Lorena

Often at rehearsals, between tunes we’re planning to work on, Doug Chaffin will just start playing a song that’s been on his mind, and lately that tune has been a sweet antebellum melody called “Lorena.” Now, while the song is of decidedly Northern origins — it was written in Zanesville, Ohio, five years before the Civil War by a young man devastated by a broken engagement with his sweetheart — “Lorena” was equally loved by homesick southerners during the war. In fact, we know from diaries and letters that both sides claimed it as their own. Meanwhile, the song has special meaning for history lovers in our part of the world, because the final resting place for the subject of that lovely ballad — Martha Ella Blocksom, later Ella Johnson — is just across the river from us here, at Woodland Cemetery in Ironton, Ohio. So here, from a recent rehearsal, are Doug, Sam and Veezy contemplating this hauntingly beautiful melody that comes down to us from more than a century and a half ago.
 

Summertime

 George Gershwin’s 1935 composition “Summertime” is probably the most frequently covered song in all the world. Some estimate that there have been at least 25,000 recorded versions, many of them classic jazz renditions, of course, but also in every other genre from disco to reggae. As the centerpiece of Gershwin’s opera “Porgy and Bess,” the song is built around a poem by DuBose Heyward, the author of  the novel on which the opera was based. But besides all these facts and figures, there’s some serious magic going on here, in that even after 85 years, “Summertime” still has fresh musical ideas to inspire, as Veezy Coffman so lovingly demonstrates here in a couple of choruses from last night’s rehearsal.

I Almost Lost My Mind

 Before rock ’n’ roll was a thing, it was rhythm and blues that was perking up the ears of a generation of young radio listeners, and tops among the early R&B songwriters was Ivory Joe Hunter, the original “Baron of the Boogie.” Ivory Joe — by the way, that wasn’t a nickname or a stage handle, but his given name — was born in Kirbyville, Texas, to a gospel-singing mother and a guitar strumming daddy. At 13, his piano-playing was already turning heads and his first recording was for Alan Lomax and the Library of Congress when he was still a teenager in 1933. He left Texas for the wilds of downtown Los Angeles in the early 1940s, just as R&B was starting to attract legions of fans hungry for more tunes, and in 1950, Ivory Joe got into everybody’s head with his new song “I Almost Lost My Mind.” The Flood’s been paying homage to this great old tune for a few years now. Here’s a rendition from last night’s rehearsal, with Michelle and me harmonizing over the rock-solid support of Doug Chaffin and Paul Callicoat. You know, if you’re going to lose your mind, those are the guys you want helping you find your way back to it.

Memphis in June

 Back in the days when we would ride on — and occasionally even got to perform on — the good ol’ Delta Queen steamboat, it often meant a reunion with a dear friend, the boat’s band leader, the legendary New Orleans cornetist Connie Jones. We learned this song — an obscure Hoagy Carmichael composition — from Connie. On his album, it was an instrumental, but whenever we’d ask for it on board the boat, Connie would sing it. Now, The Flood’s only just begun learning this song — we started messing around with it a few weeks ago, so our arrangement is still evolving — but it’s already doing its magic, conjuring up memories of sunny days up in The Delta Queen’s Texas Lounge, seeing Connie, eyes closed and grinning as he purred those sweet Paul Francis Webster lyrics. Here then, in memory of Connie Jones in the week of what would have been his 87th birthday, is Hoagy Carmichael’s “Memphis in June.”

Dead Cat on the Line

 While we are regularly reminded that they nailed Socrates for corrupting the youth, we do sometimes feel obliged to enlighten the younger members of our audience as to the origins of some of the bluer material in our repertoire. This song, for example — which we got from a 1934 recording by a couple of our heroes, Tampa Red and Georgia Tom — isn’t about what you might think it’s about. Don’t worry! The “dead cat” in the title isn’t Mittens or Fluffy. It’s about fishing. No, really. The Flood’s crack research department looked into this, oh, 10 or 12 years ago and learned — from no less an authority than the late, great word guru William Safire, writing in The New York Times — that the phase "dead cat on the line" appears to refer to a dead catfish on a trotline, evidence that a lazy fisherman hasn’t been checking his poles. In other words, the song’s just saying, look out, now — something's fishy...

Golden Apples of the Sun

 More than a century ago, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote an amazing verse called “The Song of Wandering Aengus.” In it an old man remembers a mystical experience in his youth, in which a silver trout he’d just fished from a stream suddenly transforms into a glimmering girl, who called him by his name and then vanished. To this day, he looks for her, through the long green dappled grass of hilly lands and hollow lands, search the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun. Many years later, folksinger Travis Edmonson set Yeats’ words to a lovely, ephemeral melody, which the Family Flood sat down with last night.

At Last

One of the many frustrating things about this time of COVID, of course, is that we so seldom have gotten to see some of our dearest companions. And as you can imagine, for a band, well, that’s just devastating. It’s been months, for instance, since we’ve had another of those sweet evening with Michelle Lewis that only a year ago we just took for granted. But yesterday evening — at last! — Michelle came sailing back into the loving arms of her Family Flood, and to celebrate that moment, she brought with her the perfect song. “At Last,” indeed!