Joe and The Gentle Maiden
#386 / Flood Time Capsule: 1997
By the summer of 1997, the re-united Flood — David Peyton, Joe Dobbs and Charlie Bowen — had been jamming together each week for nearly a year.
The trio wasn’t quite ready to start playing gigs yet — that was still another year or two in the future — but Dave and Charlie happily said “yes” when Joe asked them them to come do an episode of his weekly “Music from the Mountains” show on West Virginia Public Radio.
The Restart
Joe had become a bit disappointed that MftM, which had been on the air more than a decade, lately had drifted away from his original goal of the show being a platform for live, local music. In recent years, he said, it was back to being mainly just record-spinning, so he asked Dave and Charlie to help him again convince network executives that live music was the way to go.
(In The Flood scrapbook, audio of the Aug. 29, 1997, appearance also is a record of what the band was playing in those days just before drawing bassist Doug Chaffin into the mix and heading into the first studio recording a few years later. )
Topics in the conversation between the tunes on the broadcast that evening ranged from how the band got its name to how Dave’s famous dog Fred got a hundred write-in votes for governor in a recent election. Above all, the chatter reflects the joy of old friends just being together on a summer’s night.
Wanna take a break and ramble down memory lane? It’s sure to make you smile, hearing Joe and Dave’s voices again. Click the button below for the entire hour of the 1997 show:
The Standout Song: “The Gentle Maiden”
Most of the songs the trio played that evening were frequently visited numbers from The Flood’s folkier repertoire (“Down by the Willow Garden,” “Banks of the Ohio”), as well as songs that later would appear on Flood albums (“Furniture Man,” “Fair and Tender Maidens,” “I Got Mine” etc.)
But the highlight of the night was Joe’s performance of an Irish aire that he had only recently brought the mix.
Click the button the button below to hear Joe leading the band on his version of “The Gentle Maiden,” a tune he learned from banjoist/fiddler Tony Ellis:
About the Song
There’s no telling how old this melody is, but we know that Irish song collector Edward “Atty” Bunting obtained the melody in 1839 from a “Miss Murphy” of Dublin and published in his Ancient Music of Ireland in 1840, three years before his death.
In 1923, it was among a selection of tunes set for string quartet by British composer William Alwyn in his "Seven Irish Tunes.” Later the song acquired lyrics by Sir Harold Boulton (and if that name sounds familiar, you might be recalling our earlier discussing the history of the Irish tune “The October Wind,” for which Boulton was the lyricist). Famed Irish tenor John McCormack recorded his rendition of “The Gentle Maiden” in 1940.
Gentle Maiden Redux
Sadly, Joe didn’t play this beautiful tune very often, but it did make a surprise appearance a dozen years after his 1997 performance.
It was April 2009 and Joe arrived at The Flood’s weekly rehearsal with a strange new instrument: an eight-string Hardanger fiddle of Norwegian origin. Click the button to hear Joe’s explanation of its design and its “sympathetic strings.”
The fiddle was built by the late West Virginia artisan Arden Bender. Joe’s Fret ‘n Fiddle music store in St. Albans lately had started carrying Bender fiddles, a move that Dave Peyton wrote about in The Charleston Daily Mail. (Click here to read Dave’s December 2007 story.)
Later that spring evening 2009 in the Bowen house, when Pamela Bowen wanted a video of Joe demonstrating the Hardanger, he suddenly returned to “The Gentle Maiden.” Here is that precious moment: