A half dozen years after his death at beginning of the horrid Covid pandemic, songwriter John Prine is still very much on the minds of the folks in The Flood band room.
In fact, every spring since the sad April 2020 day of his passing, John’s wonderful songs start popping up among the tunes that fill the weekly rehearsals, like this one, one of our favorites, which Prine wrote a few decades back.
As reported earlier, “One Red Rose” is a song that an old band mate, the late Roger Samples, got enamored of as soon as he heard it on John’s then-new 1980 Storm Windows album.
How the Song Got Floodified
The Eighties were a time of change for us. Rog was ending his time with The Flood, the band he helped form nearly a decade earlier. That’s because he and his new wife, Tammy, and their young family were moving from their native West Virginia to the green hills of Mount Sterling, Ky., a hundred miles to the west.
But before he and the brood hit the trail, Rog taught the rest of the guys the tune and played it for the folks gathered for the last of the Bowen Bashes in September 1981, as heard in the video below:
Back then, The Flood never worked out a full arrangement of the song, and honestly the rest of us soon forgot it. Or we thought we did. But then a few years ago, Charlie Bowen woke up from a sound sleep grinning at a dream he had just had in which he thought he heard Roger singing that old song again.
Here’s brief audio of Charlie relating that very story at a gig a while back:
Nowadays we do “One Red Rose” as a little three-minute reunion, both with Roger and with John.
More Prine Music?
Meanwhile, want to hear more Flood renditions of John Prine songs? Gotcha covered. Not long ago, we released a special John Prine Memorial Show. Click the image below to check it out.
