"What's That Tastes Like Gravy?"
#599 / Flood Time Capsule: 2000
When The Flood played its first “jug band breakfast” at the Coon-Sanders Nightkawks Fans Reunion Bash more than a quarter of a century ago this week, the guys had no idea that the morning’s featured song — which you can hear in the video below — had a local origin story.
All they knew at the time, as you’ll hear Charlie Bowen say in his introduction, was that much jug band music was about “food and dirty stuff” and that ‘What’s That Taste Like Gravy?” managed to be both.
About the Song
Charlie and fellow Flood founder Dave Peyton had learned that song — like many others in their jug bandf/hokum repertoire — from an old Tampa Red album. However, had the guys had access to today’s monster research tools like Wikipedia and YouTube (both still several years in the future at that point), they might have learned how “Gravy” had very regional roots.
The west side of Cincinnati was the stomping grounds for one of hokum’s greats, The King David’s Jug Band, which briefly recorded for Okeh Records in 1930.
Stovepipe’s Story
We’ve never found a photograph of the band’s founder and namesake, guitarist David Crockett, but the group also featured a better-documented sideman.
On the Dec. 11, 1930, date in Atlanta when the band recorded six sides for Okeh was Sam “Stovepipe” Jones. As a “one-man band” performing in speakeasies during prohibition and on the street in his native Paducah, Ky, and then throughout the South, Jones played guitar, harmonica and a variety of novelty instruments, some of which he invented himself.
Nine years ago when the King David band was inducted into Louisville’s Jug Band Hall of Fame, Jones got more ink than Crockett. “Perhaps the most impressive thing about the one recording session from King David’s Jug Band,” said the hall of fame’s statement, “is the virtuoso stovepipe performances from the aptly named Stovepipe No. 1 (Samuel Jones).
“Jones plays the melody during every break of ‘What’s That Tastes Like Gravy?’ so accurately it sounds like a kazoo … but … he’s playing jug-style, by buzzing his lips into a metal pipe.”
Samuel Chambers Jones was born in August 1890 and “what blows my mind,” McCracken County historian Nathan Lynn told writer Mason Galemore of WKMS radio, “is this man is putting out this amazing music and there’s no mention of him anywhere in Paducah newspapers.”
Jones eventually wound up in Cincinnati’s West End, frequently playing at a local venue called the Cotton Club. He recorded in the 1920s for Gennett in Richmond, Indiana, and for Columbia in New York City, discs that are collectors’ items today.
Another Connection
His last known recordings were made at that Okeh session with Crockett in Atlanta. “There’s a lack of historical record for the end of Jones’ life,” Gladmore wrote, “and it’s still unknown when or where he died. Through the 1950s, he could still be seen performing in the Cincinnati area, playing on street corners and in bars.”
By the way, if Stovepipe’s name sounds familiar, you might be remembering the earlier Flood Watch article about the song “Tear It Down,” which Jones recorded with composer Bob Coleman for Paramount Records in 1929. When Jones moved on to Atlanta, he took the tune with him, so that “Tear It Down” also was one of the songs he and Crockett waxed that day in 1930. For more on that part of the story, see the earlier article by clicking here.
Back to Coon-Sanders
Meanwhile, if the recording featured at the beginning of this article has you curious at the venue, check out our history of “the jug band breakfasts” and the good old Coon-Sanders days by clicking here.
