Thanksgiving 2010 ... With Kazoos...

Twenty-seven people in one room. Pamela comes in with a baggie of kazoos. Orchestrated chaos ensues. That was last night at the jam session. It being the night before Thanksgiving, the crowd included friends coming from as far away as New York and Washington and as near as across town and from down around the block. Good friends... always something to be thankful for.

Misty

Flood co-founder Dave Peyton is bit under the weather right now and has not been able to attend the weekly jam sessions lately, and last night the guys were especially missing him. So, knowing how Dave's always been such a fan the great Johnny Mathis, Michelle Walker led us on a special musical get-well card for our old spiritual leader and kazoo guru.

Georgia on My Mind

The Flood has an abiding love for the music of the great Hoagy Carmichael. Sometimes nothing fits the mood better than one of Hoagy's tune, and last night was such a night. At a lull in the usual rowdy jugband action at the jam session, Joe eased into "Georgia on my Mind." On the break, we turned it over to Jacob for a couple of sweet choruses on the guitar before handing it back to Joe's fiddle, and in the process, made a memory.

Any Way She Done It

Our hero, Hudson Woodbridge -- known to millions as Tampa Red -- recorded his tune called "No Matter How She Done" in Chicago in 1932. Sixty or 70 years later, The Flood picked it up and flipped the polarity on the old number, doing it as "Any Way She Done," but, hey, that won't matter. Any way you do it, it's still Tampa Red's baby!

Got the Kansas City Blues

Because of travel and then, more recently, illness, we've not an a jam session for a couple of weeks. So this is a chance to reach back in the archives for a tune from an earlier session. Like this one, from last summer when our Missouri buddies Dave Para and Cathy Barton dropped in. This was at the end of the evening, when they took a ride on the first number ever recorded by the great Delmore Brothers in 1931.

Midnight Special

Our weekly jam sessions often let us get reacquainted with old friends. And sometimes the old friends are old tunes. We hadn't played that great old Leadbelly standard "Midnight Special" for five or six years, but one autumn evening recently it just sort of felt like the right song for the right night. Oh, it took us a minute or two to remember how we used to do it, but after a chorus or two, it drop right back into the groove.

Ron Eldridge Gets Flooded

It's always interesting when dye-in-the-wool bluegrassers wander into one of our jam sessions. There's usually one of two possible reactions when they get a whiff of The Flood's thick jumbo of blues, swing and jugband music. They either about-face and head back to the door or they grin and grab a seat at the table. (The good ones even bring their own spoon.) You'd be hard-pressed to find a better bluegrass player today than Ron Eldridge. Ronnie grew in our area, started playing his daddy's fiddle in the late 1960s and by the mid-'70s was playing with the locally legendary Sweeney Brothers band. In the 1980s, Eldridge struck out for Nashville and has been there ever since, a solid citizen in that famed music scene and a frequent performer on The Grand Ole Opry. But last night it was The Flood's turn and Ron showed us he could put the BLUE(S) in bluegrass.