The Flood Lite Story

#274 / Flood Time Capsule: 2005

On an autumn Friday night in Huntington’s southern hills 18 years ago this week, a trio of Floodsters played eating-drinking-schmoozing music for a joyful party.

Honestly, with the temperature heading toward freezing overnight, early November wasn’t exactly a great time for outdoor picking, but our hosts — Staige and Sharon Davis of Ridgewood Road — rolled in portable heaters, making for the bandstand a rather toasty corner of their patio.

Still, the chill in the air put at least one young party-goer in a holiday mood. Spying our Santa-hatted fiddler, she rushed forward to give Joe Dobbs a hopeful hug.

Click the button below for a couple of tunes ("Up a Lazy River" and "Somebody Stole My Gal") from the evening:

Birth of Flood Lite

For most of its half-century-long life, The Flood has been a rather large band (safety in numbers and all that…) and while it is cool to have all the musical options that such a plus-sized aggregation offers, it also can present problems.

Logistics alone — getting a half dozen folks and their instruments on stage and properly miked — always is a challenge at live shows. And the band routinely loses potential paying gigs to less expensive trios and duos.

Then there’s the scheduling. Just ask the band’s long-suffering manager Pamela Bowen about the nightmares of trying to arrange appearances for the group when you have juggle so many individual calendars.

So it’s only natural that over the years The Flood has also supported break-out ensembles for special occasions, such as background music for parties.

We even gave these mini-imaginings of The Flood their own names. Whenever four Floodsters gather, it is Flood Plain; downsize further and it’s Flood Lite.

Throughout much of the 2000s and early 2010s, the slim, trim troupe was Joe on fiddle, Doug on bass and Charlie on guitar and vocals.