Folk Music Declaration of Independence

#253 / Flood Time Capsule: 2000

On a Sunday morning 23 years ago this week, Dave Peyton used his column in The Herald-Dispatch to publish a kind of declaration of independence for folk music.

The piece — headlined “Folk musicians reinventing themselves” — discussed The Flood’s newly developed sound that blended old-timey tunes with jazzier swing numbers that Joe Dobbs had been encouraging the guys to learn.

The piece would have a far-reaching impact, attracting all kinds of new listeners to Flood music, and Dave even invited the curious to come to the Hilltop Festival that very afternoon at the Huntington Museum of Art to get a sample of what The Flood was playing lately.

Dave Wrote…

“All of us in The Flood developed an interest in music through the folk genre,” Dave wrote in the H-D, “but I have a confession to make. Playing folk music all the time is … well, a bit boring. The secret to learning traditional music is to learn three chords.

“If you can learn three chords,” he went on, “you can play 95 percent of all the traditional music of the mountains. Learn a fourth chord — a minor -- and you can play all of it.

“Folkies today are changing as they move toward the status of senior citizens. ‘Three chords and a cloud of dust’ just doesn't do it for us the way it used to.

“We did what we could to preserve the old music. We've played ‘Flop Eared Mule’ and ‘Sally Goodin’ so many times, we hear them in our sleep. Now we're movin' on down the line. That's why folkies, The Flood included, have been re-inventing themselves.”

(Click here to read the entire column.)

… And Chuck Read

Ultimately, Dave’s column also would help The Flood’s sound evolve even further. That’s because one Peyton’s readers that morning was Dixieland banjo picker Chuck Romine, who would still be thinking about Dave's words when he caught The Flood again a few weeks later at a public show.

As he remembered later, that column had a lot to do with Chuck’s decision to join the band the next year. Click the button below to hear Chuck relate that story during The Flood’s 2002 appearance on Joe’s Music from the Mountains” radio show: