St. James Infirmary

We started playing the wonderful Diamond Teeth Mary Blues & Arts Festival in downtown Huntington…  oh, it’s been seven or eight years ago now, and we always love coming back, but lord, and never more than this time. After the seemingly endless Covid shutdown, this’ll be our first public show in more than a year. We’ll be on stage at the festival at 2 o’clock this Saturday afternoon. Come on down for blues, food, art and good fellowship. To get in the mood, here’s a tune we’re working up for our set. We join in progress as The Flood finds its way to St. James Infirmary. Remember, we’re at the Diamond Teeth Mary Blues & Arts Festival at 2 p.m. Saturday at Heritage Station, at 210 11th Street in beautiful downtown Huntington.
 

Down by the Salley Gardens

There’s nothing at all wrong with doing public shows — shoot, we in the band are such hams that we all get a charge out of puttin’ on and showin’ off on stage — but we live for the weekly jam sessions, when we just kick back and play for each other. These nights are a musical crazy quilt, zigzagging all over our eclectic repertoire, zipping from a zany jug band tune to a sweet ballad and then back again in the span of dozen minutes. Here’s a typical moment. Fresh from that raucous blues stomp, we suddenly land out the softest sod of our evening’s stroll together, this gentlest of all Irish tunes, compliments of the poet William Butler Yeats.

I Wonder Where My Easy Rider's Gone

 In blues parlance, the term “easy rider” is code for …oh, well, many things. Maybe a rovin’ gambler or a lover, maybe a pimp… Y’all just talk among yourselves and let your imagination gallop away with that one. The easy rider starts appearing in blues songs more than a century ago. W.C. Handy featured an easy rider in his great “Yellow Dog Blues” back in 1912, but of course, that text was covered in an earlier sermon from this pulpit. Well, a decade or so after Handy, another of our heroes, Hudson Whitaker — better known to the denizens of night music as Tampa Red — brought out a new version of the story and it’s that tune that’s been rattling around our heads lately. Well, last night our old buddy, hamonicat Jim Rumbaugh dropped by to sit in and we just had to introduce him to the tune. Here’s the result, with tasty solos and fills by Jim, Randy Hamilton on bass and, of course, on the tenor the soulful Miss Veezy Coffman.

Honeysuckle Rose

 At a recent rehearsal, we tapped Veezy Coffman to choose the last tune of the night. Without hesitation, she called for “Honeysuckle Rose.” You know,  sometimes we’re amazed at the affinity she has for songs that are, some of them, nearly five times older than she is. But then again, listening to her loving, lively treatment of this great old Fats Waller jazz classic affirms for us all over again that music has a lot more to do with head and heart than it does with ticks on a clock or numbers on a calendar. Ah, tell it, Veezy!

Lovin' You Would Be So Good for Me

About 20 years ago this summer, Joe Dobbs asked the boys in his band to come up with a theme song for his show, “Music from the Mountains” which by then had been a huge weekend favorite on West Virginia Public Radio for decades. Honestly, we were fresh out of ideas for a new song until Charlie remembered a tune he had written maybe five years earlier, one he’d never done anything with. So in the summer 2002, we re-appropriated that melody, Dave Peyton wrote some cool new lyrics for it and The Flood just sort of put it all together one evening in the studio. In fact, the show’s producer, George Walker, left the recorder running and happened to capture the moment as that particular sausage was being made. From then on, that theme was used every week until the show ended its quarter-of-a-century run about a decade ago. But long before Joe Dobbs’ passing six years ago, we’d pretty much stopped playing the song. Still, lately that old melody has been on Doug Chaffin’s mind and he’s been urging us to resurrect it. So, as a hoot, we’ve tarted playing a bit with my original composition, a silly little song from the ‘90s that Charlie called “Lovin’ You Would Be So Good for Me.” So, for the record, here’s a little taste of it. From a jam session at the Chaffin house a week or so ago, this is the tune that reinvented itself as Joe Dobbs’ theme song.

Creative Listening with Veezy Coffman

 When she’s not playing with The Flood or working on her double-major at Marshall University, our saxophonist Veezy Coffman can often be seen and heard playing solo jazz sets at cool venues all around the Tri-State Area. For instance, she’s performing twice this weekend: Friday night in The Guitar Bar at The Winchester in Ashland, Ky., and then Saturday night back here in Huntington at the New Jockey Club downtown in The Frederick. Now, it was in just such a jazzy solo set that we first heard Veezy a year and a half ago and we couldn’t wait to get her into our band. We learn a lot from this 20 year old, especially about creative listening. Here’s a cool example of what we mean by that. At a rehearsal a few weeks ago, Doug Chaffin started playing “Around the World Waltz,” a tune that he learned from a 1990s Byron Berline album called “Jumping the Strings.” (Oh, incidentally, we were sad to hear of Byron’s death last week; what an amazing, influential fiddler he was!) Anyway, Veezy had never heard the tune before, so at the start of this track, just listen to her listen to it, and then, when it’s her turn, hear how she improvises her lovely impressions of that melody. Of course, Veezy learns some stuff from us too, such as how rock along on a blues with the give and take in an ensemble of band mates who are all just making it up as they go! You can hear it on the second half of this track, after the waltz, in her wailing in the final choruses of “Yellow Dog Blues.”

You Don't Know Me

 Eighteen years ago this month, our late fiddler Joe Dobbs brought a young woman to a rehearsal to meet the band. The plan was to work out just a couple of tunes for her to sing with us at a gig we would be playing that weekend at Snowshoe Resort in the mountains of West Virginia’s Pocahontas County. Now, needless to say, we all fell in love with Michelle — she was Michelle Walker in those days, later to be Michelle Lewis —and that one evening led to a rich musical life together. Now, right now these are very busy days for Lady Michelle — she’s packing up to move away to join her fiancé, Rich, who lives in Loveland, Ohio, just northeast of Cincinnati. But recently she made time to join us at Doug Chaffin’s house for an evening of reminiscing on all her favorite songs from over the years. Here’s a highlight of that night.