Play That One About the Dog...

Often a song has a special meaning that has absolutely nothing to do with either its lyrics or its melody.

The Flood’s tight connection to W.C. Handy’s 100-year-old “Yellow Dog Blues,” for instance, dates back to 2020 and the deep, dark days of the Covid-19 epidemic.

With the whole world masked and distanced, the band couldn’t get together for its weekly gatherings. It was during the loneliness of that seemingly endless quarantine that Charlie Bowen got obsessed with trying to learn that song.

Woodshedding

It wasn’t his first time to try. Far from it. Bowen seemed to have always loved Bessie Smith’s 1925 original recording, but he had found her classic vocal on that old Columbia recording darn-near impossible to copy.

Then one bright morning, while tooling around YouTube, Charlie discovered a video of a wonderful 2010 rendition of the song by Tuba Skinny. Recorded on Royal Street in New Orleans’ French Quarter, it featured the fabulous Erika Lewis just killing it. And her approach — perhaps because it was on video — seemed more approachable.

Today the video has more than a million views; Charlie probably contributed about 10,000 of them himself as he painstakingly worked through the song, slowly picking up Erika’s brilliant nuance and style on each line.

“Poor Pamela!” Sam St. Clair once quipped.

Sam could just picture it: The Bowens were Covid-trapped together for who-knows-how-long, and there was Charlie doggedly singing those same damn lines over and over again. A patient woman, is our Pamela.

Anyway, by the following spring Charlie finally had the tune ready for a special public debut.

Playing in the Parks

It was during that same Covid Winter that Floodster Emerita Veezy Coffman came up with an idea for the venue.

"Once spring comes," she said one night, "what if we had some public jam sessions out in the park?" People were really eager to get out again, she noted, and probably would appreciate hearing some free music.

One of the outings that followed that suggestion found the Family Flood jamming in Central Park in Ashland, Ky., on a happy Sunday afternoon.

Today that public jam is recorded as a red-letter day in The Flood’s scrapbook. That’s because it not only finally got the Family Flood back out into the fresh air, but also inspired bassist Randy Hamilton to return to the fold.

For the previous two years, Randy had put his Floodishness on the shelf in order to pursue other interests. However, by May 2021, he was ready to wade back in, and that lovely Sunday in the park was the catalyst. Randy had such a good time — and his old band mates were so thrilled to hear him again — that he immediately accepted the invitation to join back up.

“Yellow Dog Blues,” as illustrated in Pamela’s video above, captured Randy’s first solo of the afternoon. (An extra treat is watching Doug Chaffin pull his chair a little bit closer to better hear his old buddy play.)

Doug’s Last Favorite New Flood Tune

Oh, Doug.

Covid had been especially hard on him. Four months before the video shot, Doug had spent more than two weeks in the hospital. Doctors later said that had it not been for the vaccine and booster shots he and Donna got, the virus almost surely would have taken him.

Doug survived, but he was never back to his full strength. Further complicating matters, he also was fighting cancer by then. Those treatments lowered his immune system so much that from then on he needed to avoid being around more than a few people at a time.

In the last two years of his life, Doug did have some good days among the bad, especially when music was involved. Masked and diligently distanced, small groups of Floodsters made regular treks to see him and try to boost his spirits. Here’s such a joyful moment celebrated in a May 2022 podcast:

In almost all of those final sessions at the Chaffin house, Doug would call for “Yellow Dog Blues” as the last tune of the night.

As Charlie said recently:

Interested in the Song’s History?

Of course, as Doug well knew, there’s no canine anywhere near that song.

If you’d like to find our what the “yellow dog” really was — and to read the rest of the curious history of this great old W.C. Handy standard — check out earlier Flood Watch report by clicking here.