"I Wonder Where My Easy Rider's Gone"

 Around here, the best night of the week is whatever night we’re all getting together to pick. Everyone always comes in the room ready to rock. But some nights? Well, those night swing even more than usual. Last week, for instance, Danny Cox seemed to have a whole barrel of new riffs to try out on his guitar, and Jack Nuckols was absolutely cooking on his snare and high-hat. And, man, but it seemed like Randy Hamilton was rocking before he even got his bass out of the case. Just listen to how Randy’s walking bass lines puts a strut and a glide in the great old Shelton Brooks tunes from the Roarin’ Twenties. Shoot, you can probably hear Charlie grinning while he's singing.

"Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine"

 Charlie first heard this centuries-old fiddle tune 50 years ago when an old friend Jim Strother played it with our favorite local string band, the good old Kentucky Foothill Ramblers. He couldn’t imagined The Flood ever playing it. However, a year or so ago, when he started studying the five-string banjo, the same old tune came rolling back in his brain. About the same time, Jack was dusting off his fiddle, and they worked it up together and then they taught it to Danny and Randy and Sam, who added their own sweet touches, and now the tune is a cool change of pace at our weekly rehearsals.

"Un Canadien Errant"

 Thirty years ago, when the band first started doing this song, The Flood was back to being a trio of the original guys — Dave Peyton, Joe Dobbs and Charlie Bowen — and often on rehearsal night, the only listener in the room would be Dave’s sweet wife, Susan. At the end of the evening, when they’d ask Susie what last song she’d like to hear, it was almost always this wonderfully sad French Canadian tune, one that she remembered hearing 20 years earlier down in Louisiana when she and David and young Davy lived in Cajun country. We lost Susan three years ago this summer. This one’s for you, dear heart.

"The Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia"

 We learned this great West Virginia tribute song in the 1970s, just a few years after Bruce Phillips wrote it. That’s because some of our local heroes — H. David Holbrook’s late great Kentucky Foothill Ramblers — started singing it at those parties where The Flood was born.