Cousin Kathy's Loving Arms

#498 / Flood Time Capsule: 2004

For more than 30 years, Charlie Bowen has sung duets with his cousin Kathy Castner whenever she has been able to come for visit to Huntington from her home near Cincinnati.

For their first decade together, the pair never tried to record any of these rare vacation jam sessions, but in the summer of 2004, something was in the air.

By the then, The Flood had recorded its third studio album, and Charlie wanted to give Kathy a taste of what a recording session was like. To that end, he enlisted friend and neighbor Bo Sweeney to help. Bo had been building a studio behind his house and had been learning about audio techniques, so he jumped at the idea.

The entire band was not available for that Saturday night, but Flood Lite — Joe Dobbs, Doug Chaffin and Dave Ball — joined Kathy and Charlie at the Bowen house where Bo was busy stringing his mikes when they rolled in. “And what a great session it was!” Charlie told his mom in an email afterward, “just exactly what I wanted her first experience recording to be.”

The weather was a little dicey — rain and thunderstorms — and they worried the power might be knocked out, but it all held together fine.

The Session

“Kathy was a real trouper,” Charlie said in the email. “I don't think anyone would have imagined that this was the first time she'd ever recorded. It can be real intimidating when you sit down to record the first time and realize, gee, if I mess up just one line, we got to start all over. She was in wonderful voice and everything just rocked.

“The guys hadn't ever heard most of the songs we were recording and they weren't in keys that were usual for us, so we had to run through them a few times. But after two or three run-throughs, we were ready to roll and on almost every tune, we nailed it on the first or second take. We wrapped up by 11 and everyone was very happy with the session.”

“Lovin’ Arms,” the Video

Later Bo did his engineering magic on the recordings so that Charlie could give Kathy a private-release CD of the evening. Click the Play button on the video below to hear the title track of that private album, Kathy’s performance of the 1973 folk rock classic, “Lovin’ Arms.”

How the Song Came to Be

Folk singer Tom Jans wrote “Lovin’ Arms” in 1973, about the time he left his native San Jose, CA, for Nashville.

The song got its debut as a duet by Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge on their 1973 album Full Moon, but most of us heard the tune the following year when Dobie Gray’s rendition made Billboard’s Hot 100 chart.

It then got some love from Elvis Presley (1974) and Petula Clark (1975). Since then, it’s been recorded more than 50 times, notably by Olivia Newton-John, Etta James and The Dixie Chicks.

The Mimi Fariña Period

Jans was 25 when he wrote his hit. Before his exodus to Nashville, he played coffeehouses in San Francisco, where in 1970 he met Joan Baez, who introduced him to her little sister Mimi Fariña.

Mimi had achieved cult status as part of a duo with her late husband Richard Fariña. After Richard’s death in a motorcycle accident in 1966, Mimi began writing new songs and looking for a partner to perform them with; Jans seemed to be of similar sensitivities and the two formed a new duo.

The pair played San Francisco Bay Area clubs and received notice from their performance at the Big Sur Folk Festival.

Tom and Mimi toured extensively as a supporting act for Cat Stevens and then for James Taylor, and they received a recording contract from A&M Records, releasing the album Take Heart in 1971. However, the album received little notice and the duo split up in 1972.

Solo Again

Jans put his first hit, “Lovin’ Arms,” on his self-titled debut album in 1974, but the disc didn’t make the waves that A&M hoped for.

Relocating to Los Angeles, he released a second album, The Eyes of an Only Child, on Columbia in 1975 containing his "Out of Hand,” which later became a country hit for Gary Stewart. In addition, his "Struggle in Darkness" was a minor FM hit, but the album was not a commercial success either.

When the third album also also did not generate high sales, Jans moved to Europe as his career lost momentum. Jans suffered serious injuries in a motorcycle accident in 1983 and died the following year at age 36.

Eight years later, fellow songwriter Tom Wait, whom Jans and his wife had befriended dedicated a song to him. "Whistle Down the Wind (For Tom Jans)" was on Waits’ Bone Machine album. "It was written about another friend,” Waits commented, “but it was the kind of song that Tom Jans would have written. He was there in spirit.”

Back to Kathy

Meanwhile, if you’d like a little more from Kathy’s premiere recording session that summer night in 2004, click the button below:

The audio clip includes Kathy’s performances of “Today,” “The Way You Do the Things You Do” and “Time in a Bottle.”