Sallie Sublette Makes Memories
#448 / Flood Time Capsule: 2012
Sallie Sublette has been in The Flood’s extended family since the very beginning.
She met Joe Dobbs, for instance, just a year after Dave Peyton and Charlie Bowen started jamming with the fiddler in the spring of 1975. Becoming dear friends for the rest of Joe’s life, Sallie and he often traveled and performed together.
Sallie also was a regular at the Bowen Bash music parties where The Flood was born in the mid-1970s, often singing duets with Floodster Emeritus Bill Hoke.
For a sample of those duet days, check out the first episode of the Bowen Bash legacy films:
In the above video, press the Play button, then move the slider forward to 41:05 to hear Sallie and Bill singing Kitty Wells’ 1955 chart-topper, “Making Believe.”
In the early 1980s, Sallie, a professional social worker, relocated to Pocatello, Idaho, where in 2002 she and three friends formed an old-time string band called Wild Coyotes. Over the past two decades, the group has recorded three albums.
Some of the tracks on those lovely discs featured tunes that Sallie first heard at bash gatherings.
Melodic Blast from the Past
Sallie doesn't get back this way very often. It's all day in airports — it takes three flights to get to her native West Virginia from her Idaho home — but 13 years ago this week, Sallie rolled into the band room to jam with her old Flood buddies.
And — as shown above in Pamela Bowen’s video from that chilly February night — she immediately launched into a song that she and The Flood elders had learned the bashes.
“Tell It to Me (Cocaine)” — which Sallie and the Coyotes featured on their 2009 Coyote Tracks album — first entered the Floodisphere through the singing of H. David Holbrook and The Kentucky Foothill Ramblers.
If you’d like to hear the Holbrook gang as they played the song 50 years ago, check out the September 1975 episode of the Bash legacy films below:
The KFR rendition of “Tell It to Me” is the last song in the film. To go directly to it, click the Play button, then move the slider to 1:03:20.
The Song’s Pedigree
David Holbrook learned the song from a1928 recording by an old string band called The Tenneva Ramblers (for its origins near the Virginia/Tennessee border).
The group, formed in 1924 by brothers Jack and Claude Grant and fiddle player Jack Pierce, met and joined up with Jimmie Rodgers in 1927 and for a time renamed themselves The Jimmie Rodgers Entertainers. The group performed together on the radio station WWNC in Asheville, NC, debuting on May 30, 1927.
A year later, without Rodgers, the guys recorded ‘Tell It to Me” for Columbia Records at a session in Johnson City, Tenn., though for this session, Columbia listed the performers as “The Grant Brothers and Their Music.”
The Great Depression put an end to their recording career, but the brothers continued to play music throughout the 1930s. Pierce left along the way and joined a band known as the Oklahoma Cowboys with whom he played on radio and recorded. After a brief reunion with Pierce in the late 1940s, the Grant Brothers appears to have stopped performing.
“Tell It to Me” has been recorded by numerous folk revival artists, including David Grisman and the New York City Ramblers and his collaboration with Jerry Garcia and The Grateful Dead in 1970s.
A half dozen years before Sallie’s pressing of the tune with her Wild Coyotes came the song’s 2003 live recording by Old Crow Medicine Show.
Back in the Flood Room
Meanwhile, back to that February 2012 evening at the Bowen House, as Pamela’s video shows, several good friends were sitting in with The Flood that night, including Mark Cabell on harmonica and Chris Sutton on guitar.
Most of the Flood regulars also were there — Joe on fiddle, Dave on Autoharp, Charlie on guitar, Doug Chaffin on mandolin and Randy Hamilton on bass. And it also is good to see the smiling faces of Norman and Shirley Davis in the background.
A Little More from Sallie
Flood followers enjoyed more of Sallie Sublette’s music through that week’s edition of the podcast. Click the button to hear two more Sallie tunes, “I Want to be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart” and “The Great Divide”:
More from 2012?
If this little excursion has you hankering for more from that time slot 13 years ago, remember the free Radio Floodango music streaming service has channels for specific years of Floodishness.
In the “Hear by Year” column, just click the 2012 button to revv up the time machine.