Down by the Riverside

#9 / Flood Time Capsule: 2007

Fourteen years ago this autumn, The Flood headed down to Huntington Harris Riverfront Park to entertain folks boarding a boat for a fundraising Hospice House river cruise. It was the first of what would be an annual autumn gig from the guys for a couple of years. For this inaugural outing, Floodster Emeritus Chuck Romine brought his tenor banjo to sit in.

"The weather was perfect, the crowd was fun and the company, as always, was the best," Charlie told his mom in an email, the next month. "We played solidly for an hour and half as the some 600 people arrived to board the riverboat for their cruise. Lots of grins and nice comments. It was a great evening.”

Also notable about that September 2007 evening is that the Bowens’ neighbor, Bo Sweeney, came down to run the sound system, and he brought along to assist him the son of Tom Scarr, a partner in Bo's law firm, a lad by the name of Jacob Scarr.

Jacob, then just 14, soon would begin a long association with the Family Flood. Less than two weeks after the riverfront gig, the young guitarist jammed with the guys for the first time. The Floodsters already knew Jacob as the polite young man who lately had been coming to listen at the weekly jam sessions, but until that night, none of us knew the boy could play. Here's how that happened:

That autumn evening, Doug Chaffin had brought both his mandolin and guitar, and midway through the session, he noticed Jacob eying the guitar.

"Pick it if you'd like," Doug whispered to him, and in the next few minutes, everyone in the room was grinning as sweet, round, funky blues figures started rolling from the boy's fingers.

"Damn!" Dave Peyton muttered appreciatively.

"Play it again, Youngblood," Charlie said. The nickname would stick as Jacob became a regular at the weekly jams throughout that wonderful winter and into the next years to come.

Jacob officially joined the band in early 2009 (we wanted to wait to make sure he kept his interest in playing music with people his parents' and grandparents' age), and he played with us as our youngest member until he left for college in Colorado in 2011. Today, at 28, Jacob, now a Floodster Emeritus, is a lawyer in Colorado, but he still regularly sits in with us whenever he's back in town.

And it all started down by the riverside.