Joe Dobbs Comes On Board

#62 / Flood Time Capsule: 1975

Under a circus tent down by the river where the city held the annual Dogwood Arts and Crafts Festival in the years before the civic arena was built, Joe Dobbs came into our lives. It was 47 years ago this week that Joe met David Peyton and Charlie Bowen, the duet that had been regularly jamming together for only a little over a year by then.

That particular afternoon, Charlie and Dave had just finished their day’s work in The Huntington Advertiser newsroom and headed down to the festival encampment near the floodwall to play for the hardworking, hard-hustling crafts people who were peddling their creations.

As Joe himself would recall decades later in his autobiography, "A Country Fiddler," the encounter came about because he and his wife, Amy, had come downtown to check out the crafts. While strolling the grounds, they spied a woman weaving cane in the bottoms of ladder-back chairs.

"Sitting in two of the completed chairs were a tall man playing a Guild guitar and short guy playing an Autoharp," Joe wrote. "Both of these musicians looked to be about 30 years old, a hippy version of Mutt and Jeff. The guitar player had medium long hair and an untrimmed beard. The Autoharp player wore a beard but his hair was neatly trimmed. They seemed to be very good friends."

Joe himself was quite memorable too that day, in his bib overalls and Chuck Taylor tennis shoes and with, of course, a coffin-like wooden fiddle case under his arm.

In his book, Joe reports he was reluctant to ask to sit in — thinking his fiddling had gotten a bit rusty in recent years — but nonetheless, he pulled up a finished chair next to Dave and started taking his fiddle out of the case. Initially, no one said a word, until after a moment Joe said, "Would you play an A chord, please?"

Tuned up, Joe at first quietly played along behind some of the tunes that Charlie and Dave had worked out. Then Dave said, "So, you know 'Soldier's Joy'?" Of course he did. Soon the three of them were drawing a crowd.

By summer, Joe was jamming regularly with Dave and Charlie. Not wanting to be left out, Roger Samples, the other founder of The Flood, was driving in from Mason County, WV, to be part of it all. Click here to hear one of Joe’s first tunes with us, his wonderful rendition of “Sail Away Ladies” (with Roger, David and Charlie providing mortal support in the form of chords and rhythm).

That autumn, the new improved Flood — shoot, now we had an actual tribal elder (Joe was all of 42!) — made its first public appearance, inaugurating Joe's four decades of Floodishness. The venue was a weekend-long party at Pamela and Charlie’s house in the South Side of Huntington, a bi-annual event that regulars called “The Bowen Bash.” That weekend recently was commemorated in this video, chapter 3 (“Joe Dobbs’ Coming Out Party”) in our “Bowen Bashes” film series:

Audio Aftermath

Twenty-five years after that momentous April afternoon at the Dogwood Festival, Joe still had good memories of it. In fact, in August 1997, when he was hosting his famed “Music from the Mountains” radio show on West Virginia Public Radio, Joe had Dave and Charlie on as guests, and during a break between tunes, the three reminisced. Click here to hear the 3-minute clip.

And then 20 years after that, a year or so after Joe died, his daughter Diana attended a weekly Flood jam at the Bowen house and added her own take on that fateful summer of ‘75. Click here to hear the 2-minute clip of Charlie and Diana’s conversation that night.

Postscript: The Rug

Joe said he and Amy had such a good time at the Dogwood Festival that they returned to sell a few crafts of their own, including some faux Navajo rugs they had made.

At Christmastime a few years later, Joe gave Pamela and Charlie one of those rugs and to this day it still hangs in The Flood’s weekly practice space in the Bowen house.