Our Baby Pictures: Two From Year #1
#410 / Video Extra / Flood Time Capsule: 1974
A half century ago, in the first full year of Floodishness, Dave Peyton, Charlie Bowen and Roger Samples’ frequent gatherings were just old-fashioned jam sessions, joyful, extemporaneous, improvised … and for the most part, highly forgettable.
Oh, the recollections are sweet, of course, but the music wasn’t especially memorable. Variations on the simple "parkin' lot pickin’” the guys knew from the folk festivals of the day, their evenings together focused on few new ideas, defaulting instead to tunes they had already known for years.
However, something started to change in the autumn of 1974: They began to think like a band.
Starting to schedule regular practice sessions, they each also began to bring new tunes to the mix. They smoothed out harmony vocals and crafted solos. Looking back, we recognize the first baby steps toward building a repertoire of actual arrangements.
The Reason
They had an incentive. With the fall edition of the biannual Bowen Bash coming up, the new Peyton-Samples-Bowen contingent wanted to have some fresh stuff to share with their friends at the next party.
By that November weekend at the Bowen house, they had two tunes shined up and ready for prime time. The following pair of videos feature those new songs as they were performed at the Nov. 1-2, 1974, bash.
The Paxton Number
In the video below is the first number to get that special treatment, a song from the great Tom Paxton's 1969 album, The Things I Notice Now:
“Wish I Had a Troubadour" was one of many songs Paxton wrote over the years to his wife, Midge, who was just 18 when she and Tom met in 1963 in the early folk scene in New York’s Greenwich Village.
Midge and Tom were married more than 50 years. (She passed away in 2014 after persevering against an auto-immune disorder for many years.)
Aunt Jennie’s Tune
The second song readied for sharing that fall was Dave and Roger’s duet of Aunt Jennie Wilson’s moving “Banks of the Old Guyan.” Here’s that video:
As noted in an earlier Flood Watch article, Dave, as a reporter for The Huntington Advertiser, met banjo-playing Aunt Jennie in Logan County, WV, a few years earlier.
Peyton interviewed her a number of times for stories and, along the way, fell in love with her music.
When he and Rog starting playing as a duo in the pre-Flood days of the early 1970s, Dave just naturally brought a number of Jennie’s tunes with him.
Roger — who always had the heart and head of an arranger/composer — created an extraordinary musical setting for the ring of Dave’s vocals on “Banks,” which they continued to play in the nascent Flood.
Today as we look back and listen, we know how fortunate we are that Floodster Emeritus Stewart Schneider, running the recorder at so many of the bashes over the next decade, pushed all the right buttons at just the right time to capture that moment.
More, You Say?
As noted, both these tunes were recorded at Pamela and Charlie Bowen’s house. There’s a lot more to say about those Bowen Bashes; that particular weekend is featured in this video:
It’s Episode Two in The Flood’s eight-part “legacy film series” about the parties that were so central to The Flood’s birth. For more information about the entire film series, which is viewable online for free, click here.