Gee, Baby, Weren't They Good to Us?

As we start thinking about what The Flood should play for its set at the latest Diamond Teeth Mary blues festival here in Huntington later this month, one song seems like a natural. “Gee,Baby, Ain’t I Good to You?” is a near-century-old tune that touched the lives of two great West Virginia jazzmen a dozen years apart. Big band composer Don Redmond, who hailed from the eastern part of the Mountain State, wrote the song in 1929. Then in 1941, the phenomenal saxophonist Chu Berry from Wheeling recorded it in his very last studio session. Here’s The Flood’s latest take on the Redmond-Berry classic from last week’s rehearsal.About the SongAs reported here earlier, the mid-1920s had been good to Don Redman. Just barely out of his teens, he was already responsible for integrating the rhythmic approach of Louis Armstrong’s playing into the work of Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra. In 1927 Redman was wooed away from Henderson to join McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, the house band at the celebrated Greystone Ballroom in Detroit.“Gee, Baby, Ain’t I Good to You?” was the first song that Don wrote for the Cotton Pickers. After its 1929 release, though, the tune went into cold storage.More than a decade passed before the next major jazz artist recorded the song, and, as we say, it turned out to be yet another West Virginian.Wheeling’s proud native son, tenor saxophonist Chu Berry, recorded the song in 1941 on the flip side of his rendition of “Sunny Side of the Street.” (Sadly, it would be Berry’s last recording; an automobile accident in northern Ohio later that year ended his life at just 33.)Two years later, Don’s song finally made The Big Time when Nat King Cole turned “Gee, Baby, Ain’t I Good To You?” into a national hit, topping the 1943 R&B charts. Around the same time, Count Basie also adopted the song as a favorite, using it to showcase his band’s various vocalists, including legends like Jimmy Rushing and Joe Williams.For more about the song, as well as about Redmond and Berry, see our earlier Flood Watch article by clicking here.Mark Your CalendarThe Flood will be at the Diamond Teeth Mary Medicine Show on Saturday, Aug. 22, at Heritage Station, 210 11th Street, in beautiful downtown Huntington. The guys are honored to open the festivities with a set at 6 p.m. And we’re pleased that our old friend Jim Rumbaugh has agreed to sit in with us on bass, subbing for Randy Hamilton, who can’t make the gig.And hey, we’re open to suggestions if you’d like to help up figure out our set list for the show. To get you in the mood, you can swing by the free Radio Floodango music streaming service and turn on the band’s Blues Channel for a randomized playlist of the band’s bluesier bits over the years.Oh, and remember we’ve now got ways to mobilize the ol’ Floodanago.Click here to find out how to put the Flood radio on your computer desktop and on an iPhone to make your Flood fix always just a click away. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com