Remembering Fret 'n Fiddle's Birth
#1 / Flood Time Capsule: 1976
Forty-five years ago this week, the Peytons and the Bowens took part in Huntington's worst kept secret of the season, picking at the PRE-grand opening of fiddler Joe Dobbs’ famed music store, Fret ’n Fiddle on West 14th Street. By Thanksgiving 1976, Joe and his brother Dennis were just firming up plans for what would become that West Virginia institution.
“Though we opened the store with less than $200,” Joe later recalled in his book Country Fiddler, “we had a backlog of repair work. It was our only income in the beginning.” But they also had something else: a lot of local good will.
By then, Joe had been in our circle of friends for only about a year and a half — David and Charlie had met Joe at Huntington’s Dogwood Arts and Crafts in April 1975 — but he already was a mainstay in the new Flood, having begun a lifelong friendship with them and with the band’s other founder, Roger Samples. Joe and Dennis — who had just moved his family to West Virginia from Louisiana — were also jamming regularly with The Flood’s extended family of friends, like Susan and David Holbrook, Bill Hoke, Jack Nuckols and Ron Sanders of The Kentucky Foothill Ramblers, Buddy Griffin and The Samples Brothers, Bob and Cathie Toothman, and many more.
By November 1976, The Dobbs brothers still were a few months away from inviting in the public, but it was only natural while the store was still a-borning that they would call on The Flood and friends to come out and bless the new enterprise. It was the night before Thanksgiving, come they did! Pickers and singers filled the new little shop in the space the Dobbses had rented in a yellow brick building at 524 West 14th Street in Huntington’s Old Central City district. It would be the first of many jam sessions in that special spot before Fret 'n Fiddle moved to several new locations, eventually settling for good in St. Albans, WV.
Incidentally, also on hand that chilly November night was artist Sue Wroblewski, who sat in the corner making charcoal sketches of the goings-on. Among the images Sue saved on her pad that evening was this sketch of Charlie and Dave in mid-jam. Joe's daughter, Diana Johnson, remembers Sue -- a Michigan native then living with her husband and children at Mam-Maw Lake in East Lynn, WV -- also designed the Fret 'n Fiddle logo that Joe use the rest of his life. Besides sketches, Sue also restored old photos, custom-painted motorcycles and helmets and painted murals on vans.