#625 / Flood Time Capsule: 1997
It’s been nearly 30 year now, but we still remember a strange, but kindly gig.
The evening before, Dave Peyton called Charlie Bowen and, after apologizing for the short notice, asked for a little time. It seemed Dave got roped into speaking in Cross Lanes, near Charleston, to a class of visiting students of all ages, K through 12.
Only after Charlie said yes did he find out that none of the visitors spoke English.
How, you might ask, does anyone teach a class of students from different countries in which no one speaks the same language? Yeah, well, they didn’t know either.
On the drive to the class, they discussed posing that question to the teacher… assuming he spoke English.
To be on the safe side, David drafted Charlie and Joe Dobbs to back him up — international language of music and all that — and it worked.
Children from Japan and elsewhere who didn’t know a word of English still grinned and clapped along with the old fiddle tunes and Appalachian ballads they heard that afternoon.
Time Machine
Alas, we have no recording of that day in the classroom. However, a few weeks later, Dave and Charlie joined Joe in the studios of West Virginia Public Radio to record an episode of Dobbs’ “Music from the Mountains.”
Tunes from that show were almost certainly on the playlist for the Japanese visitors. Click the button below for a six-song sampler:
Meanwhile, if you’d like to know what else was happening in the Floodiverse in 1997, click here to visit those pages of the band’s digital scrapbook on the website.
Radio Floodango
Incidentally, as founders of The Flood a half century ago, Peyton, Bowen and Dobbs top the list of featured players in the “People Picker” section of the band’s free Radio Floodango music streaming service. To hear tracks of each, visit their channels by clicking the graphics below:
And remember, we’ve now got ways to mobilize the ol’ Floodanago. Click here to find out how to put the Flood radio on your computer desktop and on an iPhone to make your Flood fix always just a click away.