Our Dennis Dobbs Days

#199 / Flood Time Capsule: 1995

Dennis Dobbs, fiddlin’ Joe’s baby brother, was a witness — and best of all, sometimes a participant — in The Flood’s earliest days in the 1970s.

Then 28 years ago this week, Dennis returned to the scene of all those good times to play a brief, but vital role in the band’s re-awakening after almost a decade of near hibernation.

Today everything we do — from our weekly podcasts to our regular shows and our various projects like this very newsletter — owes much to that particular Dennis Dobbs visit.

That’s because it was during that April 1995 reunion that Dennis grinned and said to us in his smooth Southern drawl, “What the hell, people? Pick! It’s what y’all do, dammit.”

We thank Dennis Dobbs every day for that loving kick in our collective caboose.

Dennis and Family, Act I

Originally, Dennis came into our lives a year after brother Joe Dobbs began playing with The Flood in 1975. As Joe later recalled in his autobiography, A Country Fiddler, “He had been two years old when I left home. My family lived far away. I saw him only when we went to Louisiana to visit. Dennis brought his wife, Barbara, their son Chris and daughter Candice, who was a baby.”

In those days, each of the Dobbs brothers was involved in a different aspect of the music business. Joe had converted the basement of his Wayne County, WV, home into a repair shop for musical instruments.

Dennis worked at Dew Music, a large retail music store in Monroe, Louisiana.

Surprised at the stack of instruments he found at his brother’s home, Dennis said, “Joe, you should open a music store, Then you would have the traffic to sell new guitars. Selling someone a guitar is much better than gluing one. You’re passing up a lot of business.”

At first, Joe wasn’t interested. He didn’t have the capital to stock a retail outlet, he said. “Dennis went back to Louisiana,” Joe wrote in his book, but “in just a few days he called and wanted to know if I would be interested in going into business with him.”

Joe was beginning to warm to that idea himself. However, he said he had two conditions — he didn’t want to open the doors at 9 every morning and he wanted his weekends free to play his fiddle at gigs and festivals — and both were okay with his brother.

“Dennis believed he could teach me the retail business,” Joe wrote, “and that I could teach him the techniques of repairing. He would be glad to open the store when I wanted to be out playing my fiddle. And so it was.”

As reported here earlier, Joe and Dennis opened Fret ’n Fiddle in the spring of 1977 in a cozy little space on Huntington’s West 14th Street. For the next four decades, the legendary West Virginia music store was a friendly landing pad for generations of musicians.

Dennis, Act II

Dennis quickly immersed himself in the West Virginia music scene.

He became a regular at the Bowen Bash music parties, jamming with The Flood and its friends and helping out on various projects.

He was on stage with The Flood at its first memorable gig, playing at Memorial Field House as one of the opening acts for Little Jimmy Dickens, as reported earlier.

(Thirty-five years later, the Family Flood was still talking about that night, as demonstrated in this track from in a 2012 reunion with Dennis at a Flood jam.)

Dennis and Joe also teamed up to perform and record as The Dobbs Brothers both alone and as an accompaniment to folk musician Mary Faith Rhodes, as seen in this 1978 video:

Busy years they were for Dennis, picking with The Flood and touring with Joe and Mary, all the while working to get the new business on a firm footing.

In the end, though, “Dennis and I never got the store’s sales up to supporting two families,” Joe reported in A Country Fiddler, so in 1980, Dennis moved back to Louisiana and went into a different business with his father-in-law.

“The knowledge I learned from Dennis made it possible for me to move Fret ’n Fiddle to St. Albans and to build a successful business,” Joe added. Joe would run the store for 40 years.

Dennis’s departure came at time of many other changes in the Floodisphere. By then, as reported, the Bowen Bash parties were coming to an end. A number of Flood founders — Roger Samples, Joe and Stew Schneider and Bill Hoke — all married or remarried and many of them moved to new cities. In other words, for most of us, the 1980s meant a retreat from music as we pursued interests of family and livelihood.

Act III

Now flash forward to April 1995. It was a Monday afternoon and, out of the blue, Charlie got a call from Dennis, saying that he and his son (“Little Chris?” “Yep, just graduated from college.” “Sheeeeesh!”) were in St. Albans visiting Joe, and he was wondering if anyone still picked music. Well!

“I drove up last night,’ Charlie told his cousin Kathy in an email the next morning, “and, gawd! everybody was there. It was like old home week. Bill Hoke even drove in three hours from Abingdon, Va., picked for a few hours and then drove back."

The party was at Joe's shop. "Nobody brought guitars," Charlie noted in the email. "We just took 'em down off the walls. What a hoot! It sure was good to see Dennis again.”

And, as noted, it was during the gathering that Dennis gently upbraided his old cohorts for not jamming more often.

Years later, Joe acknowledged that it was that party -- along with another one nine months later at Bob and Cathie Toothman’s house in Ironton — that inspired him to come back to picking with his old Family Flood compadres, a decision that framed the rest of his life.

Dennis in the 21st Century

After that, it took another dozen years for us to see Dennis again. It was in the spring of 2012 — a few weeks before his 61st birthday — that Dennis came north with his grandchildren for a visit. The night before he was to head back to his Texas home, Dennis tagged along with Joe to the weekly Flood jam at the Bowen House. Immediately he slipped right back into the old, familiar mix.

By then, Dennis had played fiddle for a number of years and had developed enough chops to duet with his more seasoned brother. We featured their playing in that week’s podcast. Click this button to hear it:

Meanwhile, here’s a video from the night, featuring some Dobbs fiddling on an old Mississippi John Hurt tune, “Payday.”

Flood Lore

Best of all, Dennis traded stories and quips with his old Flood pals. We close with his purred compliment of Dave Peyton’s stellar kazoory, a remark that prompted this bit of Flood lore: