Voodoo Guru of Kazoo

#53 / Flood Time Capsule: Video Feature

For decades, The 1937 Flood’s co-founder David Peyton put on another hat — sometimes literally — to become the band’s “voodoo guru of the kazoo,” leading rollicking hum-alongs with audiences across four states. As the above 12-minute video/audio tribute illustrates, Brother Dave demonstrated this venerable “people’s instrument” to orchestra conductors and barnyard animals alike, adding a kazoo tinge to everything from Wagner to Dixieland classics.

Twenty years ago this spring, for instance, Peyton was “guest kazooist” with the Marshall University Symphony Orchestra. As “first-chair kazoo," Dave was front and center on a Charles Ives experimental piece written in the early 1920s. Now, Ives wrote some pretty strange music -- even a hundred years later, it can sound pretty dang odd -- most of it impressionistic numbers. This one tried to capture the sounds of a football game -- a specific football game between Harvard and Yale in 1897 — including the sounds of the cheers, the band warming up, the players on the field and the roar of the crowd. 

"Dave led a group of kids on kazoo playing the part of the crowd," Charlie told his mom in an email the morning after he and Pamela attended the concert.

"What a hoot!” the email noted. “And when Dave was introduced, he got the biggest hand of the evening.”

That wouldn’t be Dave’s only orchestral experience that year. By summer, Peyton would be teaching the wonders of kazoory to the Huntington Symphony Orchestra during The Flood’s guest appearance at a riverfront “Pops” concert.

More from Br’er Dave!

If you want to spend some more time in Peytonia, spin a few tracks on the David Channel of our free music streaming feature, Radio Floodango, by clicking right here!