Rocking Romney
#362 / Flood Time Capsule: 2012
Twelve years ago this week, The Flood hit the road going east for a memorable weekend and a very special birthday party.
The city of Romney was celebrating its 250th anniversary. A hamlet of about 2,000 people in West Virginia’s Potomac Highlands, Romney is the seat of Hampshire County, the oldest city in the oldest county in The Mountain State.
The Flood was honored to be invited by the Hampshire County Arts Council to do a two-hour concert launching a week of events in the county.
The Wooded Hideaway
Sharon Gallery, who was on the arts council, provided quite comfortable lodging for the visiting Family Flood.
At the end of their five-hour trek from Huntington on the day before the concert, the traveling tribe settled into a beautiful bed and breakfast that Sharon and her husband Phil called the Just Far Enough Getaway in the wooded hills over Augusta, WV.
It was lovely log-paneled house with three bedrooms, two baths, a large living room and a sleek, modern kitchen.
Best of all, a large deck invited everyone to stretch out and jam a bit in the late spring mountain air.
Our old buddy, singer/songwriter Paul Martin — three years before he joined the band himself — made the trip with us to work the sound system, driving in with fiddler Joe Dobbs and sharing a room with him at the B&B.
The next morning, Randy Hamilton — who at that point was just six months into his own first year with the band — cooked breakfast for everyone, since our hosts were away, attending a mass at their church to welcome their new bishop.
After breakfast, the guys tuned up and relaxed a bit until it was time to leave for the concert about a half hour away.
The Show
The venue that afternoon was a shady grassy space in the center of the campus of the Potomac Center (a non-profit facility for children with learning disabilities). What a beautiful green setting for some music!
The show was one of the band’s best in a long time. Paul rocked on the sound system. More than a hundred people filled the audience, more than the band expected, considering how small the town is.
The folks all seemed to have a good time and even bought a lot of the band’s latest album.
Here — in a video that Pamela Bowen shot from her ringside seat — are Joe and Michelle Hoge (“The Chick Singer'“) rocking a Duke Ellington tune:
And the guys got the audience involved for a bit of its patent-pending kazoory:
(If you’d like to see four more videos from the June 17, 2012, show, see the memory pressed in the band’s website “Scrapbook.” Here’s a direct link.)
Jim and Joanne Parker
One of the sweetest memories of that June day was seeing the arrival Pamela’s cousin Jim Parker and his lovely wife, Joanne, who drove 80 miles from their Hagerstown, Md., home to be on hand for the show.
A long-time Flood fan, Jim was always ready to join a sing-along … or when the kazoos came out, a hum-along. In fact, Jim was often the first to help teach others how to play that tricky little instrument.
Today it’s a bittersweet memory. Because Jim was younger than the rest of us, we expected to have joy of seeing his face in the crowd — and maybe hearing him pick his guitar with us at jam sessions — for years to come.
Sadly, it was not to be. Jim was the first victim we knew to die from the horrible COVID-19 epidemic. In late October 2020 — just seven months into the pandemic — we were heartbroken to learn of Jim’s death.
His stories, his thoughts, his humor so enlivened our times together. And when he and Joanne couldn’t attend shows and parties in person, Jim stayed in touch through social media. In fact, just a week or so before his fatal COVID symptoms developed, he was posting kind words on Facebook about the latest developments in The Flood world.
We miss you, Jim.