Bill Hoke, We'll Miss You, Dear Friend

#99 / News Extra

News has come from Abingdon, Virginia, that Floodster Emeritus Bill Hoke has died. He suffered from a respiratory condition called idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, which lately led to congestive heart failure. He was 74.

It’s going to take a while to get used to a world without Bill in it. The years he played in The Flood actually were few — he brought that heart-stirring string bass to us from about 1978 to 1982 — but in many ways, Bill has always been the soul and the spirit of the band.

Bill was like a character in a wonderful old Charles Dickens novel, the man who pops in every 200 pages or so, says and does a few simple but important things that change everything, then disappears until the story needs him again a few hundred pages further on. Bill embodied all we have aspired to: eclectic and curious, fun-loving and devoted to detail, a happy hunter of an ever-better soundtrack. Who wouldn’t be drawn to a man who loved old records and radios, railroads and riverboats?

Hoke came into our lives in the spring of 1973, when he attended one of the earlier “Bowen Bashes,” those biannual weekend-long music parties that Pamela and Charlie hosted in Huntington’s South Side.

“I got out of the Navy at the end of February and spent a few weeks checking into a couple of 'dream jobs’ before landing in Lexington,” Bill said many years later. “The dream jobs were the Cass Railroad and The Delta Queen. The timing was bad for both.”

In Lexington, Ky., Bill met a slew of local musicians — Jim and Ralf Strother, David Holbrook, Jack and Susie Nuckols. Bill's cousin, Susan Lewis, told him that the bunch of them were traveling for a party in Huntington “and we needed to go 'cause there would be music,” Bill recalled, “though, she said, Stewart and Charlie mostly sit around and play chess. Well, I don't remember the chess games, but I do remember hearing more music that night than I'd heard in every coffeehouse I had ever been to. Being just out of a six-year stint in Navy, I'm thinking, 'My God! Life is good!’ I was hooked!”

And we were all pretty quickly hooked on Bill too. Very soon he was central to the old-time string band music of The Kentucky Foothill Ramblers, playing guitar and singing with Susan and David. And Bill would bear witness to the birth of The Flood during the next eight years of those spring and fall Bowen Bashes.

Musical Explorations

Even in those earliest days, Bill already was intrigued by new musical experiences. For instance, The Flood has never had a dobro in the band, but we came darn close in 1974 because of Bill. The story goes that Charlie — in rare moment of disposal income in the Bowen household — bought a beautiful National Steel Body guitar. Bowen had visions of a future in blues, but quickly figured out his new instrument was much more guitar than he could handle.

Enter Bill Hoke, who borrowed the box and added a extension nut to raise the strings so it could get in touch with its dobro nature.

Click the button below to hear Bill’s venture into dobro-ry at a Flood jam that autumn. First on the track is Dave’s rendering of “Mary Golden Tree” (a variation of “The Golden Vanity”), then come Charlie and Dave doing the then-new John Prine piece, “Everybody.”

The dobro was only a short-time diversion with The Flood, but Bill would be back a bit later to play upright bass for a few of the goldenest years of early Floodishness.

Below is a video we made from audio and still pictures, featuring Bill and his bass in the center things at a jam at the Bowen house one steamy summer night in 1979.

Bill was also on hand in the summer of 1982 when fiddler Joe Dobbs asked his Flood family to gather at Fret ’n Fiddle on a late summer afternoon to record a full-fledged demo for a show he was pitching to West Virginia Public Radio. Ultimately, of course, that show became Joe’s beloved and long-running “Music from the Mountains.” The Flood segment was among the first episodes presented when the show took to the air in 1983. Click the button below for a 9-minute chunk of that initial show.

Bringing It All Back Home

In the mid-1980s, it appeared that the Age of The Flood was over. Bill Hoke was working at Cabell-Huntington Hospital, but plotting his escape; he soon would head to Abingdon and begin a new life with his young bride, Evelyn. Everyone else in the Floodisphere also had new chapters in their lives — new marriages, new jobs, new kids — and the band was being relegated to a sometimes kind of thing.

Oh, we tried to keep the lines open. For instance, Bill and Evelyn traveled back to Huntington for Bash reunions at the Peyton house in 1991 and again in 1995, but nothing really stuck.

Nothing, that is, until one winter when again it was Bill-Hoke-as-Dickens-character that made it all happen.

The venue was a January 1996 party in Ironton, Ohio, hosted by the late Cathie and Bob Toothman. Bill, driving in for the do from Abingdon, stopped at Joe's shop in St. Albans to chat and check out instruments, and while there he said to Joe, "Hey, you are going to the Toothmans' party tonight, aren't you?"

Now, honestly, Joe hadn't planned to -- he was still recovering from a car wreck the previous summer that badly hurt his shoulder — but as the fiddler told us later, “Shoot, 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. As soon as Dave and Charlie saw Joe, they launched into some of the old tunes they had played a decade earlier, and Joe quickly joined in. After that — and for the rest of his life — Joe was back inside the Flood circle.

In that Flood circle, incidentally, Bill Hoke could be the fire tender as well as the fire starter. For instance, as we reported earlier, it was just two years after the Toothman party that Bill again rode to the rescue, this time when the guys were to play the first of what would be many years of appearances at the Spring Festival at Huntington’s Heritage Farm Museum & Village. (Click here to read that story.)

Bill also introduced the guys to Dale Jones and other good folks at the Coon-Sanders Nighthawks Fan Reunion Bash, which led to a decade of The Flood’s annual “jug band breakfast” sessions for that happy tribe; for each one, Bill was in the front row every time. Right up until the end, in fact, Bill was still recommended songs for us to play. (For example, the first time we ever heard one of our all-time favorite tunes — “No Ash Will Burn” — Bill was playing it solo for us in the Bowen living room.)

Declining Health

As his health began to falter, Bill played less and less. In an email exchange with Charlie earlier this month, Bill said, “My guitar days have been over for a while.  I don’t believe I’ve had one out of the case in several years.” The last good jam we all had with him was about a dozen years ago. Here’s a video from that wonderful October 2009 night.

Ah, sweet memories.

Bill, dear friend, your picture is added in a place of honor in the Flood music room, nestled in with Joe and David and Roger. Rest in peace.