Dogwood Days & Wondrous Wallace the Washboard

#202 / Flood Time Capsule: 1974-80

Huntington’s Dogwood Arts & Craft Festival was always a sentimental favorite for The Flood. Back in the early 1970s, David Peyton and Charlie Bowen performed at the first few shows. In fact, the crafts fair was among their first public performances as an antediluvian duo.

Meeting Joe

And in 1975 it was at the 4th Dogwood Festival that the pair first met fiddler Joe Dobbs. That encounter happened because Joe and his wife, Amy, had come downtown to check out the crafts. While strolling the grounds, they spied a woman weaving cane in the bottoms of ladder-back chairs.

"Sitting in two of the completed chairs were a tall man playing a Guild guitar and short guy playing an Autoharp," Joe later wrote in his autobiography, A Country Fiddler. "Both of these musicians looked to be about 30 years old, a hippy version of Mutt and Jeff.”

It didn’t take much that afternoon to persuade Joe to sit in with them, initially playing only quietly behind some of the unfamiliar tunes that Bowen and Peyton had worked out. Then Dave said, "So, d’you know 'Soldier's Joy'?"

Well, of course he did, and he ratcheted up his fiddling a notch or two. Drawn by Dobbs’ lively sawing, a crowd soon encircled the new trio. (Keep “Soldier’s Joy” in mind; it will be back before the end of this story.)

Paging 1980

For many years, music was a prime element of the annual Dogwood festivals, and The Flood was happy to do its bit.

A particularly good Dogwood gig -- which took place exactly five years to the day after that initial April 25, 1975, meet-up with Joe -- was the 1980 show.

By that time, as illustrated in Pamela Bowen’s picture above, the original Peyton-Bowen aggregation had tripled in size, with Joe, Charlie and David being joined on stage by Bill Hoke on bass, Stew Schneider on harmonica and Rog Samples on guitar and vocals.

Pamela’s picture also shows how the band’s instrumentation was expanding, this time because of a Dave Peyton brain storm.

The Cajun Factor

About that. During the late 1970s, David and Susan Peyton took their young son David Jr. on his first big road trip. That’s when the three of them traveled to the swamps of Louisiana so that Brother Dave could begin his study to compare and contrast Cajuns and Appalachians as part of his new Alicia Patterson Foundation grant project.

Because of his research, Peyton gave a lot of thought to how Cajun music used the venerable, versatile washboard. Soon David was figuring out how the same appliance-turned-instrument could give a new texture to the jug band tunes that were just starting to sprout in The Flood’s imagination.

Wallace the Washboard was born in the autumn of 1979 as David experimented with an assortment of horns, kazoos, whistles, shakers and other add-ons chosen for their grin-inducing possibilities. (Wallace was notoriously camera-shy, but he did allow Pamela close enough for the picture below.)

David now could switch from Autoharp to Wallace and back again as different tunes inspired him.

Want to hear Wallace rocking it? Click the button below to play a five-minute portion of The Flood’s 1980 Dogwood Festival set in which David demonstrates the washboard’s range:

As the track begins, we enter mid-song (and mid kazoo break) on “Marie (The Dawn is Breaking)” (“the moon … the moon!”), then segue into a bluesy Ma Rainey number called “Black Eye Blues.”

Finally, remember “Soldier’s Joy”? The audio wraps up with Joe’s rip-roaring rendition of that piece, a sprint that seems to leave half of the guys in the shade. (Do notice, though, that during the romp, Bill and David pace him note for note on the bass and Autoharp.)

Wallace Wows ‘Em

The original Wallace the Washboard had a brief, but glorious career in the Floodisphere. It especially enjoyed the last couple of the beloved Bowen Bashes in 1980 and ‘81.

Alas, though, the instrument faded away in the mid-1980s as the band entered a period of inactivity; when The Flood re-awoke in the early ‘90s, old Wallace was nowhere to be found.

Enter Wallace the Second

Fortunately, the 21st Century version of The Flood experienced a washboard renaissance, because of the good works of a new Floodster, harmonicat Sam St. Clair. Working with his young daughter Zoey Stull, Sam spent weeks designing a svelter, prettier version of the original. Immediately, we christened their creation “Wallace II” and placed it in Peyton’s expert hands.

The new board got quite a workout at all the gigs, especially in Dave’s duets with Flood tenor banjoist Chuck Romine on their signature song, “Coney Island Washboard Roundalay.” You can hear it by clicking the button below.

That moment was recorded live at an August 2003 Flood show for the Snowshoe Institute atop Snowshoe Mountain (a track later released on the band’s third album, I’d Rather Be Flooded).

The Washboard Video

A half dozen years later, Wallace II was still swinging with The Flood. For instance, on an April evening at the Bowen house, Peyton and Romine were urged by the band's premiere groupie/den mother Rose Marie Riter to re-created the Snowshoe performance. Pamela captured it all on this video from 14 years ago this week: