Welcome Jack Nuckols to the Family Flood!
#277 / News Extra
Jack Nuckols, who for a month has been jamming with us on assorted percussion instruments — from bongos and spoons to cool brushes on snare and hi-hat — has become the latest member of The Flood, and we are thrilled.
Playing his first gig with the band just last weekend, he wowed the folks at Sal’s Speakeasy in Ashland, Ky., for three hours last Saturday night.
Jack is a veteran educator. A retired high school history teacher, he now teaches as a adjunct professor. He also was recently re-elected as a long-time member of the South Point, Ohio, school board.
Long History
Jack and Sarah Nuckols have been friends of The Flood since the very beginning.
In fact, as Flood co-founder Charlie Bowen recently noted, “Jack is one of the few functioning musicians still around who was actually at those parties where The Flood was born in the ‘70s.”
Bowen and Nuckols have known each other for 60 years, having met in 1963 in Miss Reynolds’ speech class at Ashland’s Paul G. Blazer High School. (They were the two tallest students in the class, so they both were invited to sit in the back of the room so as not to obstruct the view of other young scholars; there Jack and Charlie discussed that if the school ever had a play about Abe Lincoln, the two of them could arm-wrestle for the role.)
Musical Beginnings
In those days, Jack was a star of the school band’s percussion section, following his father’s love of drumming.
It was then that Jack also took up guitar and played in a local Chad Mitchell Trio cover band called The Wayfarers (with Jim Canfield and David Chinn).
But then Jack was drawn to more traditional folk music. By the time he got to college at the University of Kentucky, Jack was playing a mountain dulcimer (“Waterbound and I can’t get home….”) at the coffeehouses.
He also was be part of the earliest incarnation of the great Kentucky Foothill Ramblers with his brother-in-law, H. David Holbrook, along with friends Jim Strother and Ron Sanders.
The One That Got Away
The truth is that we in The Flood have been angling to reel Jack Nuckols into our band for, well, for decades, but he always seemed to slip the hook.
By 1974, Jack had taken up fiddle, and just a few months after David and Charlie had started picking together, the pair began imagining Nuckols in their mix.
We even have audio evidence. In the following track, recorded on an April evening 49 years ago, you can hear the results when Peyton and Bowen visited the Nuckols’ place to sit in for an evening of fiddle tunes. Click the button below for “June Apple,” “Angeline Baker” and “Lynchburg Town.”
Can’t you just hear Bowen and Peyton making their pitch?
“Aw, c’mon in, Jack. The water’s fine!”
Jack smiled, nodded … and swam away.
That wasn’t our only attempt. Just five years after that session, we tried to hook him to be The Flood’s rhythm section. Check out the audio in this video and hear Jack rocking it on spoons on a rowdy session with Joe, Roger, Stew, Bill and Charlie:
Again, this time citing the demands of work and of a growing family, Jack demurred.
Finally!…
Over the past few years, knowing the Nuckols kids were grown and Jack had retired from his long and acclaimed teaching career, we considered he perhaps had a little more free time. That’s when we renewed our courtship, imagining how cool his drumming could sound behind the tunes we’ve been doing lately.
Always polite, Jack routinely answered our emails with, “Well, let me think about it” and “Gee, guys, I’ve haven’t touched my drums in years!”
But then a couple of months ago, Jack and Sarah happened to catch one of our Sal’s Speakeasy sets.
“I didn’t realize,” he said, “you guys are playing this kind of stuff these days?”
“Why’d’ya think we’ve been trying so hard to pull you in, Jack?”
At last.
And now, somewhere in the great beyond, the late Dave Peyton is grinning, saying, “Got him!”
