All of Me

 Here’s a song that’s celebrating its 90th birthday this year. “All of Me” was written in 1931 by Gerald Marks and Seymour Simons. It was an early hit for vocalist Mildred Bailey, recording with Paul Whiteman’s orchestra, and for Louis Armstrong. Of course, the definitive version came a decade later when Billie Holiday made her great 1941 rendition of it. And then a brand new generation learned the song through Willie Nelson’s inclusion of the tune on his landmark 1978 “Stardust” album, which featured hits of the great American songbook. The Flood started doing the song a couple of decades ago, but it got a new burst of energy at a recent rehearsal in Michelle’s singing twinned with Veezy’s sax solo.

Yellow Dog Blues

 It’s not every song that has an historical marker devoted to it beside the highway. But then it’s not every song that has the privilege of being composed by the great W.C. Handy. It’s hard to imagine what the early days of jazz would have been like without the songs of William Christopher Handy. “Memphis Blues” and “Beale Street Blues,” “Careless Love” and, of course, the immortal “St. Louis Blues.” The Flood does a lot of those songs, and lately we’ve been drawn to one of Handy’s earliest compositions. In 1912 he wrote “Yellow Dog Blues,” which ends with the line “Your easy rider’s gone where the Southern cross the Yellow Dog.” Those are railroad references about the crossing of the Southern Railway and the local Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad, known thereabouts as The Yellow Dog. And to this day, down in Sunflower County, Mississippi, in the town of Moorhead, a bronze plate stands at the very spot memorialized in that classic blues line. So, here’s our take on the tune from last night’s session, with Doug and Veezy burning it up on the solos atop Danny Gillum’s rocking bass line.

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...