Needed Time: 2019

Some tunes have their own long, strange stories for how they end up The Flood’s songbag. Here’s one. Back in 1952, blues great Sam "Lightnin'" Hopkins recorded a sweet, mournful number called “Jesus, Will Come By Here,” but the song went largely unnoticed for 20 years. Then in 1972, the great Cicely Tyson/Paul Winfield movie called ”Sounder" used it in the soundtrack, but renamed it "Needed Time.” Well, sitting here in Huntington, WV, both Roger Samples and Charlie Bowen saw that movie, loved that song, and a year or so later, as our band getting busy being born, “Needed Time” was a song that both Rog and Charlie brought to the table. Well, over the next decade or so, as we played it at the ever-more raucous music parties where The Flood was just getting its feet wet, our little tune evolved from a moan to a shout — a lot less Sunday morning and a lot more Saturday night, as Roger might have said — but, you know, we like to think even today the tune still taps into some of Lightnin’s original magic, what made us fall in love with the song in the first place a half century ago. So here’s “Needed Time: 2019.”