Vandalia Vagaries

#77 / Flood Time Capsule: 2000

Twenty-two years ago this week, The Flood play for the first time at Charleston’s Vandalia Gathering, unleashing a 30-minute set of mostly good-time jug band tunes that managed both to tickle listeners and to irk some of the very folks who invited us there the first place.

The show — performed on an outdoor stage in front of the state capitol complex — was emceed by an old friend, West Virginia fiddling icon John Morris.

John seemed to thoroughly enjoy the band’s unconventional set list, so heavy on hokum of the 1920s and ’30s. The raucous music also energized the crowd. We even had dancers calling for encores as the show ended.

On the other hand, the same show managed to stir a bit of mini-controversy among some of Vandalia’s music traditionalists. As we said that day — shoot, as we would say in many shows in the years to come — The Flood fervently believes that jug band music has as legitimate a place in Appalachian musical history as the fiddle tunes and the square dances.

While the jug band tradition is not always clearly defined in the history books, it apparently began in the hills of Virginia in the early 20th century before traveling on down to more urban areas, migrating in the late ‘20s to river towns like Louisville and Cincinnati (and Huntington and Charleston, for that matter.)

On that May 2000 afternoon, we told our Vandalia listeners that we had been playing hokum music for 25 years by then and that the tunes we played (“Rag Mama,” “Yas Yas Duck” and others) — complete with Dave Peyton's rollicking kazoo solos — could be thought of as mountain pickers imitating the jazz bands they heard on passing riverboats. In other words, this is what can happen, we said, when mountain music comes to town. It was just another twist, we believed, on the folk tradition that the Vandalia Gathering was born to celebrate.

Sadly, not everybody bought what we were selling. Over the years, some staunch folk purists continued to contend that West Virginia’s most eclectic string band just wasn’t West Virginian enough for their festival. For The Flood’s part, we just agreed to disagree.

When "Ain't Misbehavin'" Ain't For Them

All of this is to say that we have never been a darling of the Vandalia organizers. And if we had wanted to change that, we did ourselves no favors with our behavior when they finally did invite The Flood back in 2006.

That year we were scheduled for an evening set in the big hall. However, it was a moment down in the Green Room when we were warming up for our set that seemed to seal our fate. Click here to hear the story as we told it a few years later between tunes at a weekly jam session at the Bowen house.

The late Joe Dobbs always regretted at that incident, thinking that it was his call for “Ain’t Misbehavin’” that evening that had turned off the purists. Honestly, though, the rest of us bore no hard feelings; we thought the whole thing was kind of hilarious. “Their loss,” Peyton said with a sniff and a grin.

Anyway, after that night, it was a full decade before The Flood was invited back to play Vandalia. That occasion was a special tribute for Joe, who had died the previous September.

Our set in that night’s show afforded us an opportunity to acknowledge the debt we owe Joe for bringing such diversity to The Flood’s repertoire. Here’s what we said on stage that evening in our introduction that same darn beloved troublemaker, “Ain’t Misbehavin’.”