Here’s a tune that will be on the set list tomorrow night when The Flood opens the festivities at this year’s Diamond Teeth Mary blues festival in downtown Huntington.
It’s a 1913 composition by the great Shelton Brooks. And if that name sounds familiar, you might be remembering last week’s podcast when we talked about Brooks’ best-known composition, the phenomenal “Darktown Strutters’ Ball.”
As noted, by the time Brooks wrote that, his songwriting chops already were firmly established with songs like this “I Wonder Where My Easy Rider’s Gone,” which, as we’ve reported earlier, was performed by everyone from Sophie Tucker and Mae West to Tampa Red, Georgia Tom and Frankie “Half Pint” Jaxon.
The Companion Song
This tune also is intimately related to another song on The Flood set list. As we’ve report here earlier, in 1915 famed songwriter W.C. Handy was writing an “answer” to Brooks’ “I Wonder Where My Easy Rider’s Gone” when he penned his “Yellow Dog Blues.”
“Yellow Dog Blues” is an especially appropriate choice for Huntington’s Diamond Teeth Mary festival, because in 1925 it was one of the biggest hits for Mary’s half sister, Bessie Smith. Critics consider Smith’s take to be the definitive recording of Handy’s song.
“Yellow Dog” focuses on the crossing of the Southern Railway and the local Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad. Today in Sunflower County, Mississippi, in the town of Moorhead, a bronze plate — see above — stands at the very spot memorialized in that blues classic.
You have to wonder if that same song might have been on Mary’s mind a dozen years later when she was at her sister’s side as Bessie died in Clarksdale, MS, from injuries suffered an auto crash on Highway 61 just 50 miles north of “where the Southern crosses the Yellow Dog.”
Come to the Festival!
The Diamond Teeth Mary Medicine Show will be rocking downtown Huntington tomorrow night in the beautiful Heritage Station, 210 11th Street, where the band has often played over the decades.
The Flood takes the stage on at the gazebo at 6 p.m.
For more about the festival, you might be interviewed in a recent segment aired by Marshall University’s WMUL radio.
Emma Johnson and John Boggess interviewed The Flood’s Charlie Bowen, festival director Karen Combs and Osage, WV, soul artist Aristotle Jones. Click the “Play” button below to give it a listen.
In addition, here’s the link to Derek Halsey’s story about the festival in The Herald-Dispatch.
