At a good rehearsal — and, heck, that’s just about every rehearsal nowadays — none of us really wants it to end.
Oh, sure, we get tired — two hours of hard picking take a toll — but as Gladys Knight used to say, none of us wants to be the first to say goodbye.
In fact, as you hear at the conclusion of this week’s podcast, which features the final tune of a recent rehearsal, we often even keep extending the ending, jockeying to be the one to play the last note.
The moment is always really fun if that last tune of the night is an especially goofy one, and you can’t get much goofier than “Yas Yas Duck.”
About the Song
This late 1920s hokum song came into The Flood’s life more than 40 years ago. In fact, it had its public debut at what turned out to the last of those semiannual music parties that birthed the band, as seen in this excerpt from the “Bowen Bash Legacy Films” series:
In those days — the above audio is from September 1981 — chasing down the history of these quirky little tunes was challenging. The World Wide Wide was still more than a decade away, so to suss out songs’ back stories, we had to rely on often sketchy liner notes on rare albums and on even rarer books covering esoteric genres.
We learned our version of the song from a 1973 Yazoo Records compilation called Tampa Red, Bottleneck Guitar (1928-1937), the same record we studied so we could cop other Tampa tunes like “What’s That Taste Last Gravy?” “Black Eyed Blues” and “No Matter How She Done It.”
Mastered by Nick Peris, the LP featured liner notes by Seattle bluesman John Miller who gave us no hint of the song’s colorful evolution. For years, we just assumed that it was another of Red’s collaboration with Georgia Tom Dorsey.
Only recently were we able to use web resources to determine that the song traces back to what Wikipedia characterizes as “a ‘whorehouse tune,’ a popular St. Louis party song,” first recorded in January 1929 by a great St. Louis piano pounder named James “Stump” Johnson. It would be four months later before Tampa Red and Georgia Tom recorded their version in Chicago.
For more about “Yas Yas Duck” (and all its various alternate names), check out our earlier Flood Watch article by clicking here.
Latest Floodification of The Duck
As you’ll hear on this track, this hokum classic, whether it comes at the beginning of an evening of music or at the end, is always good for a few laughs.
As noted above, it was 1981 when The Flood first publicly played the tune. But the song was still very much in Flood Consciousness 20 years later when the band made its first studio album. Click the button below to hear the album track from 2001:
