Song for the Tree Huggers

#459/ Flood Time Capsule: 2002

Celebrating the first full day of Spring 2002, The Flood played the 13th annual Tree Huggers’ Ball, sponsored by the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, at the good old Calamity Cafe on Huntington’s 3rd Avenue across from Marshall University.

The gig also marked the guys’ first meeting with a bunch of folks who would become good friends, the members of the then-new Big Rock and the CandyAss Mountain Boys, including Herald-Dispatch writer Dave Lavender.

In those early days, the Big Rock bunch still were a bit shy about that sassy name. In fact, the June 2002 issue of the OVEC’s E Notes newsletter’s report of the ball noted, “All work and no play makes for dull tree huggers, so each year we hold our Tree Huggers Ball as a fun(d)raiser.

“Folks look forward to the great music,” the report continued, “which this year included Dave Peyton’s band, The 1937 Flood, and, as always, the mostly-husbands-of-OVEC band, with their latest unprintable name.”

We don’t know if it represents a growing boldness on their part, but we’re happy to see that BRATCAMB nowadays flies its candyass flag proudly in its publications and promotions.

The Featured Tune

Back to the March 2002 show, The Flood prepared a special environment-friendly tune for the night at Calamity, the band’s take on a 1930s novelty piece called “Never Swat a Fly.”

It was a tune that would buzz in and out of the band’s repertoire over the next few decades, finally ending up on The Flood’s Live In Concert album in 2016. Click the Play on the video below to hear it:

The Song’s History

Credits for this song include a familiar name in the Floodisphere. Tin Pan Alley composer Ray Henderson in 1925 alone wrote no fewer than three classics in the great American songbook, including “Bye Bye Blackbird,” “Has Anybody Seen My Girl?” and “I’m Sitting on Top of the World.”

Five years later, Henderson teamed up with lyricists Buddy DeSylva and Lew Brown to write music for a delightfully goofy sci-fi musical comedy film called Just Imagine.

Directed by David Butler, the movie is little known today, but film buffs praise it for its art direction and its special effects in its portrayal of New York City in an imagined 50 years in the future, that is to say 1980.

The musical highlight of the film is the performance of “Never Swat a Fly” by Marjorie White, a woefully short-lived (1904-1935) Canadian comedienne, and her wide-eyed partner, the marvelous tuxedo-ed Frank Albertson.

Shortly after the movie’s 1930 release, the tune was recorded by McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, then was forgotten until 1967 when it was revived by the great Jim Kweskin and The Jug Band.

Revisiting The Flood Album

If all this has you wanting more from that 2016 Live In Concert album, check out this earlier Flood Watch article below: