For a half dozen years beginning in the late 1990s, The Flood always greeted March’s arrival with an annual road trip into the mountains.
Providing an evening of music, jokes and stories, the band would entertain a roomful of visiting volunteers, kindly students who had come more than 600 miles from Milwaukee’s Marquette University to use their spring break helping with assorted post-winter chores around the little mining town of Rhodell on Tams Mountain about 20 miles south of Beckley.
As reported here earlier, from 1997 to 2002 The Flood’s original three amigos — Joe Dobbs, David Peyton and Charlie Bowen — shared this weird, wonderful way to celebrate the coming of spring.
To read more about these Tams Mountain adventures, click here.
But, Hey, This is About a Song…
Each year, party hostess Martha Thaxton never failed to ask the guys to play one particular tune before they left for their two-hour journey back to Huntington. It was a song that seemed to speak to Martha’s own rambling soul as a die-hard folkie, a beloved Tom Paxton composition from his 1964 debut album for Elektra Records.
“I Can’t Help But Wonder Where I’m Bound” was a song Dave and Charlie knew well — they had played it with Roger Samples back in the old Bowen Bash days — so they were happy to dust it off for Martha and her visiting good samaritans.
In the past 60 years Paxton’s song has been recorded by everyone from The Mitchell Trio and The Kingston Trio to Tiny Tim and Dion (no, really!), from The Country Gentlemen and Country Joe to Doc Watson and Nanci Griffith.
But surely the most touching rendition was Johnny Cash’s recording of the song in his final session in February 2010.
In a recent interview, Paxton noted that Cash used to come in The Gaslight back in the early 60s “in what we now know was his worst period.
“He was skinny as a rail because of all the pills he was doing. He had not had his renaissance yet. But he was a gentle man. He was a direct man and he took you as you were. I just liked this man.”
Paxton said he was “absolutely thrilled … to hear him sing the song. That’s just a once in a lifetime kind of thrill.”
Elijah Wald Blazed the Trail
Speaking of being thrilled, members of The Flood’s crack research department are always overjoyed whenever they discover the blazed trails and rambling footprints of the incomparable Elijah Wald on some musical terrain they’ve come to explore.
For nine years now, Wald’s online “Songbiography” has been his musical memoir, giving history and personal reflection on some of his favorite songs, which often turn out to be Flood favorites too. Elijah’s site was barely a month old when he took up “I Can’t Help But Wonder Where I’m Bound.”
It is a tune he loved as a young man, but, he writes, he couldn’t “help noticing that Paxton himself got married back when he was writing these songs, and the marriage lasted, and he moved out to the country and raised a family, and all in all has had one of the most settled and stable lives of anyone on the folk scene.
“It’s as if he actually meant the last verse, where he sings that anyone who sees the ramblin’ boy goin’ by and wants to be like him should just ‘nail your shoes to the kitchen floor, lace ’em up and bar the door/Thank your stars for the roof that’s over you.’”
In retrospect, Wald said, “I think it’s a nice touch that the singer keeps bemoaning his sad ‘n’ ramblin’ ways, but it’s the girl, rather than him, who leaves on the morning train.”
Our Take on the Tune
So this is an evergreen song, and that word has special meaning in The Flood band room. It is reserved for tunes that are timeless.
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