... And Roger Makes Three

#139 / Flood Time Capsule: 1974

By the fall of 1974, David Peyton and Charlie Bowen had been playing music together for less than a year. They didn’t yet even have name for their ensemble, but by spring the third crucial element of what would become The 1937 Flood was in place. Enter guitarist/singer Roger Samples.

As reported earlier, before he was picking with Bowen, Dave had been half for a great duo with Roger.

In fact, the Peyton-Samples duet played parties and coffeehouses in and around Marshall University all during the years before Roger graduated, married and moved away.

Thus, because of his history with Peyton, Roger was fairly easy to reel back into that world in ’74 when he came back to our neighborhood.

Meanwhile, Back at the Parties…

For about a decade, Pamela and Charlie hosted semiannual music parties in their home in the south side of Huntington, gatherings that their friends started calling “The Bowen Bash.”

Starting in the spring of 1972, the parties featured three days of music by friends from West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio, good folks like H. David Holbrook, Bill Hoke, Susan Lewis, Jack Nuckols, Stew Schneider, Jim Strother and, of course, Peyton and Bowen.

Hands down, the big news from this particular November weekend — nearly half a century ago now — was that it was Roger Samples’ first bash. The party introduced him to friends he would have for decades to come!

The Flood’s First Hits

That bash also was the stage for the fledgling Flood’s first real arrangement. Through the spring of 1974, whenever he drifted back into town, Roger jammed with David and Charlie, usually on a Friday or Saturday night at the Peyton Place out on Mount Union Road.

At first, it was all very casual -- just a version of "parkin' lot pickin'" that focused only on tunes that one or the other of the three already knew -- but in the summer of 1974, they started acting and thinking more like a band. The trio practiced regularly, brought new tunes into the mix, worked on harmony vocals and begun to solidify actual arrangements that could be more or less reliably reproduced each time they played.

All that effort came together first in this tune from The Flood archives, the boys' version of Tom Paxton's "Wish I Had a Troubadour" from his 1969 album, "The Things I Notice Now." They rolled it out at the Bowen Bash in autumn 1974, with solos by Roger and Dave and vocals by Charlie. To hear it — direct from the dusty time machine — click the button below:

That same bash witnessed Dave and Rog recording the first Flood classic, their duet of Aunt Jennie Wilson’s beautiful “Banks of the Old Guyan.”

About “Banks”

When he and Rog starting playing as a duo in the pre-Flood days, Dave just naturally brought a number of Jennie’s tunes to the table. David had met banjo-playing Aunt Jennie in Logan County a few years earlier, had interviewed her a number of times for feature stories for The Herald-Advertiser and, along the way, had fallen in love with her music.

And Roger — who always had the heart and head of an arranger/composer — created this extraordinary musical setting for the ring of Dave’s vocals.

Looking back and listening today, we know how fortunate we are that Stewart Schneider was there that night to run the reel-to-reel recorder and to push all the right buttons at just the right time. To hear the result — recorded, incidentally, exactly 49 years ago tonight — click the button below:

Keeping the Memories Alive

That magical November weekend at the Bowen House is featured in one of our favorite episodes in the Flood legacy film series. To view the film, now entrusted to the YouTube archives, click below: