Ramblin' with The Ramblers

#181 / Flood Time Capsule: 1974-75

The Flood was born among friends. Funny, loving, inspiring friends.

The earliest boosters of the band-to-be were the members — and the wonderful wide circle of fans — of The Kentucky Foothill Ramblers, banjoist H. David Holbrook’s extraordinary old-time string band of the early 1970s.

Picking at parties — at the Bowens’ house in Huntington’s South Side, at the Peytons’ place out on Mount Union Road, at the Holbrooks’ Spring Valley home — we learned an untold number of great old tunes. Songs ranged from the old gold of Uncle Dave Macon, Charlie Poole and The Carter Family to classic musical re-imaginings by The New Lost City Ramblers and The Greenbriar Boys, by The Dillards and The Holy Modal Rounders.

Just months after Charlie and Dave started regularly jamming together at that 1973 New Year’s Eve party, Rambler regulars started coming around to help the new duo get its groove.

Jack Nuckols

By Spring 1974, for instance, old friend Jack Nuckols occasionally lent us a little fiddle magic. Charlie had known Jack since 1963, when they met in high school, where Nuckols became a star of the school band’s percussion section, following his father’s love of drums. Later, Jack took up guitar and play in a local Chad Mitchell Trio cover band called The Wayfarers; soon after that, he was drawn to more traditional folk music.

By the time he and Charlie got to the University of Kentucky, Jack was playing the mountain dulcimer and fiddle at The Catacombs coffeehouse and would be part of the earliest incarnations of The Kentucky Foothill Ramblers with Dave Holbrook, Jim Strother and Ronnie Sanders.

Here, from spring 1974, Jack is sitting in on fiddle with Peyton and Bowen on a few old-time tunes:

Bill Hoke

A few months later, another Rambler, the incomparable Bill Hoke — who eventually was to join up as an official Floodster — dropped in to do some dobro with us. As noted in an earlier report here, Bill always was intrigued by new musical experiences.

Now, The Flood has never had a dobro in the band, but we came darn close in the autumn of 1974 because of Bill. The story goes that Charlie — in rare moment of disposal income in the Bowen household — bought a beautiful steel-bodied resonator guitar. He probably had visions of a future in blues, but quickly figured out this new instrument was much more guitar than he could handle.

Enter Bill Hoke. He borrowed the box and added a extension nut to raise the strings so it could get in touch with its dobro nature.

The dobro was only a short-time diversion with The Flood, but Bill would be back a bit later to play upright bass for a few of the goldest years of early Floodishness.

Your Time Machine Awaits…

Want a sample of all this? Click the button below to tool on back to November 1974 for a tune (Bryan Bowers’ “Berkeley Woman” from the 1970s) played by Charlie and David at a Bowen Bash, with Jack on dulcimer and Bill subtly in the background on dobro:

Taking It Public

Thoughout that fall and into the winter of ‘75, the Peytons and the Bowens regularly partied with The Ramblers, sometimes even taking the parties public.

Forty-eight years ago this week, for instance, on a wintry Sunday night, the bunch headed over to Marshall University’s coffeehouse at the Campus Christian Center for an evening of old hymns, psalms and rollicking spirituals.

A highlight of evening was Dave Peyton’s rendering of “Call Him Up (Jesus on the Mainline.”). It was a song he first heard a few years earlier at a snake handlers’ church that he found in rural Kanawha County, WV, while working on a story as a reporter for Huntington’s Herald-Advertiser.

The song, which became beloved among our circle of singers, was to conclude many a picking session in the next decade. Click this button to hear the tune as the group performed it on Feb. 23, 1975, at Marshall:

Davy Peyton’s Debut

Historical sidetone: In this particular recording from the coffeehouse, listen closely and you’ll hear a 4-year-old Dave Peyton Jr. singing along.

(Yep, like Socrates, we’ve always been answerable to charges of corrupting the youth….)

Want More? The Bowen Bashes

From the very start, the Bowen Bashes, multi-day music parties at which The Flood was born, featured the Kentucky Foothill Ramblers, as demonstrated by the introductory episode of our legacy film series:

And if one episode isn’t enough, the entire eight-part series is on YouTube and can been reached from this page on The Flood’s website.