Down in the Flood

#52 / March 25 Podcast

“Down in the Flood” is a remarkable tune that was born in the late 1960s when Bob Dylan started goofing around with The Band in a basement of a big pink house in West Saugerties, New York, north of Woodstock.

It was one of many songs that would fill the world’s first great bootleg album, the unforgettable “Great White Wonder.” (Later nearly all those recordings were officially released by Columbia Records as “The Basement Tapes.”)

As The Band’s Robbie Robertson remembers it, “Down In The Flood” (also known as “Crash on the Levee”) evolved during a specific 1967 jam session at which Bob and the guys started fiddling with an old John Lee Hooker song called “Tupelo Blues,” about the historically devastating 1927 Mississippi River flood. Playing with that tune apparently triggered Dylan’s memories of another song, this one from his repertoire in the early years called “James Alley Blues,” based on a 1927 Richard “Rabbit” Brown recording. Significantly, that song uses the phrase “sugar for sugar, salt for salt,” a line that would end up in Bob’s own lyric.

Now, some in the ever vigilant Dylan community believe that Bob actually wrote “Down in the Flood” for bluegrassers (and then-fellow Columbia artists) Flatt and Scruggs. Perhaps, though it seems less likely now that we have Robertson’s account of the tune’s evolution. Still, the fact is the first commercial recording of the song was indeed by Flatt & Scruggs and The Foggy Mountain Boys on their 1968 “Changin’ Times” album.

Dylan’s own first recording of the number was three years later, on his “Greatest Hits Vol. II” album, on which Bob’s friend and Woodstock neighbor Happy Traum played second guitar. “I had heard ‘Down in the Flood’ in bits and pieces during the Basement Tapes sessions,” Traum says, “ but the version that we did at this recording was totally impromptu — at least for me. It’s a blues in G, so it wasn’t hard to find some things to play. Bob was strumming the rhythm with his flatpick, so I just tried to compliment his singing with some sliding licks and bluesy, finger-style fills on the high strings. The whole thing went by so fast that I didn’t realize it was a take until we played it back.”

After that, “Down In The Flood” receded big time. Oh, sure, Blood, Sweat & Tears turned it into some jazz funk in 1972, the Beau Brummels produced a slightly psychedelic version, Sandy Denny’s cover brought a vaudeville piano to it. However, Dylan himself didn’t play it publicly for another 23 years. Then unexpectedly he revived it in 1995 as the opening song for his Never Ending Tour, performing it in an infectious swamp rock arrangement. These days it remains on the set list. There was even a re-recording, this time for “Masked & Anonymous,” the 2003 film that Dylan wrote with Larry Charles.

Our Take on the Tune

This tune, which is only a few years older than our band, by all rights ought to be The Flood’s theme song. The fact is, though, we’ve been doing it only about a dozen years or so, which is — well, “yesterday,” in FloodSpeak — but since then, we have embraced it. And in this, our latest rendition, we’re loving how Danny Cox and Veezy Coffman are owning it! Click here to hear it from a recent Flood rehearsal.