The Night TV Came Calling

#39 / Flood Time Capsule: 2009

For most of The Flood’s long life, there has been, of course, no video. Even until relatively recently, aside from snippets of news film at events we played and occasional video shot by friends, the media record of the band’s comings and goings was pretty much limited to audio files and still photographs.

But all that started to change on a winter’s night 13 years ago this week when WSAZ-TV’s Tim Irr dropped by one of our weekly rehearsals and produced a feature story that beautifully captured the fun and foolishness of evenings at the Bowen house.

Now, Tim is an old friend of the Bowens — he and his family live not far away in the same South Side neighborhood of Huntington — and Charlie and Pamela had invited him to simply come by and listen to the music some night as a treat during his dinner break between his 6 and 11 p.m. newscasts. They never meant to suggest that he should come and work.

But work he did! That night Tim filmed for more than hour, catching a number of tunes and interviewing members of the band and the audience.

It was a particularly good turnout that night. Susie and Ervin Jones were on hand, as were Rose Riter and her friends, Shirley and Norman Davis, who just happened to be making their very first visit to Floodlandia that evening. Meanwhile, from Ashland, Nancy McClellan and Zoe Brewer drove in as well as Donna Chaffin, Doug's wife. And we had Mike Smith sitting in to join Joe on fiddle.

In his report, Tim interviewed Rose and Shirley and Norman. From the band, he talked with Bowen and Peyton, and with young Jacob Scarr, who had started jamming with the band a few years earlier and would become an official member of The Flood later that winter. Here is the broadcast that resulted from Tim’s Feb. 18, 2009, visit:

The Flood Gates Open

In many ways, Tim’s piece is a seminal moment in The Flood Story. First, WSAZ is so widely viewed that his feature story was seen by other pickers who then were inspired to start coming by the band’s weekly sessions to jam with us. Often they brought even more friends to listen and to share tunes and stories.

Lights! Camera! Action!

Secondly, Tim’s visit caused The Flood to step up its technical game to keep up with The Cool Kids. Video cameras! We needed video cameras! “Time’s a-wastin’,” one fan told us. After all, by 2009, YouTube already was four years old, for goodness’ sake!

By that spring, we had sprung for some of those new low-cost video cameras, and immediately band manager Pamela Bowen took charge of The Flood’s cinematic department, regularly shooting videos at jam sessions and shows. Her work continues today, filling the website’s Our Videos page.

Parties Celebrated in Our First Feature Film

Those new video resources couldn’t have come at the better time, because old and new friends continued to fill the weekly jam sessions. Many an evening several dozen listeners and players were crammed into the Bowen house’s practice space. Over the next three years, the weekly gatherings morphed into mini-parties, with Pamela and her camera right in the middle of it all.

Oh, eventually we did have to curtail these joyful jams so we could take the sessions back to the rehearsals they were originally intended for, but to this day we fondly remember The Party Years of 2009 to 2011. In fact, those wild, silly, wonderful nights are the subject of “Flood and Friends,” a feature film we produced in 2018. You can view it for free right here:

And it all started because Tim Irr decided to spend his dinner break with us one winter’s night.

More From Our Guests

By the way, if you’d like to hear more from friends who have sat in with The Flood over the years, check out the Guests Channel on our free Radio Floodango music streaming service by clicking here.

In Other Business…

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Meanwhile, we're thinking that new readers maybe could use some help browsing, searching and reading the archives, posting comments and replies and sharing articles, so we’ve expanded our help file to cover these things.

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