The Fairmont Tradition

#113 / Flood Time Capsule: 2003

Nineteen years ago this week, The Flood played the first of what would be a half dozen shows in a decade at a wonderful Fairmont, WV, venue, the amphitheater at the restored 18th century log buildings at Prickett’s Fort State Park. It long hike from Huntington — about 200 miles — but it was fun trip.

The Bowens left about noon for the Friday night gig, along the way, picking up Sam (who, incidentally, had his own special memory that weekend: When the travelers stopped at the Clarksburg’s Applebee’s for a late lunch, Sam ordered a coupla beers, since he wasn't driving, and the young waitress carded him! Quite an ego boost for the 38-year-old...)

Anyway, the three reached the amphitheater — a covered stage with a new sound system — just 10 minutes before the time for the sound check, meeting up with the rest of the guys. As Charlie told him mom in an email later, “We were very pleased to find a great sound guy on the job. It was one of the easiest sound checks we've had and we're really happy with the theater, monitors and so on.”

People started arriving at the theater at 6:30 and by 7 when we started the show, we had a couple of hundred folks, lots of them fellow musicians, many of whom also fans of Joe Dobbs' weekly ‘Music from the Mountains’ radio show.

"We launched right into our swing/jugband tunes with ‘Somebody Stole My Gal’ and immediately started connecting with the crowd. Very good listeners -- very appreciative of good soloing, harmony," Charlie reported.

"The only difficulty I had all evening was in the third tune of the first set -- ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ -- when I broke a string on my guitar. That's the first time I've done that on stage since probably the 1970s. Weird, helpless feeling when it happens. Of course, I had replacement strings in my case and so did Joe. And the cool thing is the band just kept on playing while I stepped back and replaced the string and got back for the finish. I think that crowd appreciated it that we didn’t interrupt the show for something like that.”

In the second set, we had a surprise for them. One of Joe's new friends in the audience was a very young fiddler named Zach Fanok, 15 years old and already winning fiddling contests throughout the region. So we got him up on stage to play "Ragtime Annie" with us. The crowd loved it.

We wrapped up the show with a couple of jump tunes and then our show-ending "San Francisco Bay Blues," but the crowd didn't want it to be over yet. They stayed for two encores. Pretty cool night. Later, the venue’s director said she had been told by many people that it was the best concert of the season and they wanted us back next year.