Persuasive Nostalgia

#434 / Flood Time Capsule: 2007

The Bowens surprised their old friends with a special gift during the 2006 holiday season. Observing the 25th anniversary of Bowen Bash music parties at which The Flood was born, Charlie and Pamela sent out packages of customized compact discs filled with music that was recorded at those parties.

Reactions came quickly to those 100 tunes from the 1974-1981 parties. On Christmas afternoon, for instance, the Bowens’ phone rang. It was Roger Samples calling from Mount Sterling, Ky.

“Man, I can’t believe this!” Rog said. “I can’t believe you still have all this, but mostly I can’t believe that you put it all together for us. We’ve been playing the discs all day. What a present! My kids are loving hearing their old man and their uncles from ‘back in the day.’”

Reuniting

That was exactly the reaction the Bowens hoped the Bash discs would elicit. Even better was what came next: a reunion with some of those wonderful friends. A week after Christmas, Roger was persuaded by those sweet memories to make the trip from Mount Sterling to jam with his old Flood band mates.

"I think hearing those old Bash tunes really made him homesick, both for West Virginia and for the music," Charlie told his mom in an email 18 years ago this week. It was the first time Rog had been back with the band since the Joe Dobbs surprise birthday party 2 1/2 years earlier.

"And what good music it was last night," Charlie added in the email to his mom. “About 7, the folks started arriving for the jam session and we started picking. It was a good, lively session for the next four hours.

“Lots of good music, harmony, laughs, stories and memories. Good times! And we had a houseful, about a dozen or so.” Roger spent that Wednesday night in the Bowens’ guest room, then lingered the next morning for breakfast and more conversation.

“He talked a lot about the players,” Charlie wrote, “especially Doug Chaffin. He just he couldn't say enough good about Doug. Later that afternoon, long after Rog had gone home, I called Doug to tell him about that. I think that made his day."

Samples would be back several more times over the next few months. Four years later, when Rog entered the last chapter of his life, his final struggle re-energized his Flood outreach.

The Nostalgia Bait Continues

Later that winter, the Bash discs continued to work their magic.

Floodster Emeritus Stewart Schneider devoted an entire edition of his weekly folk music show on WMMT-FM in Whitesburg, Ky., to the bashes and the Bowens’ anniversary recordings.

Stew brought Charlie into the studio to interview him between playing tracks live on the air.

Meanwhile, across the border in his Abingdon, Va., home, their fellow former band mate Bill Hoke heard the broadcast that afternoon and, like Roger, was tempted back into The Flood’s room. By fall, he had dusted off his guitar again and was regularly driving back to Huntington for jams with his old friends.

Meanwhile, closer to home, Stewart occasionally packed up his Autoharp and joined in the jams from time to time.A dozen years later, he appeared as a guest artist on The Flood’s Speechless album.

Bash Redux

Because of the cost and the time involved of digitizing and copying the original tapes, those “Best of the Bash” discs had a very limited distribution. Fewer than two dozen sets in all were ever created.

Then a dozen years later — after YouTube was well established and facilities for basic filmmaking were available on laptop computers — the bash tapes got a major rebirth.

In March 2020, Charlie and Pamela launched a series of eight feature-length movies about the bash years.

Called “The Flood Legacy Films,” the series — put together during the seemingly endless months of quarantine and isolation in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 epidemic — focused on music and images from the parties that in The Flood’s story started it all.