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Flood Time Capsules

Aug. 12, 2004:, Thinking of our old companion, the late Joe Dobbs, on his birthday, we're remembering one particularly bright day. Being the senior Flood founder, Joe was the first of us to reach the age 70, and we celebrated that event with a wonderful party in the backyard of Sam and Joan St. Clair, a gathering of Dobbs family and friends from a half dozen states. A highlight of a day was this visit from Marilyn Monroe (“Happy birrrrth-daaaay, Mister Fiddler….”), channeled by The Chick Singer, Michelle Lewis.

Marilyn

We saw Joe smile a year’s worth of smiles that fine day. If you want to see more of Pamela Bowen's pictures from Joe’s 70, you can dig back into the Internet’s dusty archives by clicking here.

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Aug. 17, 2011: Jacob Scarr — our youngest-ever bandmate — was fixin’ to leave the nest, heading off to Colorado for college. cdThe night before his red-eye flight to Denver, the Family Flood gathered in Bud Carroll’s Live at Trackside studio in Huntington to record all 15 tracks that would become the band’s fourth CD. “Wade the Water.” It was The Flood’s first trip to the studio in eight years. To recognize the influence young Mr. Scarr had had on The Flood, the disc even featured a novelty picture of Jacob on the cover (showing him with a strategically positioned hat as he waded the sweet waters of the Greenbrier River). The August 2011 Trackside session also provided The Flood with its first DVD, “The Making of ‘Wade in the Water,’” through the good work of Adam Harris and Michael Valentine. Here is a sample video from that magical evening.

 

For more on the CD and DVD, go here. This session marked the end of chapter in The Flood’s long story. With Jacob’s departure, Doug Chaffin moved to guitar and mandolin for extensive solo work, and Randy Hamilton came aboard to play bass and sing outstanding harmonies. Randy would play a major role in The Flood’s next CD, “Cleanup and Recovery,” just 19 months later.

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Aug. 26, 1978: The 1937 Flood was asked to host a party at The Huntington Museum of Art by its director, the extraordinary Roberta Emerson. Roberta seemed to believe Dave-1978that the culture cooked up at "The Huntington Galleries" (as it was called in those days) could go stale without a little local seasoning, so she called for homegrown string band music to freshen the mix. Because of Roberta's vision, we saw amazing things from the stage that night, such as sight of boys in tuxedos sitting next to girls in bib overalls. David Peyton kicked off that weird and wonderful evening with a solo set with his Autoharp. Then we gradually stirred in more musicians. Roger Samples and Charlie Bowen joined Dave after a few tunes, then Dennis and Joe Dobbs and Stew Schneider came in. Before the night was over, dozens of local musicians had crossed the stage -- The Kentucky Foothill Ramblers, the Samples Brothers, Front Royal -- ending with a massive sing-along reminiscent of the hootenanny days of the 1960s. And it all started with Dave and "Simple Gifts," which you can hear right here.

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Sept. 1, 2003: The Flood was invited by Paul and Lynne Mayer to come to Smokey's on the Gorge near Fayetteville, WV, and help celebrate the wedding of their daughter Debbie. The Mayers were wonderfully lenient about letting The Flood to be The Flood in selecting decidedly eclectic entertainment for the day, but the parents did have one request. "You know," Lynne said, "you will need to play 'Hava Nagila' at least once during the Dave-1978afternoon." No problem, we said confidently. Surely our fiddler, Joe Dobbs, had that old Israeli folk song in his repertoire. Uh, no. And while we didn't see Joe sweat much during the 40 years he played with us, THIS was turning out to be a rather tricky tune. In fact, he still hadn't gotten it down when at a rehearsal just days before the wedding, Sam St. Clair and Chuck Romine said, "Here. Let us take a shot at it," and they nailed it the first time. And that's how The Flood became surely the first (and perhaps only) band to do "Hava Nagila" with a harmonica and a tenor banjo leading the way, a rendition that was the hit of the afternoon. The Mayer party led to several more wedding gigs for The Flood, including several more at Smokey's, most of which featuring the happy couple joining us on the bandstand. After one such party, during which the new bride and groom happily played kazoos along with Dave Peyton on "Somebody Been Using That Thing," Sam wondered aloud, "You know, we may be doing serious damage to our karma." But what happens at Smokey's….

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Sept. 7, 2005: It was 15 days after Hurricane Katrina began devastating New Orleans, and The 1937 Flood joined other local musicians in a benefit concert at Pullman Square that would raise more than $16,000 in disaster relief. Dave Ball, a retired firefighter who played bass with The Flood at the time, Dave-1978organized the show, the first of a number of Katrina fund-raisers to be held in the Tri-State Area in the months to come. Along with The Flood, the Pullman Square show featured Backyard Dixie Jazz Stompers and Big Rock and The Candy Ass Mountain Boys, among others. Speaking with The Herald-Dispatch on the morning of the benefit, Dixielander Dale Jones said what was in the hearts and minds of many of the musicians that Wednesday; "The music that comes out of that place is in my heart,” Dale told writer Dave Lavender. “I have been playing this music for more than 20 years now and it is heartbreaking to see all of the disasters in all of the states along the Gulf. The best we can do from far away is help out. This is just a natural for us."

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Sept. 19, 2001: The Flood finished recording its first CD, mixed and engineered by the incomparable Buddy Griffin. Actually, for most of the tracks we slated for the CD, Buddy had already recorded Dave Peyton, Joe Dobbs, Charlie Bowen and Doug Chaffin the previous June. However, in the several months since that first session, The Flood had grown by a third with the addition of two new Dave-1978members, Sam St. Clair and Chuck Romine, and now we needed to get them on the CD too. "Well, just come on back," Buddy said. "Once more, with feeling -- AND banjo and harmonica!" It was a busy evening in that little Charleston studio, and it was about to get a whole lot busier before it was done. That's because after The Flood session was over and everyone was packing up for the drive home, Joe cornered Doug and Charlie and asked them to hang around because he had an idea to "record just a couple more things." Well, that "couple more" became another "couple more" and then a "couple more" after that until by midnight the trio (the little band within a band that would come to call itself "Flood Lite") recorded the dozen tracks that would be the core of Joe's own "Fiddle and the Flood" album. So, Sept. 19, 2001, was the one evening that gave birth to two CDs. "The next morning," Doug recalled with a chuckle earlier this week, "I didn't have any feeling left in the fingers, but, I swear, I'll never know how Joe even held his fiddle for five hours, much less less played it like that!" Here's a link to one of the tracks from that memorable night.

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Sept. 29, 2013: The 1937 Flood crossed the state and quietly slipped into Romney, WV, to play a part in history. Legendary statesman Ken Hechler was turning 99 that weekend, and his wife, Carol, along with Bob Nelson and Carter Taylor Seaton, Dave-1978had arranged for Ken's closest friends to come together from all around the East Coast for a surprise party at a local hotel. The Flood was booked to provide the background music, starting with Ken's favorite song. That Sunday, as Ken and Carol strolled into the room to cheering well-wishers, we greeted the Hechlers with "Don't Fence Me In." It was a memorable afternoon. And then, showing he could arrange a surprise or two of his own, Ken was back a year later with a more public birthday party -- his 100th -- this time held in Huntington at Marshall University's student center with hundreds of friends and admirers in attendance. Once again, The Flood was brought in as the house band. And sitting in with us for that show was Floodster Emeritus Chuck Romine, who goes back a long way with Ken. Chuck was a student in Professor Hechler's very first political science class at Marshall in the late 1950s.

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Oct. 3, 2002: The Flood headed into the studio to record one very special tune: An original song we wrote to be the new theme song for Joe Dobbs’ beloved weekly “Music from the Mountain” show on West Virginia Public Radio. The idea for the theme song came from Joe’s producer, the late great George Walker, who a month later also would engineer our second CD (“The 1937 Flood Plays Up a Storm”) on which this new tune would be the opening track. George thought it was a no-brainer that “Joe’s Dave-1978band oughta make up Joe’s theme song.” So David Peyton wrote the lyrics for “Music from the Mountains Sets You Free,” working with a melody that Charlie Bowen came up with. Then a few weeks later, the band rolled into the WV Public Broadcasting studios in Charleston and, in two or three takes, recorded the tune that would be heard every Friday night on radios throughout the Mountain State. The theme song was just The Flood's latest association with the radio show. Since Joe was one of the founders of the band, it’s not surprising that on a dozen times or so during the show's 23 years on the air, the band or individual Floodsters appeared as guests. In fact, The Flood actually appeared on "Music from the Mountains" before there even WAS a "Music from the Mountains." In the late summer of 1982, when Joe was just thinking about pitching WVPR on the idea of a weekly radio show, Peyton, Bowen and the late Rog Samples came together at Joe's shop, Fret 'n Fiddle, to record a demo of how Joe envisions the show, complete with interviews and live music. That was more than a year before the show hit the air on Nov. 11, 1983.

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Oct. 10, 2007: Fourteen-year-old Jacob Scarr picked with The Flood for the first time. The guys in the band already knew Jacob as the polite young man who lately had been coming to listen at the weekly jam session (usually brought by his friends Tom Pressman or Rose Marie Riter) and who more recently who had been helping out with the sound system at gigs, but until that night, none of us knew the youngster could play. That autumn Dave-1978evening, Doug Chaffin had brought both his mandolin and guitar and midway through the session, he noticed Jacob eying the guitar. "Pick it if you'd like," Doug whispered and in the next few minutes, everyone in the room was grinning as sweet, round, funky blues figures started rolling from the boy's fingers. "Damn!" Dave Peyton muttered appreciatively. "Play it again, Youngblood," Charlie said. The nickname would stick because Jacob became a regular at the weekly jams throughout the winter. Jacob played his first major gig with us the following spring when The Flood played its annual Saturday morning breakfast show at the Coon Sanders Nighthawks Reunion Bash. Here's a sample of his solos from that fun May morning. Jacob would officially join the band in early 2009 (we wanted to wait to make sure he kept his interested in playing music with people his parents' and grandparents' age) and would play with us as our youngest member until he left for college in Colorado in 2011. At 23, Jacob, now a Floodster Emeritus, is attending law school in Boulder, but he still regularly sits in with us when he's back in town.

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Oct. 18, 2000: The Flood — at the invitation of then-Mayor Jean Dean and TTA Director Vickie Shaffer — entertained folks who were gathered to hear the exciting plans for construction of the new Pullman Square on Huntington’s long-delayed “Superblock” downtown. The day had a strange start. An hour or two before we were to play, we learned that Doug Chaffin, our new bass player, would not be joining us; earlier in the day he Dave-1978had broken his wrist while working on a car in his garage, and it developed that he would be out of commission for the rest of the year. However, the rest of the old-line Floodsters — Joe, Dave and Charlie — soldiered on, playing a lively mix of fiddle tunes, folks songs and the great old swing tunes the band lately had been sampling. And it was those latter numbers that attracted the attention of a couple of especially well-tuned ears. Chuck Romine had never heard The 1937 Flood until that afternoon, and those songs — ranging from “Sunny Side of the Street” and “Up a Lazy River” to “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “My Blue Heaven” — drew him to the bandstand to chat us up during a break. Until recent years, Chuck had led his own group — The Lucky Jazz Band, a much-loved local Dixieland outfit — and lately he had begun to miss making music. He missed it so much, in fact, that two months later, Chuck, with trusty tenor banjo in hand, would show up at our door to sit in at a Flood practice. Subsequent sittings-in week after week throughout that winter ultimately would result in Chuck’s joining The Flood, playing with the band for the next six years. He'd be featured prominently on the band’s first three CDs and it all its shows. And it all started that October afternoon on 3rd Avenue.

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Oct. 23, 2004: We gathered in Ashland, Ky., to give a hearty send-off to the one of our oldest, dearest friends. Harvey McClellan and his wife Nancy were at all the parties in the 1970s when The 1937 Flood began evolving into the band it is today. Harvey and NancyHarvey, who even recommended tunes the Family Flood could tackle over the years, was especially excited when in 2000 The Flood began regularly playing at the Coon Sanders Nighthawks Reunion Bash, an annual gathering of traditional jazz fans in Huntington. While a native of Henderson, Ky., Harvey spent much of his early years in Chicago and even had family members associated with that gathering’s namesake, The Coon Sanders Original Nighthawks Orchestra. Harvey had great original stories to share from the late ’20s and ‘30s and loved The Flood's jugband tunes of that era. So it was only natural when Harvey passed away in October 2004, at the age of 89, that Nancy would ask The Flood to play the background music at the memorial service for her partner of 60 years. It was a busy weekend for us — we played in Huntington earlier in the day and in Lexington, Ky. the next day — but there was no question that we would be there for Harvey and Nancy; they had always then there for us.

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Nov. 1, 1974: The core of what would become The 1937 Flood -- David Peyton, Roger Samples and Charlie Bowen -- introduced their first real arrangement of a tune during a party at the Bowens' house in the South Side of Huntington. The guys had been jamming 1974together off and on for several years at that point. Dave and Rog had played as a duo in the late '60s and early '70s when Rog was still a Marshall University student and Dave was a young reporter at The Huntington Advertiser. Samples moved away about the same time that Charlie and Pamela moved back to Huntington in January 1971, and soon afterward Dave and Charlie picked regularly. When occasionally Roger would drift back into town and the three of them would play. It was all very casual in those earliest days -- variations on "parkin' lot pickin'," focused only on tunes they already knew -- but that summer of 1974, the three of them started acting more like a band. They practiced regularly, brought new tunes into the mix, worked on harmony vocals and begun to solidify actual arrangements that would be more or less predictable each time they played. All that energy and effort came together first in this tune from The Flood's dusty archives, the boys' version of Tom Paxton's "Wish I Had a Troubadour," from his 1969 album, "The Things I Notice Now." They rolled out this rendition at that party in autumn 1974, featuring solos by Roger and Dave and vocals by Charlie.

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Nov. 8, 2015: A contingent of The 1937 Flood played on board the Valley Gem during a pleasant autumn afternoon cruise. It was the just the latest in a long, happy affiliation the band has had with riverboats over the years. Growing up along the beautiful Ohio River (and of course, taking our name from one the Ohio's less lovely moments), we naturally head down to the riverboatsriverside every chance we get. And through the kind efforts of good friends who have worked and lived on America's rivers, we've had some memorable chances. For instance, 13 year ago, invited by our buddy Jazzou Jones we started playing regularly aboard the legendary Delta Queen steamboat whenever she sailed anywhere near us. We played on the decks, in the forward cabin, in the Texas Lounge. And most memorably, in September 2005 our dear friend Phyllis Dale invited us to play the evening show in the steamer's beautiful Orleans Room during the boat's visit to Ashland, Ky., as part of Phyllis' extraordinary heritage cruise of the Ohio and Kanawha rivers. And while the DQ was always our sentimental favorite riverboat, we also came down to the Ohio to serenade other visiting river royalty, like the Mississippi Queen and the American Queen and to entertain passengers boarding the BB Riverboats, like the lovely Cincinnati Belle. The river will always be in our blood.

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Nov. 16, 2002: On a chilly, rainy Saturday, we gathered in a Charleston studio with producer George Walker to record the band's second CD, a disc that would be released a few months later as “The 1937 Flood Plays Up a Storm.” It was a long day. The guys recorded 23 tunes in eight hours of staring at each other over microphones. We started early. Everyone -- Dave, recordingCharlie, Joe, Doug, Chuck and Sam -- reached the studio by noon, but the setup took a while. It was complicated to set up mikes and cables for a six-piece band and then do the sound check, so it was 2 in the afternoon before we were ready to record. George used digital tape for the session, so the band would record five or six tunes in a 45-minute stretch, filling up one of the tape. Then we had to take a break while George formatted the next tape, a process that took about 20 to 30 minutes. That gave us time to order some pizzas for dinner and then launched into it again. Now, it is always fun when The Family Flood comes together and that night everybody did his best stuff, but by anybody’s definition, it was grueling day. In fact, some of the guys probably would have voted to end the session at 6 (when we had about 18 cuts in the can), but the majority decided to stay on for another two hours. And as it turned out everyone was glad we did. The final tunes we recorded -- despite our being tired and, yes, a bit grumpy -- were the best of the whole bundle, including this one, with the best solos of the day.

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Nov. 19, 1977: The Flood had a jam session that made headlines, first in Huntington, then around the state and ultimately across the nation. It all started that afternoon when Bowen, who was then city editor of The Huntington Advertiser, spotted U.S. Sen. Robert C. Byrd at a United Press International Byrdmeeting. Sidling up, Charlie asked the senator what key he fiddled "Soldier's Joy" in. "Why, D, of course," Byrd said. "Great," said Charlie. "Wanna play some music?" Byrd grinned. "Got an extra fiddle?" It all sounded very casual. Actually, though, Bowen and Peyton had been plotting this maneuver for more than a week, ever since they had learned that Bob Byrd was coming to town. Now, just about everyone in West Virginia knew that Robert C. Byrd was a fine fiddler, that he had played most of his life, starting out in square dance bands as a teenager as he grew up in Raleigh County. But few people on the national level had a clue about Byrd's fiddling past, mainly because the senator had no time for music once he had become the U.S. Senate majority leader. But now the nation would know what we West Virginians knew. On that day in 1977, as soon as the senator showed interest in jamming a bit, Dave and Charlie went to work. They called their Flood co-conspirator Joe Dobbs to come quickly to the Huntington newspaper office lunchroom and to bring along an extra fiddle and to pick up our buddy David Holbrook, who hands-down was the finest banjo picker we knew. Shortly before 4 that afternoon, the foursome was playing "Flowers of Edinburgh" when the senator and his assistants arrived, followed by dozens of newspaper employees who wanted to hear this. Byrd happily took the fiddle Joe handed it, said, "Get in A, boys," then launched into a tune called "Red Bird." That was followed by a half dozen more tunes, from "Old Joe Clark" and "Cumberland Gap" to "Amazing Grace" and "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." After 45 minutes or so, Byrd said, "I have to go, boys. I really enjoyed it. I'd like to play some more some time." But, like any good musician, he couldn't leave the listeners wanting more. The crowd went crazy with his rollicking "Cripple Creek" encore. Joe Dobbs grinned as his watched and listened. "I wish my grandma could be here now," Joe said. "She didn't think any fiddle player was worth a damn!" In the years come, The Flood never knew what, if any, role that afternoon's jam session played in Byrd's decision the following year to come out with his debut album, "U.S. Senator Robert Byrd, Mountain Fiddler." After the LP's release, Byrd went on to perform at the Kennedy Center, on the Grand Ole Opry and on TV's "Hee Haw." And he continued to play publicly until 1982, when symptoms of a benign essential tremor began to affect the use of his hands. Sen. Byrd died in June 2010, and music was still a huge part of his legacy. Our friend Bobby Taylor, a West Virginia fiddle champion, played the senator's favorite tunes during a public visitation in the W.Va. capitol rotunda.

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Nov. 21, 1999: The Flood played its first show at Tamarack near Beckley, WV. The famed arts/crafts tourist destination — an economic development project of the West Virginia Parkways Authority selling homegrown craft products, as well as specialty food items, fine art and books and recordings — was only three years old at the time. Joe, representing the interests of musicians around the Mountain State, had been active in helping get the venue started, and he had no trouble persuading his cohorts Dave and Charlie to join him for one of Tamarack’s first free Sunday afternoon concerts. Many of the tunes the three played that day — “Rocking Chair,” “Fair and Tender Ladies,” “Sweet Georgia Brown,” “Furniture Man,” Sally Garden,” Jug Band Music” — would appear on the band’s first CD two years later, by which time the trio had expanded to a sextet.

tamarack

Meanwhile, this picture, one of our favorites, verifies that the gig featured one of the rare occasions when Joe not only switched from fiddle to mandolin but also sang. (We think the tune we were doing when this shot was snapped was Hazel Dickens’ “West Virginia, My Home,” a song for which Joe had found a high harmony he particularly liked to sing.) The Flood has played Tamarack many times since that November 1999 show; it remains one of our all-time favorite venues.

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Nov. 29, 2002: The Flood gathered in the lobby of the beautiful old Frederick Hotel in downtown Huntington to help out with a very special cause: An art auction to benefit Sam St. Clair’s dear friend, sculptor Sinesia Lenac. Sinesia was from Rejika, Croatia, the coastal city on the blue Dalmatian coast, Sinesiawhere he went to school to study engineering and ship design. When war came to Croatia, Sinesia volunteered for active duty, during which he was injured. At the end of the war, he headed out for New York City where he scrapped it out as an electrician's helper for a few months. But more than anything, Sinesia wanted to become an artist. Things were set in motion when he met a professor from West Virginia professor who told him about Marshall University, where he could earn an art degree. Soon after that, Sinesia packed up and left New York for Huntington. It wasn’t easy at first. He struggled, sleeping on couches, spending his days vigilantly working on his art. Finally, his efforts started paying off. He got a partial scholarship, then a full ride. When he finished at Marshall, he got a slot as a graduate assistant in the art department at Miami University near Cincinnati, with a good year of teaching and working on art. But just when things were turning around, Sinesia was diagnosed with a rare sarcoma. By late 2002, his health had crashed and bills were mounting. That's when his friends organized the benefit auction. For that night, Sam brought in his fellow Floodsters to entertain the crowd that came to the Frederick. The Flood donated time and the proceeds from the evening's CD sales to help off-set the medical expenses. The night's efforts raised nearly $5,000, which help ease at least some of Sinesia’s worries for the last weeks of his life. The artist died a month later, New Year’s Day 2003. He was 31.

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Dec. 1, 2007: Kathy Castner sang with the band for the first time. The Christmas season usually brings Kathy to Huntington to visit her cousin, Charlie, and that year, Flood Fan Extraordinaire rose Marie Riter said, "We gotta celebrate with a party." Now, when Miz Rose wants something to happen, it Kathy-Roseusually does, and she made this night memorable. While Kathy has a beautiful voice, inherited from her mom, she was always a bit shy about performing in public, but encouraged by the band (and perhaps fortified with an eggnog or two; we can't remember, and wouldn't tell if we did), she stepped up and brought the house down with her spot-on vocals. A bit later, urged especially by her super-fan, fiddler Joe Dobbs, Kathy sat in with The Flood at a rehearsal. Here’s a tune recorded that evening by Bo Sweeney and featuring Joe, Doug, Bub and Charlie as the supporting cast.

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Dec. 21, 2008: We started our weekly "Jam Log, Freebies from The Flood" podcast. The idea began with Sam St. Clair. Earlier that year, Sam noted that the price of good digital recorders had come down dramatically, and he thought we should buy one and have it running during the weekly rehearsals, just … you know … in case somebody might commit jamsome art. To launch the podcast, we combed recordings of the previous few months and just picked a tune that grabbed us. For instance, for this first episode, released a chilly December day in 2008, we chose a typical recording from a warmer June evening, a track from near the end of the night when the rehearsal had morphed into a jam session. On the track, you'll hear Doug and Charlie start picking a blues and and Mickey Dee and Bub hopping in. Before it was over, Joe has joined, then we hand it off to Jacob. And somewhere along the line, we determine that we must be playing is “St. Louis Blues.” The weekly Flood podcast lives on today -- we now done more than 300 of them, a new one released for free almost every Wednesday morning -- and you can hear the latest ones on our web site, right here and you can subscribe to the podcast here. :

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Dec. 24, 2005: We threw a surprise Christmas Eve party -- complete with Floodsters in Santa hats -- for the band's Mother Superior, Nancy McClellan. Some background: After Harvey, Nancy's husband of 60 years, passed away in 2004, Nancy began spending Christmas Eve and Christmas morning with NancyCharlie and Pamela Bowen. Over the next decade, the tradition evolved into what we called "Nancymas," and before Nancy died in 2013, Rose Riter was welcomed into the annual festivities. That year, Christmas Eve 2005, was the First Nancymas. We had all known that Nancy was sad heading into that holiday season -- it had been her first full year without Harvey -- and it was Joe who suggested The Flood do something special for her. So, that Saturday evening, Nancy arrived at the Bowens' house about 6 for what she fully expected would be just a quiet dinner. And it was. But then about 7:30, the musicians began arriving. And along with the band came friends from the neighborhood and from as far away as California and Texas. All told about a dozen folks gathered around the table, playing music, talking and joking, eating and telling stories for hours. Later, around midnight after everyone had gone home and Nancy was heading upstairs to bed, she stopped on the landing, grinned and said, "Best Christmas present I could possibly have!"

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Dec. 31, 1999: The Flood jammed with Doug Chaffin for the first at a New Year's Eve party in Ashland, Ky. Now, Dave, Joe and Charlie had been looking to add a bass for a while. Joe, who always said "if you don't have a bass, you don't have a band," doug-basswas nonetheless skeptical about our prospects. "We're not going to find a bassman who wants to play the weird stuff we're doing these days," he said, referring to the band's eclectic mix of folk, blues and swing. And so far he had been correct. (Oh, during the late summer, Joe had brought around one bass player to the practice. "Don't scare him away," Joe said. "He's a preacher." The only session we had with the fellow went well enough initially, but when we morphed into some of the rowdier jug band tunes, we could tell by his expression that he wouldn't be back. Joe just grinned and shook his head, and we never saw that guy again.) So, by the end of the year, as the three of us headed to Nancy McClellan's 1999 year-end bash, we pretty much figured we'd have to remain bass-less. But at the party, we just kicked into some of of the swing tunes we'd lately been playing ("Sunny Side of the Street," "Ain't Misbehavin'," "Star Dust") and suddenly Doug picked up his bass and jumped in. For years, we had been hearing Doug play behind fiddlers like J.P. Fraley, but we had no idea he was interested in swing stuff too. Listening as Doug's sweet bass lines just cleaned up all the ragged edges of what we were playing that night, Joe winked and nodded. Then, during a break, Charlie sidled up to where Doug was sitting on the couch by his wife Donna. But now, Charlie had transformed into a frat boy and Doug was suddenly the prettiest girl in the room. "So, we usually play on Wednesdays. You wanna pick with us?" Charlie said. "Or, are Wednesday not good? We could change it. What night would be good for you?" Watching this little episode unfold, Joe edged closer and whispered, "Watch it, Charlie -- you're going to scare him away too." Fortunately, Doug doesn't scare easy. Starting in January 2000, he become a regular, and Doug Chaffin now is our most veteran Floodster after band founders Dave and Charlie. Over the past 17 years, Doug has played bass, guitar, mandolin and fiddle with The Flood, and is still going strong.Here's a classic Doug Chaffin bass solo from a live June 2002 performance in Morehead, Ky. Check out the band's reaction when Doug kicks into gear, then hear how he continues to drive the tune under Dave's crazy kazoo work that immediately follows the bass solo. Too cool.

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Jan. 1, 1972: Peyton and Bowen picked together for the first time. Dave and Charlie had known each other for a while. Five years earlier, they had met at folk music parties that Pamela Dave and Charliestarted hosting at her parents' house in Ashland, Ky., but in those days Dave had yet to really get started with the Autoharp. The following year, when Charlie left for school in Lexington, Dave met Roger Samples, who was an incoming student at Marshall University, and the two of them started working up tunes together. Several years later, when Charlie and Pamela -- who had married by then -- moved back to the area from Lexington to work at the same newspapers where Dave worked, Rog had moved away, and Dave was looking someone to regularly jam with. Dave and Susie invited the Bowens to a New Year's Eve party at their house on Mount Union Road and in the wee hours of Jan. 1, 1972, Charlie and Dave found a guitar-Autoharp groove that made them grin. (Within the next couple of months, the two were even invited to be pickin' and grinnin' at the front door of the Huntington Publishing Co. when then new publisher, Buddy Hayden, arrived in town.) No recordings were made of those initial jam sessions, but there's little doubt that one of the first tunes they played together in the early hours of New Year's day was the Carter Family's "Cannonball Blues." Here's Dave and Charlie's version of the song as it sounded a year later as they prepared for their first real gig, a gathering of retired railroad men meeting at the Hotel Frederick in downtown Huntington.

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Jan. 11, 2006: The Flood gathered to record a few tunes in "The Bunker," which is what Joe Dobbs called the new studio he had just opened in his Fret 'n Fiddle music store in St. Albans, WV. At the time, we thought this might lay the groundwork for a new Flood album, a followup to CD #3, "I'd Rather Be Flooded, which we recorded a few years earlier. It didn't work out that way -- The Flood was still in a bit of a transition at the time -- but it was, nonetheless, a memorable night, due in no small part to the fact that Cincinnati fiddler/photograph Ed Strelau came along for the ride and took these great pictures.

fret

We also got a few good tracks from the session, including this one, which ultimately found its way to The Flood self-produced bootleg album, "Hip Boots."

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Jan. 18, 2012: Randy Hamilton joined The Flood as its new bass player. We'd had known Randy for a good long while before he joined the Family RandyFlood. In fact, Randy and his previous band, Sheldon Road, started occasionally jamming with The Flood six years before that, and Floodsters were often in the audience whenever that wonderful trio played. (A few years later, another third of that awesome threesome -- the incomparable Paul Martin -- became the newest Flood member, joining us two years ago. Meanwhile, Paul and Randy's old bandmate, Ken Adams, has reorganized and expanded Sheldon Road. You can catch this excellent country/classic rock band at gigs throughout the Tri-State Area.) Randy, in joining The Flood, brought us not only a rock solid bass line -- "the heartbeat of the band," Joe liked to call him -- but also stellar vocals, including spot-on harmonies and great leads. In fact, a highlight of our new CD, "Live, In Concert" features Randy's gorgeous rendition of "Wayfarin' Stranger." Here's a sample from the new album, a CD that, by the way, Paul Martin masterfully mixed and edited.

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Jan. 27, 1996: At party in Ironton, Ohio, hosted by the late Cathie and Bob Toothman, fiddlin' Joe Dobbs hooked up again with Bowen and Peyton, leading to a major reawakening of The 1937 Flood in the months that followed. And it all happened because of Joe's chance meeting with another former Floodster, ToothmansBill Hoke, who was on his way to the same great party. Of course, Joe had been on hand 20 years earlier when Dave, Charlie and Roger Samples started the band in the early 1970s, and he had played with The Flood all along, as did Bill for part of that time. But by the mid-1980s, band members started drifting off in different directions. Joe moved his Fret 'n Fiddle music store from Huntington to St. Albans; Rog left West Virginia, moving with Tammy and the kids to Mount Sterling, Ky.; Dave and Charlie put music on hold as they got busy writing computer books together for Bantam Books; Bill got married and moved to Abingdon, Va. So for about a decade, The Flood was more of a fond memory than a reality, a sometimes-kind-of jam session thing. But then on Jan. 27, 1996, Bill was passing through and stopped at Joe's shop to visit and to check out instruments, and while there he said, "Hey, you ARE going to the Toothmans' party tonight, aren't you?" Honestly, Joe hadn't planned to -- he still didn't feel tip-top because of his car wreck the previous summer in which he had badly hurt his shoulder -- but, he told us later, "Bill Hoke kind of shamed me into it. I mean, I figured if he could come all the way from Virginia for a party, I sure as hell ought to go too." And we were all glad he did. After jamming a bit at the Toothmans' do with Charlie and Dave on some of the old tunes they'd played a decade earlier, Joe was eager for more, and by the following spring, the three of them had resumed weekly sessions at the Bowens' house. Joe then would play with the band for the rest of his life.

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Jan. 31, 2001: Chuck Romine brought his well-tempered tenor banjo to jam for the first time with The Flood. We had known Chuck for a long time; not only was he one of Cabell County's representatives in the state legislature, but he also had famously fronted a beloved local Dixieland ensemble, The Lucky Jazz Band, in the 1960s and '70s. Until his Flood chuckexposure that night, however, Chuck had never played with an acoustic string band -- he was used to making that banjo roar along with all that brass -- but it turned out Chuck also could turn it down and play a light precise style that clicked right away with The Flood’s swing/jugband/folk/country repertoire. Jan. 31, 2001, was funny evening, though. It got off to a rocky start. Joe hadn't been practicing much the previous couple of weeks -- he mainly had been crawling around dealing with frozen water pipes at his house -- and even when David arrived and jump in with his Autoharp and kazoo, the session was still limping along. However, when Doug showed up with the bass and then Chuck arrived with the party-in-a-box that was his banjo, the night instantly went from rocky to rockin' and it stayed hot for the next two solid hours, generating smiles all around. Throughout that winter, Chuck continued jamming with us and by spring we were asking him to joined as a full-fledged Floodster. "Doctor Jazz," as we still call him when he returns to sit in with us from time to time, became a solid presence in the band for the next six years. One of the first tunes Chuck played with us that first chilly winter's night was "Bill Bailey," which also made its way onto The Flood's first studio CD that fall.

Here's a taste of Chuck's signature tune

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Feb. 12, 2016: The Flood learned of the death of one of the band's founders, the innovative, talented Roger Samples who remained a dear friend long after he was no longer bandmate. Actually, even years before The Flood even born in the early 1970s, Rog and David Peyton already were playing music together. In fact, before Charlie and Pamela Bowen were married in 1969, Pamela had been one of the young folksingers performing on the same stage at Marshall University with Rog and David, and when the Bowens moved back to Huntington from Lexington, Ky., in 1971, one of the first performances they caught at the Marshall coffeehouse was one of Rog's memorable solo sets. The intersection of two Peyton orbits -- music with Rog on one hand and the Bowens working at the same newspapers at Dave and Susie Peyton on the other -- the creation of a band was nearly predestined. By the spring of 1973, Rog, Dave and Charlie were jamming regularly at the Peytons' place, and when Joe Dobbs appeared on the scene a few years later, it was Roger who roped the fiddler in, hooking him with that rich Samples repertoire of folk songs, Beatles tunes and dazzling guitar work. In The Flood's first decade, it was also Roger -- and by extension his remarkable brothers Mack and Ted -- who showed us each next step, from John Prine and Steve Goodman to a selections of crazy, wonderful 1920s and '30s jug band tunes. Roger was a regular in the band until the early 1980s, when economic conditions propelled Roger and Tammy to move the family away from West Virginia. The Samples would settled in Mount Sterling, Ky., where they remained for the rest of Roger's life. But even then, Rog came back to be with us whenever he could. Here's the video tribute that Roger's Flood family made for him this time last year. We think of you every day, brother.He

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Feb. 18, 2009: Anchorman Tim Irr of Huntington's WSAZ-TV dropped by one of the Flood's weekly rehearsals and produced a feature story that beautifully captured the fun and foolishness of such evenings at the Bowen Bower. Charlie and Pamela had invited Tim -- who lives nearby with his family in the South Side -- to simply come by and listen to the music some night on his tim irrdinner break between his 6 and 11 p.m. newscasts. They never meant to suggest that he should come and work, but work he did! He filmed for more than hour, catching a number of tunes and interviewing members of the band and the audience.We were fortunate that there just happened to be a particularly good turnout that evening. Susie and Ervin Jones were on hand, as were Rose Riter and her friends, Shirley and Norman Davis. From Ashland, Nancy McClellan and Zoe Brewer drove in as well as Donna Chaffin, Doug's wife. And Mike Smith was sitting in with Joe on fiddle. In his report, Tim interviewed Charlie, Dave and Jacob from the band, as well as Rose and jam session first-timers, Shirley and Norman. Here's the broadcast: 

 

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---Feb. 22, 2006: We began searching through The Flood's archives for material that would eventually come together as the band's first and only bootleg album. Everybody's mother always said (usually with a pretty heavy sigh), if you want something Done Right, do it yourself. Well, in our case, the real truth is that after decades of making music, we just got tired of waiting for Hip Bootssomeone else to produce The 1937 Flood bootleg album, and (with a pretty heavy sigh) we decided that if it was going to happen, it looked like that we would have to make it so. The result was "Hip Boots: The Flooded Basement Tapes," a collection of nearly two dozen cuts from various drop-in points during the first three decades of the band's foggy history. In the finest tradition of bootlegs, the recording quality on this disc isn't always the greatest. These field recordings were made on the fly at coffeehouses and parties, clubs and concerts and in people's living rooms, using whatever equipment was available, from cheap cassette recorders to reel-to-reel machines that were pretty nice for the day to (later still) digital recorders of all stripes. Setting aside the sometimes suckiness of the recording quality, the tracks do capture the spirit and madness that brought The 1937 Flood into being in the first place and has kept it together today. The disc continues to be popular with diehard Flood fans and, in fact, these days we're offering it a freebie to anyone who orders our new "Live, In Concert" album. (Read about that at www.1937flood.com.) Meanwhile, here's a track from the Hip Boots, one of the earlier Flood recordings in existence. It features Roger Samples and Dave Peyton doing The Eagles' "Peaceful Easy Feeling," with Bill Hoke adding some tasty dobro licks!

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March 6, 2002: The Flood partied in Charleston with Gov. Bob Wise and his friends and foes in the West Virginia Legislature and the state capital press corps. It was David Peyton who landed us the gig as part of “The Third House,” a popular annual spoof of the lawmakers orchestrated by Marshall University's W. Page Pitt School of Journalism and Mass Communication Alumni Association. The evening of parody skits and songs, presented at the Cultural Center Theater, roasted state government leaders, most of whom were in the audience. The Flood not only provided accompaniment for some of the musical numbers, but also preformed a half-hour pre-show set. In a highlight of the night, as shown here, Gov. Wise — a clog-dance enthusiast — hoofed it during one of Joe’s rollicking fiddle tunes. The Flood had such a good time that the band came back for an encore in the 2003 show, when Wise supporters presented him with a pair of "clogging shoes" to commemorate his Flood debut.

wise

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March 14, 2009: Jacob Scarr became an official member of The Flood. The young guitar whiz already had been picking with us for a year and a half, but since he was just 14 years old (!) when he started, we fully expected he would get bored with us at any time. After all, we told each other, for Jacob it had to be like jamming with his grandparents. Weren't these kids of the new millennium supposed to have infamously short attention spans? Jacob-2009Well, not Jacob. So when he reached his 16th birthday and still was a regular at the weekly jam sessions, we decided to make it official and invite Jacob -- whom we by now had dubbed "Youngblood" -- to become the band's youngest member ever. It was one of the best decisions we ever made. Jacob played lead guitar with The Flood right up until a recording session on the night before he left for college in Colorado in August 2011. The actual decision to ask Jacob to join us came while The Flood was playing a birthday do for long-time Flood fan and photographer Larry Kendall (who incidentally took the accompany picture of Jacob circa 2009). Meanwhile, here's a Jacob Scarr solo from The Flood rehearsal the week he officially became a Floodster.

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March 17, 2011: The Flood celebrated St. Patrick’s Day at the city’s first “Party on the Patio” event of the year at the gazebo at Heritage Station downtown. Here’s a video of the band’s show that afternoon, with Joe Dobbs tearing it up with his "Miss McLeod's Reel" for the dancers on the patio below the bandstand.

 

That March 17, 2011, show was part of the band’s long-time relationship with that particular downtown Huntington venue. In fact, 35 years earlier, The Flood’s Joe Dobbs, Charlie Bowen and Bill Hoke played at the dedication of gazebo when Heritage Station — the converted B&O railway depot — opened for business. Joe later moved his Fret ’n Fiddle music store from West 14th Street to Heritage Station, where it stayed until the move to its current location in St. Albans, WV, in the mid-1980s. More recently, The Flood has been happy to return to Heritage Station often. In fact, the photo on the cover of our latest CD, "Live, In Concert," was taken in the beautiful lobby of old depot.

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March 27, 2013: The Flood walked right into Bud Carroll’s Live at Trackside Studios to begin recording the band’s fifth cleanupcommercial CD, the album that would be released as “Cleanup & Recovery.” The CD would the first for then-new bassist/vocalist Randy Hamilton. And it also would be the first on which Doug Chaffin, who played bass on the first four Flood CDs, moved to guitar and mandolin. Randy and Doug also helped Bud with the mixing of the new album. And the disc, sadly, would be Joe Dobb’s last album; our co-founder and long-time fiddler passed away less than two years after the disc’s December 2013 release. The album also featured The Flood’s new emphasis on tighter vocal harmonies, as you can hear here in the album’s opening tracking.

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March 31, 2015: Paul Martin officially joined the band. The operative word here is "officially," because Paul already had been part of the extended Family Flood for at least a decade before that. As early as 2006, Paul was occasionally jamming paulwith The Flood. Later, when his old friend, Randy Hamilton, came on board as The Flood's bassist, Paul started running sound for the band at gigs. In addition, as an extraordinary singer-songwriter, mandolin and guitar soloist, Paul became a regular featured guest performer at shows around town and on the road. But it was after he actually joined the band that Paul's remarkable talents began to inspire the next direction for The Flood's evolution, starting with his mixing and editing skills on the band's latest CD, "Live, In Concert." And the best is yet to come! But let's go back in the archives. Here's a Paul Martin-Randy Hamilton tune a jam session in September 2011, before either of them was a Floodster, a take on a 1978 tune, "Ready for the Times to Get Better."

 

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April 6, 2002: The Flood did the first of several gigs we would play in the pub at BrazenHead Inn. Will Fanning’s traditional Irish lodge in the old community of Mingo tucked in the Potomac highlands of southern Randolph County, WV, was already special to us, because the inn was one of the sponsors of Joe Dobbs’ “Music from the Mountains” radio show each Friday night on W.Va. Public Radio.

Brazenhead

On our set list for the show were tunes from the band’s first CD, released earlier that year, as well as songs already being honed for the second CD, which would be recorded in seven months. But a highlight of that first gig at BrazenHead was not a musical number at all, but a story. It happened this way: While we were re-tuning between songs, David and Charlie noticed that Joe was wearing an especially snazzy sweater that night, and we asked Joe to tell us about it. From that very evening, here’s a rare audio of Joe’s yarn. Incidentally, as you'll hear over the laughter at the end of the story, Joe says, "If I ever write a book, I'm gonna put that story in it!" That's a promise he kept a decade later when he published his book, "A Country Fiddler." And if you were at BrazenHead that night, you heard it here first…

 

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April 17, 2010 – We flooded the newly renovated Alban Arts & Conference Center in Joe Dobbs' adopted home town of St. Albans, WV. It was an evening of folk and jug band songs, swing and fiddle tunes, along with some laughs and stories among old friends and special new ones. Here's audio of our opening number followed by Joe's brief welcome to the audience. Photographer Larry Kendall got some great shots that evening, as you see in this collage.

Alban


Our buddy singer-songwriter Doug Imbrogno opened the night with a solo set of original compositions and some innovative arrangements of traditional music. But we also have a special bittersweet memory of that evening: It was the night we met the beautiful, mysterious person we still call "The Hobo Girl." A 29-year-old vagabond named Patulla Williams – a young woman who travelled across the country with her dog Ashes, hopping from one train to another like a footloose wanderer from another era – had rambled into West Virginia the night before. Ambling into Joe's Fret 'n Fiddle music store the next morning, she happened to meet singer Jim Snyder who would be hosting The Flood show at the Alban theater that weekend, and Jim invited her to the concert. Backstage that evening, Patulla visited with The Floodsters and instantly won everybody's heart with her brilliant smile and with her stories from the road, where her friends called her "Hermit." We were, each of us, enchanted. Then she went on stage with Jim to share some of her own tunes with a wowed audience. After that night we never saw Patulla Williams again. In a few days, she hopped another train and was gone again, saying she was heading west maybe, Nebraska, maybe. Eight months later she was found dead in a jail cell in Texas, where she had been taken after being caught illegally riding another train. Controversy still surrounds the details of her lonesome death. At least it was a happier story for Patulla Williams in St. Albans that April night in 2010. Here's a different perspective on the young wanderer's life. A week or so before she came to West Virginia, Williams was in Winston-Salem, NC, where she and Ashes caught the eye of filmmaker Martin Tucker, who spent the day with her. Linked here is the trailer for Tucker's 22-minute documentary film called, “Patty: This is My Normal.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6o8Lh8A_cg


 

April 24, 1975: Dave and Charlie first met fiddlin' Joe Dobbs under a circus tent down by the Ohio River where the city of Huntington held its annual Dogwood Arts and Crafts Festival in the first few years of the show before the civic arena was built. On that day in April 1975, Dave and Charlie, who had been picking together regularly for about three years by then, had just finished their work day in the newsroom of The Huntington Advertiser and headed down to the festival encampment near the floodwall to play some tunes for the crafts people. As Joe later recalled the encounter in his autobiography, "A Country Fiddler," Joe and his wife, Amy, were checking out the crafts when they spied a woman weaving cane in the bottoms of ladder-back chairs that she sold. "Sitting in two of the completed chair was a tall man playing a Guild guitar and short guy playing an Autoharp," Joe wrote. "Both of these musicians looked to be about 30 years old, a hippy version of Mutt and Jeff. The guitar player had medium long hair and an untrimmed beard. The Autoharp player wore a beard but his hair was neatly trimmed. They seemed to be very good friends." Joe himself was quite memorable too that day, in his bib overalls and Chuck Taylor tennis shoes and with, of course, a coffin-like wooden fiddle case under his arm.

Joe-1975

In the book, Joe reports he was reluctant to ask to sit in, thinking his fiddling had gotten a bit rusty in recent years, so instead, he pulled up a finished chair next to Dave and started taking his fiddle out of the case. Initially, no one said a word, until after a moment Joe said, "Would you play an A chord, please?" At first, Joe played along quietly behind some of the tunes Charlie and Dave had worked out, then Dave said, "So, you know 'Soldier's Joy'?" Of course he did. Soon the three of them had drawn a crowd. By summer, Joe was jamming regularly with Dave and Charlie; soon, not wanting to be left out, Roger Samples, the other founder of The Flood, was driving into from Mason County, WV, to be part of it all. The first recording of Joe with The Flood came five months after that initial Dogwood Festival encounter, at a party at Charlie and Pamela's house. Here's Joe Dobbs' September 1975 rendering of "Sail Away Ladies," with Roger, Dave and Charlie as the supporting cast.

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May 1, 1999: The Flood began a decade-long tradition of playing at the annual Spring Festival at Heritage Farm Museum and Village the first Saturday of each May. Earlier that year, the late Mike Perry, an old friend and founder of the farm, contacted David Peyton, saying that West Virginia's most eclectic string was a natural fit for what he hope to present at his new farm museum. We thought so too. The Flood's first appearance was at the 3rd annual festival in 1999, and Mike usually made a point stopping by to sing a few tunes with us as you see here.

farm

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May 5, 1979: The Flood did a little preaching, using as its text the Old Testament story of "Samson and Delilah." Actually, it was The Flood's take on a classic Rev. Gary Davis tune, a slightly milder version of which had appeared a decade and a half earlier on the first Peter, Paul and Mary album. But as you'll hear here, there was nothing mild about The Flood's "tear-it-down" rendition, complete with Roger' show-stopping guitar solo and Dave's cosmic commentary on everything from urban renewal to "old-fashioned head honey." How did this recording come to be? Thereby hangs a tale. At that Saturday night party in May 1979, Joe had been telling the story of how Charlie had recently been mistaken for a fire-and-brimstone preacher. It was all because of the band's performance of this particular song a little earlier at Hannan High School in Mason Countyy, WV, where Roger was teaching. Rog had wrangled an invitation for The Flood to play at an assembly at the school, during which the "Samson" performance seemed to persuade some of the listeners of Bowen's Bible-thumping prowess. Well, the partygoers were skeptical -- to them nothing about Bowen seemed especially ministerial -- so they demanded a re-enactment. For years afterward, recording of The Flood's take on "Samson" circulated on tape among friends; later the song wound up on the band's "Hip Boots: The Flooded Basement Tapes" CD. And now, nearly 40 years later, the tune refuses to die. Here's its latest incarnation in a video the guys made for inclusion in the 2011 "Wade in the Water" DVD.

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May 7, 2000 -- The Flood for the first time played the Saturday morning breakfast session of the Coon-Sanders Nighthawks Fan Reunion Bash, a Huntington, WV, gathering of traditional jazz fans from all over the country. Coon-Sanders organizer Dale Jones, leader of Huntington’s Backyard Dixie Jazz Stompers, had a hunch that the reunion regulars would get a kick out of the jug band portion of The Flood’s eclectic Coonrepertoire, and he was right! After that May 2000 performance at the breakfast session, The Flood would be invited back every year as a regular Saturday morning feature of the annual reunion for the next 13 years. The band would play at each May gathering until the final Coon Sanders Huntington reunion in 2012. The size and composition of the band showing up would change from year to year, sometimes just a minimalist trio of Joe, Dave and Charlie, other times a big eight-member ensemble, complete with guest artists and almost always with kazoos to share with the audience for hum-alongs. One of our favorite Coon Sanders memories was our May 2008 appearance, when we persuaded the great ragtime pianist Jazzou Jones to join us for the entire hour-long set. Jazzou was visiting West Virginia from his hometown in Maine, on his way to a gig in Charleston. Here's some audio from that morning. In the track, the band starts its opening number (“Jug Band Music”) and midway through you can hear Charlie called Jazzou to the stage to be part of the fun. And fun it was!

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May 18, 1974: David and Charlie played their first John Prine tunes at an annual music party called The Bowen Bash. The Bash — a semiannual three-day party hosted Pamela and Charlie Bowen for their musician friends — was central to the birth of The 1937 Flood. Over the next decade, the bashes would continue in the spring and autumn of each year in Big Blue, the only frame house in the 600 block of 13th Avenue in Huntington’s South Side.

Bssh

It was in this house and among those friends — fellow musicians and a growing community of devoted fans — that The Flood evolved in the hazy hippy-dippy 1970s. And John Prine’s music would always be as much a part of the band’s DNA as it was part of The Bash’s foundational chemistry. At the very first bash in August 1972, Terry and Pat Goller came with a selection of interesting new folk albums to share, and it was John Prine’s self-titled first album, released a few months earlier, that completely blew everyone away. Charle and Dave immediately fell in love with Prine’s “Paradise” (“…. and Daddy, won’tcha take me back to Muhlenberg County, down by the Green River where Paradise lay? Well, I'm sorry, my son, but you're too late in asking. Mr. Peabody's coal train has hauled it away.”) By the May 18, 1974, bash, we had started recording some of the music of The Bash, with Stewart Schneider at the helm of the recording equipment, and here’s what Stew recorded of Dave and Charlie’s rendition of the tune that night.

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May 29, 2000: The Flood for the first time played the Vandalia Gathering in Charleston, performing a 30-minute set on an outdoor stage in front of the state capitol complex. The guys’ program that afternoon, emceed by an old friend — West Virginia fiddling icon John Morris — featured mostly jug band tunes of the 1920s and ’30s, music that on one hand energized the crowd (we had dancers calling for more as the show ended), but on the other hand also brewed a mini-controversy among some Mountain State traditionalists. As we said that day — as we would say in many shows in the years to come — The Flood fervently believes jug band music has as much a legitimate place in Appalachian history as do the fiddle tunes and the square dances.

Vandalia

Sure, the jug band tradition is not always clearly defined in the history books, but it apparently began in the hills of Virginia before traveling on to more urban areas, immigrating in the late ‘20s to river towns like Louisville and Cincinnati (and Huntington, Ashland and Ironton, for that matter!) We told our Vandalia listeners that day that the tunes we played (“Rag Mama” and “Yas Yas Duck” among others), complete with Dave's cool kazoo solos,could be seen as mountain pickers imitating the jazz bands they heard on passing riverboats. In other words, it was another twist on the folk tradition that the Vandalia Gathering was born to celebrate. Sadly, not everybody bought what we were selling — over the years, some staunch folk purists (okay, Joe called them "folk Nazis") would continue to contend that West Virginia’s most eclectic string band just wasn’t “West Virginia enough” for them — and for our part, we just agreed to disagree.

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