The Joe Dobbs Book Tour

#95 / Flood Time Capsule: 2012

Ten years ago today, The Flood launched a three-day “Joe Dobbs Book Tour,” with back-to-back shows in three different cities to promote the release of our 77-year-old bandmate’s autobiography, A Country Fiddler.

Each show featured Joe’s performance of his favorite fiddle tunes, followed by his reading of excerpts from the book, which Joe had started working on a decade earlier. Then the band continued entertaining the crowd while Joe met readers and signed books.

The tour brought back Jacob Scarr, home after his first year in college in Colorado, to sit in. Also present was future Floodster Paul Martin, on hand to help with the setup and work the sound system for the shows.

The Stops

The tour opened to a packed house at the Paramount Arts Center in downtown Ashland, Ky.

Charlie’s sister-in-law, Bonnie, who volunteered at the Paramount, told us afterward that regulars were coming up to her all evening to say things like, "Hey, this is the best Thursday night we've had here in a long, long time."

“And,” Charlie told his cousin Kathy in an email later, “Joe, who's played there a lot with another group, says he's never seen so many people there. So I guess we did okay. I know Joe did -- he sold several dozen books!”

The next night, the traveling circus moved on to South Charleston, where we played one of Joe’s all-time favorite local hangouts, a little coffee shop called "The Daily Cup."

It was a much more informal evening, feeling more like a jam session than a show. Many Kanawha County friends were on hand, some of whom got up and danced to the fiddle tunes.

The tour wrapped up on Saturday morning at Huntington’s Heritage Station, “the best of bunch!” Charlie emailed his cousin.

“The room we played in — carpeted, red brick walls, and all this wonderful old dark wood furniture — is tucked inside the 100-year-old railroad depot and was simply perfect,” the email continued. “The sound was great. The crowd was great. Everybody was on.”

As we said in caption for the picture below when we posted it later on Facebook, “it says a lot that the gang was still smiling after three days of back-to-back shows.”

“Joe was really humbled, I think, to realize how much everyone wanted to come out and do this for him,” Charlie told Kathy. “It was really fun (though I do think three shows in row is about all we can handle these days…).”

Douglas Imbrogno Story

One of the reasons we had such good turnout for the shows is that friends in the press helped spread the word, especially Douglas Imbrogno who published a wonderful feature in The Charleston Gazette two days before the tour got underway.

"I'm having the best time I've ever had playing music,” Joe told Douglas for the story. “I never expected to live this long and have this much fun.”

He added that the incentive to write A Country Fiddler was simply to tell his life story to his six children, starting with what life was like when being self-sufficient wasn't a lifestyle choice, but the only choice a family had.

Click the button below for a .pdf Imbrogno’s story, which appeared on July 10, 2012.

Flood Funnies

A favorite souvenir for the tour was the online publication of some “Flood Funnies,” built around photos taken by Lindsey Marshall.

Aftermath

Of course, in shows and in podcasts for months after the tour, we continued to promote the book. Click the button below, for instance, to hear Charlie and Michelle chatting about Joe’s new “kiss and tell book.”

Reviews

Ten years after its publication and seven years after Joe’s death, A Country Fiddler is still on sale on Amazon.com, appreciated by readers around the globe.

“Joe writes from the heart with love, humor, and graphic details of his journey on the bumpy road of life from youth to his golden years,” one reader wrote in the Amazon review section. “I truly enjoyed this read about a country fiddler whose well-written words fiddled his way into my heart.”

The book, wrote another, “is a look into the personality of a real man. … His life story is well told and easy to read, a real treat for a reader, a thinker.”

Perhaps the best reviews were the impromptu ones that came up in the jam sessions at the Bowen House. Click the button below for an audio clip in which Dave Peyton starts out talking about his favorite part about the book. This leads to Dave trading memories with Joe and with jam session regulars Susie and Ervin Jones: