That Thing We Have for Taylor Books

#349 / Flood Time Capsule: 2002

The Flood’s decades-long love affair with Charleston’s Taylor Books began 22 years ago this week, when the band played its first gig there just a few years after the iconic venue opened on the city’s picturesque Capitol Street.

Ann Saville — who with her husband, Dr. Paul Saville, created the bookstore in the shell of a former shoe store at 226 Capitol Street — was a fan of Joe Dobbs’ “Music from the Mountains” show on West Virginia Public Radio.

So when the Savilles decided to start featuring live music on weekends at the shop, Ann asked Joe if he could use his show to help spread word about upcoming events, and it only made sense that Joe’s own band would be among the first to perform there.

Taylor Books’ invitation to The Flood came at an auspicious time. As reported earlier, the band already had launched its 2002 “grand tour” of gigs around the state to promote its first studio album. Taylor would be a profitable stop.

"The crowd was small, but enthusiastic," Charlie Bowen told his mom in an email the next morning. "The tables were filled for both sets, so I guess that's a good sign.”

It was the first of many Flood gigs at Taylor Books over the decades, dates that sometimes also happened to mark milestones in the band’s life.

Twelve Years On…

For instance, a dozen years after that maiden flight, it was a gig at Taylor that turned out to be Joe’s last out-of-town job with the band he helped form 40 years earlier.

That was in July 2014. It was difficult time for our 80-year-old fiddling co-founder. Two days before the gig, doctors had inserted stents in his kidneys to increase blood flow. This came six months after Joe had been hospitalized to have heart stents replaced. In another six months, his health would further fail; at the start of the following autumn, we lost him.

But, of course, no hint of that was evident on that happy summer night in 2014. On the contrary, “I gotta say it was one of the best gigs we've had in years,” Charlie wrote in an email to his cousin Kathy the next day.

“It's such a neat place to play,” he added, “a little independent bookstore/coffee house with a lot of charm and personality. Oh, it is a very tight space for a seven-member band to play — I said at one point that I've never been on a submarine, I imagine that's how it'd feel! — but the crowd is so warm and friendly, and everyone just rocked."

Michelle’s Crowd

That was special evening in another way too: it was the band’s first gig after Michelle’s marriage to Stephen Lewis, “and many folks in the audience were her good friends,” Charlie noted. “What a great night for The Family Flood.”

Over the years, we often thought of Taylor Books jobs as being “Michelle gigs.” Because the venue was a mere dozen miles from Michelle’s Cross Lanes, WV, home in those days, we could usually count on a goodly number of Michelle fans in the crowd whenever we landed on Capitol Street:

The Chick Singer could even draw them out on cold, rainy winter’s nights. “The drive to Charleston for the gig was through pure pea-soup,” Charlie reported to Kathy in an email following a January 2017 appearance, “and we had to unload in all the equipment — the sound gear and the instruments — in the rain. But once we got set up, it was a fine evening. Good crowd and everyone was in top form.”

Here's a video from that cozy night:

Taylor as a Testing Station

We sometimes even used Taylor Books as a testing ground for new material. For example, 2017 was a busy year, as The Flood worked on the rollout for the then-new Route 60 Saturday Night shows.

Since The Flood had never been a house band before, we had to explore the kind of tunes we needed in reserve for such honors. Our goal for that particular Taylor Books show, then, was an ambitious one: two hours of all new music, stuff we had never done at a public show before.

“The highlight of the evening,” band manager Pamela Bowen recorded in her journal, “was a performance of perhaps the most beautiful song ever written about a state, called 'West Virginia Chose Me' by Colleen Anderson.”

Anderson — originally from Michigan, coming to West Virginia as a VISTA volunteer in the 1960s — “finished college in West Virginia and stayed,” Pamela noted, “making a living as a writer, essayist, graphic designer, writing workshop conductor and more.”

Anderson wrote copy for a yearly West Virginia tourist magazine and was a regular essayist on public radio. It was at the radio station that she became friends with Michelle, who in those days was in charge of fund-raising for WV Public Broadcasting.

"For many years I’ve been urging Charlie to include ‘West Virginia Chose Me’ in the band’s repertoire," Pamela noted, “but he just can’t sing it without tearing up. (It’s that touchingly beautiful.) Finally, he asked Michelle if she could sing it, and they’ve been working on it, with beautiful harmony. Taylor Books was its public debut.”

Colleen Anderson was in the Taylor Books audience that night for the performance, “and Michelle couldn’t get through it perfectly either,” Pamela reported, “her voice audibly cracking on a particularly poignant verse. Colleen got a kick out of that.”

Here is audio of a dozen minutes from the first set of the evening, including Colleen Anderson’s lovely West Virginia tribute: