While last week’s rehearsal was our first time to play with the remarkable fiddler John Ace, that evening was likely the last time that Floodster Emeritus Dave “Bub” Ball will get to jam with his old friend.
It was only at the end of the evening we learned that John — after two decades of snow-birding it from Virginia to Florida — is at a new crossroads in his life, set to move permanently to New Hampshire to be near his daughter.
In fact, just hours after the last notes were played that night, Ball drove Ace to the depot so he could board a train for his Alexandria home. After that, Dave turned the car south for his long drive back to his home with his wife Yvonne in Jupiter, FL.
“John and I will stay in touch,” Bub said in an email this week, “but with him in New Hampshire and me about 1500 miles away, the odds are we won’t be able to get together again.”
A train song seemed like the most appropriate choice for the last number of the night and we picked one of the best in our repertoire.
Bub and John’s Journey
As reported here recently, in 2005 John Ace sold his house and car and moved to the sea, living full time on “Four Aces,” his 36-foot fiberglass Cabo Rico sailboat. From then on, he divided his time between summers in Virginia and winters in Florida … and/or the Bahamas, Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, Mexico … wherever the winds carried him.
Now, though, “at 76 traveling becomes a factor,” Bub said of his old friend.
Bub met John about three years ago during one of those winter treks to warmer climes.
“The band he was playing with at the time, Gypsy String Revival, needed a fill-in bassist and gave me a call,” Ball recalled. “He and I became friends and started playing jams together.”
Later, when fiddler Paddy King, one of the original 3 String Circus members, couldn’t make a renaissance fair gig, John filled in.
“He spent Thanksgiving and Christmas with us here and we became close friends,” Bub recalled. “We played many Faire gigs together.”
This summer The Flood got to meet John because Bub needed a fiddler to share the stage with him at the Lewisville, WV, renaissance fair. “John just happened to be in Alexandria, a five- or six-hour train ride to Alderson,” Ball said. “Soooooo, John filled in, and brilliantly I might add.”
About the Song
Featured in this week’s podcast, those last notes of our last evening with John and Bub are from “Yellow Dog Blues,” W.C. Handy’s 1915 masterpiece that speaks so elegantly of the passages in life. As reported earlier, it is the song that brought a classic line to the blues world, talking about going to “where the Southern cross the Yellow Dog.”
For more on the history of this grand old tune, see this earlier Flood Watch article.
And for more of John Ace’s fine fiddling with The Flood during his West Virginia trek, click here and here.
Meanwhile, in Flood Movie News…
Well, Georgia is on our mind these days. Randy Yohe’s award-winning “These Boys” documentary about The Flood has been selected to participate in Augusta’s 12th annual Black Cat Picture Show film festival.
Black Cat is the Georgia city’s only adjudicated international festival for independent films, hosted at Le Chat Noir theater, a 100-seat black box theater in downtown Augusta.
This recognition now brings to a half dozen the number of honors the film has received this year.
As reported earlier, the picture has been praised by two French festivals — ARFF Paris // International Film Festival and the Cine Paris Film Festival — as well as here in the States by The East Village New York Film Festival and Texas’s Austin International Art Festival. Also the Appalachian Film Festival screened the documentary as the featured film on the opening night.
Right now “These Boys” is working its way through film festivals like these, but we look forward to sharing the completed film with everyone later this year. We’ll keep you posted.
