent Flood rehearsal.