How It All Began

#296 / Flood Time Capsule: 1973

When we gather this Sunday night to celebrate The Flood’s golden anniversary, we’ll be looking back on a 1973 New Year’s Eve party that Susan and David Peyton hosted in their Mount Union Road home on the edge of town.

Charlie Bowen didn’t know they were starting a band that night, of course. He and Dave just wanted a chance to figure out if they knew any of the same tunes and if they could pick them together.

And actually that evening was six years in the making.

When Our Tale Starts

Dave and Charlie had known each other for a while. They first met in the winter of 1967 at music parties that Pamela Irwin — Charlie’s wife-to-be — hosted at her parents' house in Ashland, Ky.

In those days Dave had not started playing yet. He loved folk music, though, so he often drove into Ashland to hear the picking at the Friday or Saturday night parties after he had finished his shift as a rookie reporter at the Huntington Publishing Co.

By then, Charlie and Pamela were just starting to sing together, but the real hit at the parties was the remarkable performances by their dear friend, Terry Goller, who showed the crowd what he had learned from all the latest folk albums.

Enter the Autoharp

Dave wanted to be part of the picking too, but looking around the room, he concluded the world really didn’t need yet another guitar player.

Instead, having grown up listing to Carter Family records, Peyton fell in love with the sound of Mother Maybelle’s Autoharp, so it was on that instrument that he focused his attention for the next 50 years of his life.

By 1968, when Charlie left Ashland for school in Lexington, Ky., Peyton already was quietly teaching himself to play. Click the button below to hear Dave tell the story when he was a guest on Joe Dobbs’ “Music from the Mountains” radio show in 2002:

Enter (and Exit) Rog Samples

Peyton had been playing for a couple years when he met young Roger Samples, an incoming student at Marshall University, and the two of them started working out tunes together.

The Peyton-Samples duo had established a solid repertoire by January 1971, when Charlie and Pamela -- who by then had been married for a year and a half -- moved back to Huntington from Lexington to start as reporters at the same newspapers where the Peytons worked.

The Bowens were in the audience two months later when Dave and Roger blew the audience away at a concert at Ashland Community College. They also heard the two regularly at Marshall’s coffeehouse (as Roger later recalled in this radio clip).

But by spring 1973, Roger was gone. He had graduated and moved away to take a teaching job in the eastern West Virginia. As a result, Dave was looking for someone else to regularly jam with.

He was eager, because the music scene around Huntington was hopping.

Even the Bowens themselves were soon hosting semiannual music parties in their home — gatherings that their friends started calling “the Bowen Bashes” — and Peyton didn’t want to be left out.

New Year’s Eve 1973

That’s why Dave made sure Charlie brought his guitar when he and Pamela arrived at the Peytons’ doorstep that New Year’s Eve in 1973. And in the hours just before midnight, Charlie and Dave found a guitar-Autoharp groove that made them grin.

There are even a few rare recordings from that initial Peyton-Bowen collaboration.

Click the button below, for instance, to hear the pair’s earliest take on the Carter Family's "Cannonball Blues." The song — which they dubbed "Solid Gone" in honor of the version Charlie learned from a Tom Rush album — was the first tune they ever played together:

(Incidentally, we have done some research on the history of “Solid Gone.” Click here for the song’s story.)

Post-Party Repertoire

By the time of the next Bowen Bash in May 1974, the Peyton-Bowen collaboration had an assortment of other tunes worked out, as illustrated this inaugural episode of our recent legacy film series:

After that, Dave and Charlie often also played at events at the newspaper where they and their wives continued to work.

Holiday events and birthday parties often found them picking in a corner, but also at picnics like the publishing company’s huge Independence Day galas in Ritter Park, even jamming with fiddlin’ Sen. Robert C. Byrd in the newspaper’s break room one memorable afternoon.

And it all started because of a party at the Peytons’ place on New Year’s Eve 50 years ago this week.

Help Us Remember That Night

We sincerely hope you’ll help us commemorate that evening by joining us at Alchemy Theatre, 68 Holley Ave., this Sunday night for our golden anniversary. Everything you need to know about the gala is on our new website at Floodat50.com.

Check it out then come to the do! We’re going to share memories and make a whole bunch of new ones.