The Flood’s First Trip to a Recording Studio

#220 / Flood Time Capsule: 2001

Twenty-two years ago this month, The Flood began recording its first studio album, gathering in the Charleston studios of Joe Dobbs’ “Music from the Mountains” radio show, which he hosted weekly on West Virginia Public Radio.

Buddy Griffin at the Board

Working the controls for the project was the incomparable Buddy Griffin, who is not only a world-class fiddler, but also first-rate at fiddling with the knobs and levers of audio engineering.

(We were thrilled, incidentally, earlier this month when Buddy was inducted into the 2023 class of the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame. It is long-overdue recognition for an extraordinarily influential Mountain State treasure. We’re pleased that now future generations of music lovers will learn about Buddy Griffin.)

The Expanding Flood

At that initial June recording session, The Flood was still a foursome — Joe Dobbs, Dave Peyton, Doug Chaffin and Charlie Bowen — but by the end of Summer 2001, the band would grow by 50 percent, the original quartet being joined by Sam St. Clair on harmonica and Chuck Romine on tenor banjo.

The new and improved Flood quickly decided many of the tunes waxxed at the that first session needed to be re-recorded as a sextet.

However, a few songs from the June 6, 2001, outing did find their way on to the album, including this rendition of “Come All Ye Fair and Tender Maidens.” Click the button below to hear it:

By the way, as reported earlier in Flood Watch, this number has its own long history with The Flood. The late Roger Samples helped Charlie come up with the unusual arrangement while the two sat at the kitchen table of the Bowens’ South Side Huntington home sometime in the early 1980s.

As a tribute to Rog’s long history with his Flood family, we wanted to be sure to include the song on the band’s first album.

A Double Album Night

It was in September that the newly expanded Flood got together with Buddy to finish the album. “Just come on back," Buddy had said. "Once more, with feeling -- AND banjo and harmonica!"

Going in, everyone figured it would be a busy evening in the little Charleston studio, but it turned out to be a whole lot busier than we even expected.

That's because after the session with the full band was over and everyone was packing up, Joe cornered Doug and Charlie and asked them to hang around because he had an idea to record “just a couple more things."

Well, "a couple more" became another "couple more" and then a "couple more" after that, mostly the swing tunes Joe loved from the 1930s, such as this track from the night:

Ultimately, all those couple-mores meant that by midnight the Dobbs-Chaffin-Bowen trio (the little band within a band that we came to call "Flood Lite") recorded a dozen tracks that would become the core of Joe's own new album, Fiddle and the Flood.

How We Remember It….

So, Sept. 19, 2001, went down in Flood lore as the night that gave birth to two separate albums.

"The next morning," Doug later recalled, "I didn't have any feeling left in my fingers, but, I swear, I'll never know how Joe even held his fiddle for five hours, much less played it like that!"

And here’s a clip of Doug, Chuck and Charlie recalling that evening:

And here’s a link to one of track by the entire band from that long autumn night, a tune that features the driving rhythms of Chuck’s banjo and Doug’s bass along with David’s stellar display of kazoory:

Twenty years later we put the full album online so nowadays you can play it for free on our Radio Floodango music streaming feature. Click here to give it a spin.

After the album was released in early 2002, the band hawked it in a year of shows around the state, an effort we remember with a grin as our “Grand Tour.”