Party for the Party Lady

#305 / Flood Time Capsule: 2008

The woman who hosted decades of parties for her musician friends — including her legendary annual New Year’s Eve bashes each year — finally got a surprise party of her own on a Saturday night 16 years ago this week.

Nancy McClellan's 75th birthday was the reason a Flood contingent ventured out of its cozy hidey hole on a brutal winter’s night to trek to Ashland, Ky., and “quite some evening it was!" Charlie told his mom in an email the next day.

Ah, Miss Nancy

Honestly, we can’t imagine The Flood’s beginnings without thinking of the love and support we got from Nancy and her wonderful husband, Harvey McClellan.

The McClellans are a big chapter in The Flood story from the start. They were there to cheer us on at those formative party years in the 1970s and ‘80s and in the 1990s. It was Nancy who invited us to some of our earlier performances at Ashland’s coffeehouse. And it was only natural for us to dedicate our first studio album to the McClellans.

They continued to be central to us. For instance, it was at a Nancy McClellan party and that we met and persuaded the late Doug Chaffin to join the band, a sweet association that lasted until his death nearly 25 years later.

Nancy’s 75th

So, of course, we had to be there Jan. 19, 2008, to surprise Nancy McClellan on her 75th birthday.

"Pamela and I left Huntington about 6 yesterday evening,” Charlie reported in the morning-after email to his mom, “driving straight to the Ann Davis Gallery in downtown Ashland, where people had already started gathering. Over the next 45 minutes, people just kept coming, many of other musicians who, like us, have been her friends for 40 years or more.”

Zoe Brewer, who owned the gallery, arranged the players to be seated in a circle in the front of the room, so music would already be playing when Nancy walked in.

“And what a scene that was!” Charlie wrote. “She really was surprised, we think. Honestly, I couldn't imagine that she didn't suspect something was up, but seeing her face when she walked in and found 75 people gathered there in her honor... well, it was pretty obvious. What fun!”

Many old friends — Rob McNurlin, Karen and Steve Byington and JoAnn McCoy, Polly Judd and Joyce Newsom and Ernie Tucker and so many others — had braved the cold to be there.

Musically, the evening was interesting. The gallery was a long, narrow room and the musicians later separated themselves into different groups: singers and guitar pickers in the front, fiddlers and old-time musicians in the back.

The Picking

"That's not unusual," Charlie noted. "While there's a lot of mutual respect between the singers (who sort of descend from the folksinger legacy) and the old-time players (who come out of the play-party/dance tradition), but honestly, after an hour or so, we tend to bore each other and gravitate to different corners.

“In a nice long room like that, it works perfectly, since the two groups can play their hearts out and not interrupt each other, and listeners can wander back and forth between the two groups."

Of course, there was lots of food on the long table that stretched from one group to the other, and stories were exchanged all around the room. "Pamela and I stayed until 10:30," Charlie noted, "then headed out into the COLD -- it was already 17 degrees and falling.”

The next morning, folks woke to 8 degrees, coldest day so far that winter. But it was worth it. All that winter, people shared warm memories from that wonderful night.

Afterglow

“A rare individual with a way of making people feel good about themselves and what they do, Nancy McClellan is destined to be remembered in art, songs and stories,” Tim Preston wrote in The Ashland Independent a few days later.

The best quotes in Tim’s story came from the Nancy’s fiddler friends.

“Nancy stands at the top of the mountain surrounded by friends and loved ones,” said Bobby Taylor. “She is in first place when it comes to being a loving soul who has nurtured and made a place for old-time music, folk music and art and she has touched the life of everyone she’s met.”

John Harrod added, “Years from now folklorists will look back, and there will be fiddle tunes named for her and songs and poems honoring her. She is kind of the heart and soul of music around here. I think of her as the patron saint of the music world.”

Five years later, after Nancy died in October 2013, Preston revisited that night in his final story about Nancy and reached out to Charlie for his memories of it.

“You could almost see ‘thought balloons’ saying, ‘I don’t know who you think you are, but I am Nancy’s best friend,’” Bowen told him.

“Each of those people was correct,” he added. “They were her best friends. She had an incredible ability to make you feel important.”