Reconnecting with Roger

#156 / Flood Time Capsule: 1995

After a drought in all things Floodish for a few years starting in the late 1980s, the urge surged to get the band back together again, inspiring a momentous road trip to Kentucky 27 years ago this week.

Music and stories shared that day in an old farmhouse in the wilds of Clark County turned out to be just the incentive the boys needed to get back to regular jam sessions.

The morning’s trek from Huntington to Mount Sterling followed the same path that Roger and Tammy Samples had taken five years earlier when they moved their young family from their native West Virginia to the green rolling hills of the Bluegrass State.

There the Samples settled into a lovely, 1930s-era house perched on 500 acres known to the locals as “Sunnyside Farm.” They rented the pastoral spread from an eccentric matron of a Kentucky blue-blood family who just took a shine to the young couple.

“We spent eight wonderful years there,” Tammy recalled recently, “and music filled every room in one form or another. It was especially beautiful at Christmas time when we would bring in a real tree and enjoy fires in one of the three fireplaces and candles in the windows.”

With 14-foot ceilings and wood plank floors, the place was wonderful … well, except perhaps in summertime. With no air conditioning, it could be… uh… humid.

Their new Kentucky home also was rather isolated, especially during bad weather, “but we didn’t care!” Tammy added. “The family bundles up in front of the fire and drank cocoa, and Roger played tunes on the old guitar. Even a little dancing!”

It wasn't wintry, though, on that particular December Saturday in 1995 when David and Susan Peyton and Charlie and Pamela Bowen rolled in from back east. On the contrary, the weather that day was positively April-like.

Being good Appalachians, of course, the visitors also brought food with them. The night before the trip, Pamela made stew and Susie made bread and salad, which Tammy set out with the lunch that she and her daughters had prepared for them all.

After chatting up and chowing down on the house’s screened-in porch, Dave, Rog and Charlie moved back inside to the enormous living room for some music, remembering all the tunes with which the trio had founded The Flood 20 years earlier. As the guys picked and sang, Susie and Pamela mother-henned Tammy, the youngest of "the band wives,” who was expecting her and Roger’s third daughter, Cathleen, in five months.

Following several hours of picking and then a leisurely walk around the grounds, petting the dogs and cats, the six of them came back to a glorious dinner. Then, after jamming for another few hours, the West Virginia travelers hugged and kissed their hosts and headed back out into the dark for the long journey home.

That Christmastime visit with the Samples clan was important in Flood history for at least two reason:

— It was the first of a number of reunions in the Mount Sterling branch of the Floodisphere, watching that lovely, talented family grow.

— And Charlie and Dave had such a good time at Sunnyside that they soon were reaching out to the fourth of the original amigos — fiddler Joe Dobbs — and within a year, regular Flood jams began again, continuing to this day.