Roger Samples' Last Big Blowout

#32 / Flood Time Capsule: 2011

Roger Samples began 2011 in a nightmare that he never woke from. Cancer had been detected — at first in his left lung, later in his trachea — and it would dominate his world for the remaining five years of his life.

An email a day or so after Christmas was how Roger — who had helped create The Flood 40 years earlier, when he was fresh out of Marshall University and just starting his grownup life as a teacher — told us the bad news. In the flurry of subsequent phone calls and text messages, we learned the awful particulars. Chemotherapy and radiation both were ordered; the doctors were pessimistic about the prognosis.

Still, Rog was upbeat, saying he wanted to get us all there for some picking. “If it turns out I got to lose a lung," he told Charlie on the phone that day, “I’d like to get some songs sung first…”

And sing we did!

Eleven years ago this week, Roger’s three original Flood comrades — Joe, David and Charlie – traveled to Mount Sterling, Ky., for a warm and wonderful afternoon of music and stories. Despite bitterly cold weather — temperatures in the single digits under a merciless blue sky — two dozen friends and family came in from three different states to gather around a roaring fire Roger and Tammy tended in the living room fireplace.

Joining Roger’s brothers – Mack and Ted – fiddler Buddy Griffin, bassist John Preston and others, we made music all day long, stopping only for food, drink and, of course, stories. The whole day was exactly what Roger needed. He started his treatment at Lexington’s Markey Center just days later.

Here’s a video from that brittle, bright January.

The Pajama Jams

Memories of that day are still with us. In the spring in 2020 — four years after Roger’s death — as the Covid-19 pandemic began and the world was in quarantine, The Flood wanted to do its part to help lift the spirits of our fellow shut-ins. To that end, we launched a series of video “Pajama Jams.” It was only natural that we’d make one of the first of those weekly films all about Roger’s last big blowout.

Settle back and join hundreds who already have watched this special memorial over the past few years: