First-Chair Kazoo: Dave Peyton
#577 / Flood Time Capsule: 2002
Twenty-four years ago this week, Flood co-founder Dave Peyton made his debut in the first chair of the new Marshall University Kazoo Choir’s first (and, well, last) performance.
Long known as The Flood’s “voodoo guru of the kazoo,” Brother Peyton brought his expertise to the Marshall Symphony Orchestra’s performance of a Charles Ives experimental composition.
The piece, called “Yale-Princeton Football Game,” was one that Ives wrote while a student in the late 1890s. It was an effort to capture the feeling of a real football game, including the sounds of the cheers, the band warming up, the players on the field and the roar of the crowd.
Pamela and Charlie Bowen were in the audience at Smith Recital Hall for the performance. “Dave led a group of kids on kazoo playing the part of the crowd,” Charlie told his mom in an email the next day. “What a hoot! And when Dave was introduced as ‘guest kazooist,’ he got the biggest hand of the evening.”
Reed Smith’s Memories
Dr. Elizabeth Reed Smith, retired professor in Marshall’s music department, remembers the evening well. In fact, it was she who set it up as part of the Young People’s Concert that Marshall hosts each year in cooperation with the Women’s Club of Huntington and the Cabell County school board.
“I don’t remember if I came up with the idea of asking Dave, or if someone else suggested it,” Reed said recently.
“He was thrilled, but I think just a bit disappointed that he didn’t get a kazoo solo! I remember that he hammed it up and everyone loved it.”
Reed said she has a long familiarity with the composition that the orchestra was playing that evening, noting that in James Sinclair’s 1991 recording of this piece, one of the 50 kazoo players called for by the composer was then-Yale football coach Carm Cozza.
“Before I moved to West Virginia,” Smith said, “I played in Orchestra New England in New Haven, Connecticut, which is conducted by said James Sinclair, who is an Ives scholar, so I was quite aware of the piece and thought it would be a ton of fun for the children.”
Kazoory
Reed also had more than a passing acquaintance with the venerable kazoo.
“I was in the habit of utilizing kazoos in my freshman music theory classes,” Reed said, “and I had found a source for cheap kazoos in quantity, so those were easy to come by.
“But,” she added, “I believe Dave had his own kazoo.”
Indeed, he did.
A Hummer of a Flood Tradition
The Flood’s connection with Kazoo Kulture reached a new level shortly after the turn of the century when harmonicat Sam St. Clair suggested handing out kazoos to the audience so fans could play along.
Pamela Bowen, the band’s manager, began ordering kazoos in bulk, and soon the signature “blue kazoo” became a staple of Flood shows.
To instruct the audience, Peyton developed what was jokingly called a 45-minute kazoo seminar, which he considerately reduced to just two essential sentence fragments: “Big End. Hum!”
This audience participation was famously showcased in June 2002 when The Flood performed with the Huntington Symphony Orchestra and handed out kazoos to all 40 symphony members — and Maestro Kimo Furumoto himself — to play along on “Rag Mama.”
