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Our
Scrapbook
Ever
once in a while, folks at a newspaper or magazine are kind enough
to let us snooker them into writing about us. Here's the cyberspot
where we commemorate those journalistic events. Thanks, friends!
From
The Herald-Dispatch,
Sept. 7, 2005:
Concert
to benefit Red Cross
By
Dave Lavender
The Herald-Dispatch
HUNTINGTON
-- When you want a good Tri-State taste of that jazz-blues-and-river-stained-folk
musical gumbo that comes spilling out of that cultural boiling
pot of New Orleans and Louisiana, local bands such as The Backyard
Dixie Jazz Stompers, The 1937 Flood and Big Rock and The Candy
Ass Mountain Boys are on the top of the menu.
Those
three eclectic area groups are gathering tonight at 7 p.m. at
Pullman Square for a concert benefiting the American Red Cross.
ADVERTISEMENT
Organized
by Dave Ball, one of the members of "The 1937 Flood,"
one of West Virginia's most eclectic jug bands, the concert will
also include the Paddling Pickers (a group of picking canoeists),
followed by Big Rock, the 1937 Flood and the Backyard Dixie Jazz
Stompers which will close the evening with an everyone-on-stage
finale of "When the Saints Go Marching In."
Ball,
who has organized Huntington's Mardi Gras parades and dinners
for years, said it was another way for West Virginians to help
out and to get a healthy dose of coming together and hearing some
of the music of that region.
"It's
devastating what is happening and we are going to help them as
best we can," said Ball, who has been to five different Mardi
Gras carnivals down in Louisiana. "Our whole community has
answered the call and we are the second poorest state behind Mississippi."
Ball,
the bass player for the Flood, which will offer up such tunes
as "Basin Street Blues," and "House of the Rising
Sun, said that WKEE-FM, which is cosponsoring the show, will have
buckets there at the show for the American Red Cross.
WKEE
will also be out on location at The Paramount Arts Center in Ashland
as well as Graley's Auto Body on Third Avenue in Huntington, collecting
donations for the American Red Cross.
Dale
Jones leader of The Backyard Dixie Jazz Stompers, didn't have
to be asked twice to participate since it's hard not to come up
with a whole lot of New Orleans when you sift through the Stompers
extensive songbook.
"The
music that comes out of that place is in my heart," Jones
said. "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."
---
From
The Ashland (Ky.) Daily Independent,
May 21, 2004:
The
Flood awash in memories
By
Lee Ward
The Independent
A
heavy metal band they're not, but The 1937 Flood does offer its
listeners a variety of music, Charlie Bowen, spokesman and guitar
player for the band, said.
"We come to the party and size up the crowd and try to play
whatever people want to hear," he said. "The beauty
of The Flood is we play jug band music, but we aren't a jug band."
Members
of The Flood share a love of eclectic music. "We never met
a tune we don't try," Bowen said.
But they find they play a lot of tunes from the 1920s, '30s and
'40s. Bowen calls it roots music.
"That's
the term I like very much," he said. "It says it's the
music from which other music sprang from -- blues, rock and roll,
swing band so of the '30s and '40s."
The current configuration of the band includes three original
members -- Bowen, Dave Peyton and Joe Dobbs.
Bowen
said when he was dating his wife, Pamela, in the mid-1960s, he
met Peyton at a folk music party at her house in Ashland. Bowen
and Peyton hit it off. They ended up working together at a local
newspaper and began getting together to make music. "We played
at the very first Dogwood Festival in Huntington in 1974,"
Bowen said. That's where they met the next original member, Joe
Dobbs.
"(Dobbs)
walked by and said, 'Boy, those guys could use some help.' He
said 'I play fiddle,' and we said 'Where is it?'"
The
three of them hit it off, too, and they continued playing together,
with other members coming and going over the years.
But
what about that name?
Bowen
said he weekend after he and his wife bought their first house
in Huntington in 1974, they attended a party, during which many
people approached them to tell them how high the water got on
their house during the flood of 1973. This struck them as odd,
and humorous, so Bowen said he shared the story with his band
members, who also found it funny.
"The
next spring we were playing our first public gig at Carter Caves,"
Bowen recalled. "They were getting ready to introduce us
and we didn't have a name, so Joe walked up to the microphone
and said, 'We're The 1937 Flood, because back in Huntington, they're
still talking about us.'"
Bowen
said even when The Flood plays out of town, "There's always
somebody who comes up and tells us they lived through the flood
and it wasn't that funny."
Of course, The Flood means no harm by its name, Bowen said. "It's
all good natured, It's not like the Johnstown (Pennsylvania) flood
where lots of people were killed. It was mostly just a nuisance.
A real, big nuisance," he added, noting that all over the
Tri-State, there are markers to recall how high the water got
during the 1937 flood.
The
Flood has three CDs available. The latest one includes an original
tune by Joe Dobbs called "Vandalia Waltz." The Flood's
second CD also contains one original tune written by Bowen and
Peyton titled "Music From the Mountains Sets You Free"
and used as the theme song for Dobbs' program "Music from
the Mountains" on West Virginia Public Radio.
The
group's first release contained no original material but, Bowen
said, "The arrangement makes it ours."
The Flood will perform a free concert at 2 p.m. Sunday (May 23)
at the amphitheater in the Paul Billups Park near the Ceredo-Kenova
Middle School. It will be The Flood's last local performance until
July 23, when the group will perform for a CD release party at
the Paramount Coffeehouse in Ashland.
---
From
Dirty Linen, February-March 2004:
1937
Flood Plays Up a Storm (Braxton 2003) The 1937 Flood is a
group of six West Virginia pickers playing whatever makes 'em
happy. That's fine by me, especially when the mix includes old-time
and hot-club jazz with some jug band chestnuts thrown in for good
fun. The group does fine versions of "Alabama Jubilee"
and "Lady Be Good." Other covers are as diverse as "Sail
Away Ladies" and "Rag Mama." (LDP)
From
The Herald-Dispatch Web site, Tri-State Music Scene, featured
band:
The
1937 Flood doesn’t rest on its laurels as West Virginia’s
most eclectic string band. Born 25 years ago when fiddler Joe
Dobbs met Dave Peyton and Charlie Bowen, the Flood has played
recent gigs with everyone from the Huntington Symphony Orchestra
to Marshall University tailgate parties.
The
band, which also features Doug Chaffin, Sam St. Clair and former
legislator Chuck Romine, plays everything from folk classics of
John Prine and Bob Dylan to the blues of Mississippi John Hurt.
Throw
in some Dixieland jazz, some Irish fiddle tunes, a great sense
of humor, some pure mountain melodies from the likes of such state
treasured songwriters as Hazel Dickens and yes by God, the best
kazoo playing between here and say Kalamazoo, and you got the
1937 Flood.
In
the past few years, the band has cranked out its first CDs, including
one in 2002 and in 2003, "1937 Flood Plays Up a Storm."
They play in a wide, wide range of places and spaces, so check
their schedule online.
-:-
From
Sing Out Magazine, Summer 2002, reviewed by Tom
Druckenmiller
The
1937 Flood was formed 25 years ago when the core musicians met
at a craft fair in Huntington, WV. When fiddler Joe Dobbs heard
Autoharpist Dave Peyton and guitarist Charlie Bowen performing,
he lent his fiddle to the proceedings. Many configurations have
followed. The band includes  bassist
Doug Chaffin, tenor banjoist Chuck Romine and harmonica player
Sam St. Clair. Their name is derived from the floodwaters that
descended on the town of Huntington in 1937.
"The
Band, Not the Natural Disaster" features a collection of
tunes representative of the eclectic nature of their live performances.
Old chestnuts such as "Bill Bailey" and "Sweet
Georgia Brown" co-exist comfortably beside "West Virginia,
My Home" "Sally Garden." Other selections were
undoubtedly learned during the folk revival days of the early
1960s. "Jug Band Music," "Fair and Tender Maidens"
and "San Francisco Bay Blues" have been folk music standards
for years.
The
1937 may not be the most polished of performers, and individually
may not be virtuosi, but they have an obvious love for the music
and a deep affection for playing with each other. The spontaneity
of the proceedings and the fine times had by all is quite evident
and very infectious. Isn't that what entertainment is all about?
The 1937 Flood knows that quite well.
-:-
From
The Charleston (WV) Gazette, Jan. 10, 2002
1937
Flood rises to the occasion
By RUSTY MARKS Staff Writer
Huntington's
eclectic old-time jug band, The 1937 Flood, finally has its own
CD.
It
took only 25 years.
"Recording
seemed like it would be very hard, and not much fun," says 1937
Flood guitarist and unofficial bandleader Charlie Bowen.
But the band had a ball recording "The 1937 Flood," the group's
first disc. The 
CD was just released by Braxton Recordings in Charleston.
The
1937 Flood will appear at 7 p.m. Friday at the Huntington High
Renaissance Center in Huntington. Admission is free, and the program
will include material from the new CD as well as a mix of the
band's folk, jazz and old-time repertoire.
The flood's live shows are much like the CD: They may switch gears
from racy blues numbers to sweet Appalachian folk music in an
instant, then branch off into jazz standards like "Ain't Misbehavin.'"About
the only thing band members have in common is a resolve not to
take themselves too seriously.
"I
think we're the only jug band in West Virginia," fiddler Joe Dobbs
announced at a performance last week in St. Albans. "I know we're
the only one without a jug."
The
band features Bowen, an author and Internet radio host, on guitar;
newspaper columnist Dave Peyton on autoharp; Dobbs (founder of
Fret 'N' Fiddle and host of West Virginia Public Radio's "Music
From the Mountains") on fiddle; Doug Chaffin on standup bass;
Chuck Romine on tenor banjo and Sam St. Clair on harmonica.
The
band members come from both sides of the political spectrum and
30 years separate the oldest and youngest members.
"Dave
and I are probably the staunchest liberals," Bowen said. "Chuck
is a conservative Republican. We don't talk politics much when
we play."
The
band goes back about 25 years, when Dobbs heard Bowen and Peyton
playing at a craft fair and decided they could use a hand.
"The
core of the group has always been Joe and Dave and me," he said.
"We've probably had 25 different people in the group."
The
band's latest incarnation started about two years ago when Bowen
and crew added Chaffin on bass. "We didn't play out in public
that much, because we really weren't interested," he said. But
Chaffin was so good and the band had so much fun after he joined
that they decided come out of the living room and onto the stage,
he said.
"We
usually just played for ourselves," Peyton agreed. "We were just
able to get it together this last year. It was the first time
we actually all had the time to do it."
Romine
joined the group about a year ago, while St. Clair has been a
member for the past several months. Along with their new-found
public following and debut CD, Bowen set up a band Web site, www.1937flood.com,
and a free e-mail newsletter called "FloodStages."
Bowen
said the band enlisted Buddy Griffin - a fellow musician and longtime
friend of Dobbs' - to record the band's CD. The entire disc was
recorded live, with no overdubs. Most of the tunes were captured
in one take, except the one or two where Bowen forgot the words.
"We
did the whole thing as if we were playing to an audience," he
said. "We wanted to capture the fun we have and bring to an audience."
The
CD is available on the 1937 Flood Web site, from Amazon.com, and
at Fret 'N' Fiddle in St. Albans. The recording should soon be
available at Tamarack. Cost is $14.95.
-:-
From
WSAZ-TV, Huntington, WV, Jan. 9, 2002
Tim
Irr: In 1937, the Ohio River left its banks, submerging dozens
of communities.
Kathy
Brown: It sure did. But the 1937 Flood isn't just a natural
disaster. It's also the moniker for a band of rogue musicians
hoping to flood the world with music played the old-fashioned
way. NewsChannel 3's Steve Eschelman explains.
Steve
Eschelman: The notes fall more like a gentle shower rather
than a flood. And after 25 years of playing together, these old
buds are ready to bloom.
Dave
Peyton: Very few people play the Autoharp, so nobody knows
whether I'm good or not because there's nobody to compare me to.
Eschelman: Dave Peyton, Charlie Bowen and Joe Dobbs are
the core of the 1937 Flood and -- along with Sam St. Clair, Doug
Chaffin and Chuck Romine -- they're releasing their first CD.
Joe Dobbs: I used to couldn't get the guys to go play with
me. Finally, I got 'em out and we went to Fayetteville and played
in the Fayette Theater and we drove into town and there was "The
1937 Flood" on the marquee and so they've been ready to travel
ever since.
Eschelman: The recent film "O Brother, Where Art Thou"
has revived interest in parlor or old-time or mountain music.
Call the '37 Flood's music what you want, they just hope you like
it.
Dobbs:
We all were in high-stress jobs when we started playing. Dave
and Charlie both worked for the newspaper and I was in a struggling
business, putting in a lot of hours, so we played music for our
own amazement. And that's where we are.
Peyton: We decided that if we don't have fun, none of those
other things happen. So that's what we're into, having fun, and
we try to do that every time we play.
Eschleman:
And as long as the notes keep falling into place, the 1937 Flood
won't be receding any time soon.
-:-
From
The (Huntingon, WV) Herald-Dispatch, Jan. 6, 2002
By
DAVE LAVENDER - The Herald-Dispatch
These
days, you put a couple of guys, a couple of computerized instruments
and a digital recorder in a garage, shake and rattle a bit and
out rolls a new band and new CD ready to shop around for a record
deal.
But the local jug and string band blues group, The 1937 Flood,
has not been in a recording rush. The band -- not the natural
disaster -- has been aging its music in time's oak barrel like
a fine bourbon.
For
more than 25 years, the Flood's solid core of fiddler Joe Dobbs,
guitarist Charlie Bowen and autoharpist Dave Peyton has been making
musical magic live on the spot and just about anywhere and everywhere
in the region. Until now, though, the group somehow never has
made music together with the tape rolling.
After
a quarter of century, the band is making up for lost time -- and
being true to its name -- and is releasing a tune deluge of near
biblical or at least local newspaper proportions.
The
1937 Flood is releasing not one but two recordings: a self-titled
CD and a second CD, "Fiddle in the Flood," which is a CD of Dobbs'
fiddling backed by the latest incarnation of the nearly legendary
band.
Summer
flood
Glenville
resident Buddy Griffin, who plays fiddle with Grand Ole Opry legends
Jim and Jesse (McReynolds), recorded the band during two rather
painless sessions in Charleston this summer.
Bowen
said that although he and Dobbs had recorded before separately,
they liked each other too much to confine their weekly homemade
jam band into the often surly studios where the tick of time's
expensive clock can put a licking on even the tightest band.
"It
was never something that sounded like fun to us," said Bowen of
Huntington, who makes his living doing a radio show and writing
computer books and most recently novels about the Delta Queen
steamship.
"I
had recorded with a band called Front Royal, and that was such
a miserable experience. You take people who you really like and
by the end of the evening you never want to see them again.
"I
didn't want to do that with these guys."
These
guys -- the core of Dobbs, Bowen and Peyton -- have been joined
by a new flood of fellow kindred musical spirits: doghouse bassist
Doug Chaffin of Ashland and Huntingtonians Sam St. Clair on harmonica
and former West Virginia legislator Chuck Romine playing tenor
banjo.
As Romine, the Dixieland band man, found out, it's easier to join
the Flood than it is to leave. Romine, laughing, said he joined
by osmosis.
"After
about four months of coming to jam sessions, (Bowen) said, 'By
the way, we got some new business cards for the band,' and my
picture was on it," Romine said. "I said, 'Nobody ever asked me
to be in the band.' Charlie said, 'Well, this band is awful easy
to get into, and it's awful hard to get out of.'
"Recording
has done something good for the band, Bowen said.
"I
think what it has done is solidify us as a musical group," Bowen
said. "When you play live, no matter how much you are trying to
hear everybody, the sound of your instrument and your voice is
right there. You are not hearing it the way it sounds to someone
else. I think the band has gotten better at listening."
Homemade
string band jam
Built
around Wednesday night living room jam sessions (usually at Bowen's
house), the Flood has honed its music, an ever-morphing blend
of steamboat jazz, Appalachian and Scotch Irish fiddle tunes,
early folk blues and jump blues, modern-day folk revivalist material
(John Prine, Gordon Lightfoot and Dylan) and swing.
Many of the more than 100 songs the band knows come rolling right
off the riverboats that traveled up and down the Ohio River --
and that still do sometimes.
Bowen
explained how folks on the shore would hear the songs being played
on the riverboat and adapt those distant tunes to the instruments
that they had on hand. Not unlike the Flood, which rolls out everything
from Peyton's kazoo solos and autoharp to Romine's antique, short-neck
tenor banjo.
The
Flood's selections range from a Memphis Jug Band song to a song
by the late, great guitar picker Dick Justice of Logan County,
who recorded in the 1920s and 1930s.
That
stuff is interlaced with the likes of old popular tunes done the
Flood way such as "Sweet Georgia Brown," "Way Downtown," "Mack
the Knife" and (the West Virginia national anthem of sorts) "West
Virginia You Are My Home" by West Virginia's treasured songwriter/mountain
mama Hazel Dickens.
Everything (audience, songs, band members, hecklers and life)
gets addressed with a good slab of humor when the Flood plays.
When Romine missed a recent gig because he was in South Carolina,
he took a few waves of good-natured ribbing from his fellow bandmates
and the audience in his absence.
"Chuck
had a golfing emergency," Dobbs said with a straight face, getting
a roar from the crowd.
And
in a fine role reversal -- the audience itself got heckled a bit
from the stage.
"Everybody's
clapping except Tom Pressman," Bowen said, pointing out Pressman,
who had just walked through the door with his wife and sat down.
"He's
waiting for the good stuff," Dobbs said.
Later
in the show, like the Flood would want, Pressman got a good shot
back at the band between songs.
"I'll
tell you this is the best Chuck has ever sounded," Pressman said,
getting a roar from the crowd.
---
A
flood of jugband blues
By
the Herald-Dispatch
HUNTINGTON
-- Jan. 6, 2002, Hear ’em, read about ’em, talk to ’em, see ’em
(if you aren’t too scared) and for heaven’s sake, give these boys
a job. Do all that and more at the Web site (www.1937flood.com).
The band will have a Huntington CD release party at 7 p.m. Friday
at the Huntington High Renaissance Center (the old Huntington
High School).
Here’s
a little bit about the history of the almost legendary local jugband.
"I met Dave (Peyton) and Charlie (Bowen) at the Dogwood Festival
a hundred years ago," Joe Dobbs said.
Bowen
said he’ll never forget the first day he and Peyton played with
Dobbs, who has an incredible four new CDs coming out soon: the
two Flood CDs and two re-issue fiddle CDs including "Fiddle, Friends
and Favorites" with Buddy Griffin and "Joe Dobbs Plays Old-Time
Fiddle Tunes."
"I
still remember that day at Dave’s house," Bowen said.
"Joe
started playing his fiddle and we said, ‘Man, it’s a whole new
day.’ The three of us played from then on. We have probably had
several dozen people in the band at one time or another, and we
would go into hibernation for a while, but we were always coming
back to the Flood."
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