Beloved Floodster Doug Chaffin Passes Away

#279 / News Extra

Doug Chaffin — who joined our musical family nearly a quarter of a century ago — died this morning at age 82 in Ashland, Ky., with Donna, his wife of more than 60 years, and their children at his side. We grieve.

It is hard to summarize in mere sentences all that Doug contributed to our lives in the past two decades.

When he joined us in 2000, he played upright bass, backing Joe and Dave, Charlie, Chuck and Sam on all manner of tunes in shows, jam sessions and recording studios.

Later Doug turned those duties over to others — first to Dave Ball, then to Randy Hamilton — moving on to other instruments.

For instance, throughout much of the late 2000s and early 2010s, he alternated between mandolin and acoustic guitar.

Then, after Joe Dobbs’ death in 2015, Doug dusted off his own fiddle and stepped up to fill that gap in The Flood’s sound.

Also, the following year, Doug got a nifty Paul Reed Smith electric guitar from his friend Glenn Perkins and got in touch with the rock ’n’ roll roots of his youth.

In 2019, when we recorded our Speechless album to feature Doug on all of the tunes, we illustrated this multifaceted aspect of our old comrade by creating a cover that showed Doug playing his fiddle while holding that new guitar.

Doug stayed active with the band until last year when a bad bout with Covid-19 and a battle with prostate cancer forced him to curtail his involvement.

Even then, Floodsters regularly made “house calls” at the Chaffin house to jam with their old friend, continuing right up until a few months ago. It always seemed to make him feel a little better to play the old tunes.

Doug’s Musical Beginnings

Doug had well over 75 years of music in his life. In the 1940s, he grew up listening to — and then playing — string band music with his mom and her banjo-picking sister.

Then, as a teenager in the 1950s, he played lead guitar with an Ashland-based rock and rockabilly band called The Montereys, named after a cool Mercury automobile. It was that young crew-cut rocker whom his wife-to-be Donna Jean met and fell in love with.

Doug told his own story to Joe Dobbs during a 2002 visit to Joe’s “Music from the Mountains” radio show. Click the button below to hear him speak:

Meeting The Flood

Doug hooked up with The Flood the first time on New Year’s Eve 1999 at a party at the late Nancy McClellan’s house. As we related earlier, during the party, we kicked off some of the swing tunes we'd been playing lately — “Sunny Side of the Street," "Ain't Misbehavin'," "Star Dust" — and suddenly Doug picked up his bass and jumped in.

Now, for years, we had been hearing Doug Chaffin play solid bass behind fiddler J.P. Fraley, often right there at Nancy’s house, but we had no idea he was interested in swing stuff too. 

Want to hear a little of it? Nancy recorded many of her parties, and she just happened to capture the very first tune that Doug played with us that night, this rather raucous rendition “Somebody Stole My Gal.”

(You’ll have to listen closely, though, to the low end of the audio; apparently, Nancy’s little recorder wasn’t a great fan of basses.)

Within days, Doug Chaffin became a regular, rocking that bass line.

Check this out. Click the button below to hear a classic Chaffin bass solo from a live June 2002 performance in Morehead, Ky.

We love hearing the band's reaction when Doug kicks into gear, then how he continues to drive the tune under Dave Peyton’s kazoo playing that immediately follows.

Doug spent the rest of his musical life with The Flood as our most versatile player.

Mentoring

Not only was Doug a superb musician, he also was always supporting and encouraging to the band’s newest and youngest members over the years, for instance, loving his time with 14-year-old Jacob Scarr and later with 19-year-old Vanessa Coffman. And when he could no longer hold down the guitar corner of the Floodisphere, he absolutely loved what Danny Cox was bringing to the sound.

Meanwhile, check out this moment from just five years ago this autumn, when Doug was jamming at the Bowen house with Floodster Paul Martin as we prepared the tunes that would be featured on the Speechless album.

Our last recording of Doug came last summer, when Charlie dropped by the Chaffin house to jam with him and old friend Danny Gillum. The last tune of that evening was Doug playing his guitar for a sweet rendering of this old J.P. Fraley tune, “Margaret’s Waltz”:

Sharing Doug’s Music

Our thoughts tonight are with Donna and all that beautiful Chaffin family — Greg, Mark, Patsy, Philip, Pam and Brad — and we want them to know we will never forgot our dear friend.

If you’d like to join us in spending a little more time with Doug, tune in the Doug Channel on our free Radio Floodango music streaming service for a randomly selected playlist of his numbers from over the decades, featuring fiddle, guitar and mandolin.

Rest in Peace

Doug was buried Nov. 25, 2023, at Kirby Flats Cemetery in Ashland, Ky.