Radio Free Flood

#150 / Flood Time Capsule: 2021

A year ago this week, we rolled out the most ambitious project we’ve ever tackled. Radio Floodango, our free music streaming service, lets you listen to a continuous, randomly generated playlist of Flood tunes.

Where’s That Music Coming From?

We’re fishing in a pretty big pond here. Some 650 episodes of our weekly podcasts — about 44 hours of music, in all — have been released into the wild by the Family Flood since late 2008; these podcasts fill the pool we’re trawling with this new service.

The fishing is good in this stream and fortunately easy too. It takes just a click of a button.

Push Play to Play

Click here to reach the Radio Floodango screen, and then click the "Play" button in the picture of the old radio at the top of the page.

With this, your computer picks a random number (something between 1 and about 650) and sends it to the feature, which uses that number to fish a tune from the digital depths, something the band played any time over the past 14 years or so.

A text block in the upper left corner tells you approximately when the current selection was recorded (such as "Spring 2017"). For most of the selections, the audio starts with a few words from Charlie Bowen, who offers a brief introduction, perhaps the song’s history or maybe the circumstances under which it was recorded.

After the tune finishes, the player automatically makes another random selection. Or if you don’t want to wait that long, you can use the button to the right of Play to skip to another tune.

Have It Your Way

All that’s fine, but what if you want a little more focus in your Floodery? No problem. Radio Floodango gives you many options to sort and group your tunes. Scroll the main page for assorted choices, such as:

The “Hear by Year” section lets you zero in on a specific year, from recent days back to 2009, the first full year of podcasts. Click a button in this section and all the tunes you hear will be from that specified 12-month period.

“People Picker” focuses on songs featuring a specific Floodster. Channels here call up favorites by the late Joe Dobbs, Roger Samples and David Peyton, the music of Charlie Bowen, Doug Chaffin and Sam St. Clair, Michelle Hoge and Chuck Romine, Jacob Scarr, Randy Hamilton and Paul Martin, Vanessa Coffman and Danny Cox. There’s even a button for "Guest Artists" if you want to listen to folks who have jammed with us over the years.

If you'd rather listen to some of the band's studio-recorded commercial albums, check out the "Spin the Discs" panel. Seven albums, recorded from 2001 forward, can be put on the turntable.

Want to rein in The Flood’s famously eclectic repertoire and concentrate only on tunes of a particular style or mood?

Look at the "Genres" panel midway down the main page, where you can choose folk, blues, swing/jazzy, ballads, hokum/jug band or instrumentals.

Our Newest Feature

We’re always adding to Floodango. A favorite new option is “Special Blends” with its playlists devoted to specific seasons, people or themes.

To date, we have released blends for Christmas, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day and West Virginia Day, for Bob Dylan’s birthday and John Prine’s memorial, Gospel Hour, The Great American Songbook and The Road Trip Mix.

Now, About That Name…

“Radio Floodango” actually is a kind of an inside joke around here. (And yeah, well, pretty deeply buried inside, come to think of it.) Anyway, as reported earlier, David, Roger and Charlie used to regularly go to the June folk festival in Glenville, WV, back in the '70s and '80s.

Often when we did, an old man who lived around there would come up and ask Roger, "Do you play that 'Spanish Fandango'?"

That tickled us -- in fact, we even started being on the lookout for the old gent when we arrived each year -- and his line became a kind of a standing joke for us. Whenever we couldn't think of what to play next, somebody would say, "Aw, just do that 'Spanish Fandango'!"

Fandango/Floodango…. close enough.

Postscriprt

A few weeks after its 2021 launch, Radio Floodango was featured by writer/editor Lee Ward in an article in the Ashland, Ky., newspaper, The Ashland Independent. Lee, who is the newspaper’s Lifestyles editor, also used the opportunity to take a look back at The Flood’s long story, starting with Peyton and Bowen’s first jam session at a New Year’s party in 1973. Here’s a link to Lee’s story.