The band does a lot of time traveling at its rehearsals. In those two hours each week, the guys might start with a rock classic like “Hey Baby,” as they do in this track from last week’s get-together.
Then in the next moment The Flood Time Machine Lab might transport the lads back to, say, the Roarin’ Twenties.
There they can sample a song or two of the day, maybe “Dinah” or “Lady Be Good” or “My Blue Heaven.”
Then switching gears again, they swoop down into the Thirties or the Forties to toy with tunes from the greats like Hoagy Carmichael (“Georgia on My Mind,” maybe) or Fats Waller (“Honeysuckle Rose”) or Duke Ellington (“Don’t Get Around Much Any More”).
Then it’s back to the Sixties or the Seventies for a bit of Bob Dylan, John Prine or Tom Paxton, Jackson Browne or Neal Young. It’s all about rocking the room.
This Week’s Song
The featured tune this week demonstrates the best part of all that temporal tramping, because it so often lets the guys revisit music of their youth. As reported earlier, “Hey Baby” was a 1961 chart-topper that 17-year-old Bruce Channel wrote with his friend Margaret Cobb.
Over the past six decades, the song has brought joy to audiences ranging from the fledgling Beatles when they were starting out back in Liverpool to movie goers years later who packed theaters for films like Dirty Dancing. For more of the song’s long history, click here.
The Flood started revisiting “Hey Baby” a few years ago when the band was invited to perform it at a very special occasion: the wedding of Floodster Emerita Michelle Hoge; she and Rich Hoge married on May 21, 2022, and The Flood was there for the festivities.
Since then, “Hey Baby” has lingered in the repertoire, as you’ll hear in this track that started last week’s rehearsal at the Bowen House.
Want to Do Your Own Time Traveling?
If you’d like ride shotgun in The Flood time machine, a new department in the newsletter helps you take your own dash through the decades.
Called “Flood Tunes on the Timeline,” the page sorts dozens of the band’s performances by the date of the songs’ composition. Here’s how to use it.
Suppose you’re in the mood for a little sumpin sumpin from the period that folksinger Dave Van Ronk once wryly called “The Great Folk Scare.” You could visit the tune timeline by clicking here, then scrolling down to “The Sixties” section, where you’ll find songs grouped by individual years.
For instance, Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” is tucked in under 1962. There’s Bob Gibson’s “Abilene” in the 1963 list. Paxton’s “Ramblin’ Boy” comes along in 1964, Eric Andersen’s “Dusty Boxcar Wall” is in 1965, and Michael Peter Smith’s “The Dutchman” shows up in 1968.
Each listed song on the timeline is hyperlinked, so clicking its title takes you to a recent Flood performance. Each entry also has a little (or a lot) of the history of that particular song.
The timeline indexes more than a century of music and is regularly updated as new songs and stories are added. Enjoy the ride!
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