Joe in Africa

#464 / Flood Time Capsule: 1978

Flood fiddler Joe Dobbs was 42 in the spring of 1978 when he had one of the defining experiences of his life. For decades afterward, he would frequently tell stories about the month he spent in Africa.

Between April 12 and May 10, Joe accompanied folk artist Mary Faith Rhoads on U.S. State Department tour of Africa with nearly 30 programs that took them through Tunisia, Sudan, Algeria, Niger, Upper Volta, Cameroon and Chad, as well as Egypt and the Ivory Coast.

How It Happened

As Joe told writer Jim Hatlo for a story the next year in the second-ever issue of Frets magazine, he and his brother Dennis Dobbs had met Mary a few years earlier at a West Virginia folk music festival, to which she had traveled from her New York City home.

Soon afterward the three began doing occasional shows, billed as Mary Faith Rhoads and The Dobbs Brothers. In September 1977, as the three were returning from attending the National Flat-Picking Championship in Winfield, Kansas, Mary told them about her concert experiences abroad (including gigs throughout France).

“What you need is a roadie who doubles on fiddle!” Joe quipped.

Joe was joking, but the remark resonated with Mary, who less than three months later took him up on that.

“Get your passport,” she said. “We’re going to Africa.”

Catalyst Mary Faith

Mary Faith — an accomplished singer of traditional tunes, as well as a recognized authority of the hammered and mountain dulcimers and a player of guitar, banjo, concertina, piano, Autoharp and harmonica — had already done a solo trip to Saudi Arabia, Madagascar and Botswana.

That three-week tour had gone so well that her sponsor, the U.S. Information Agency, invited her to make a longer tour in 1978, and to take second musician with her. Mary chose Joe.

The state department made the appropriate travel arrangement and paid Joe and Mary concert fees at each stop. Because of the nature of the tour, they seldom found themselves giving large concerts, though they did make several university performances and performed on Algerian radio.

Speaking of radio, in 2003, Joe shared the story with his friend the late Buddy Griffin on a radio broadcast from Glenville State University. Click the button below to hear that 4-minute sound clip:

A Glenville Connection

“One of the highlights was playing at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Khartoum,” Joe told Frets magazine.

“We really didn’t know how long we were supposed to play. We performed outside, and we found out later that there were lots of dignitaries there, ambassadors from a lot of different countries. When we finished they gave us a standing ovation, but I didn’t realize that was happening — I thought it was one of their local customs.

“What was really ironic was that after the program, a man came up with his wife and two daughters. He was the Italian ambassador, and he said that he’d been to the Glenville State Folk Festival in Glenville, WV, back in 1963. He said he liked the music and said that if he ever got back to the United States, he’d like to go to Glenville again.

“I told him that was where Mary and I had been the week before. I thought it was strange. Here we were on the banks of the Nile River, and this guy comes up and wants to know if we’re familiar with the Glenville State Folk Festival!”

If you'd like to read the entire three-page article from the April 1979 issue of Frets, click here.

Also the Huntington newspapers covered the tour, with these pieces you can read, an advance story by Sara Berkeley (Huntington Advertiser, March 21, 1978) and a followup report by Dave Peyton (Herald-Advertiser, June 5, 1978).

Universal Language

As he would say many times over the decades, it was while touring Africa that Joe would realize, probably for the first time, that music is a universal language.

“After we’d play, we’d sit down with people,” he told Hatlo, “and they couldn’t talk to me, but they felt that they knew me, and we felt like we knew one another, because we shared music together.”

The same idea was on Joe’s mind a dozen years later when the fiddler sat down in Beckley, WV, to be interviewed by Andy Ridenour on a West Virginia Public TV show. Here’s an excerpt from that 30-minute broadcast:

A few years later, Joe revisited that theme while being interviewed by host Brad Becker during The Flood’s 2009 appearance on Kentucky’s Red Barn Radio show. Click the button below to hear Joe’s thoughts on that night:

Footnote: Albums with Mary Faith

Soon after the 1978 Africa trip, Joe and his brother Dennis Dobbs would team up with Rhoads on a pair of LP albums on the Dobbses’ new “Fret ‘n Fiddle” label.

The first, released in 1978, included a variety of instrumentals, ranging from “Red Wing,” “Arkansas Traveler” and “Red Rocking Chair” to “Martha Campbell,” “St. Anne’s Reel” and “Flowers of Edinburgh.”

The second album, released the following year, was called Take Care of Yourself and covered everything from Old Time to some Mary Faith Rhoads originals.