When Joe Dobbs' Dream Came True

#46 / Flood Time Capsule: 1977

After working quietly in the background for three or four months, Joe Dobbs and his baby brother Dennis finally were ready in the spring of 1977 to invite the public into their new home. In a cozy little space on Huntington’s West 14th Street, Fret ’n Fiddle was set to become a legendary West Virginia music store and a friendly landing pad for generations of musicians for the next four decades.

The Dobbses turned to a friend and fellow Floodster, journalist Dave Peyton, to spread the word.

Forty-five years ago this week, Dave produced this Monday morning story on The Herald-Dispatch’s local section front, a piece topped with a classic Peyton lead:

  Dennis Dobbs tenderly cradles a 10-year-old Martin guitar in his arms. He adjusts the clamps on the guitar body where he has repaired a bullet hole.

“Just think,” Dennis said, “the story this guitar could tell if it could talk.” The piece also featured a great Frank Altizer photo of Dennis patching that bullet hole while Joe works on the viola in the background.

Joe loved Dave’s story, how it captured what he felt on those late winter days as he was starting a venture he had always dreamed of. The fiddler was still referring to the story in conversations decades later. (To read the entire piece, click here.)

As Joe himself would later write in his autobiography, A Country Fiddler, “Though we opened the store with less than $200, we had a backlog of repair work. It was our only income in the beginning.” But they also had something else: a lot of local good will.

Soon the shop expanded its focus to include instrument sales, music lessons and, of course, those jam sessions, because in no time the shop became the meeting place for string players from everywhere.

“We're not out to make a whole lot of money,” Joe told Dave that March day. “We think pickers are the finest people in the world. And there's no better way to meet them than to repair their instruments.”

Footnote: The “Soft” Opening

Actually, Fret ’n Fiddle had a “soft opening” months earlier when it was blessed in a Thanksgiving weekend jam with Peyton and the rest of The Flood and friends.

As Flood Watch noted in its first issue a few months ago, Joe had been in our circle for only about a year and a half by then, but he already was a mainstay in the newly a-borning Flood. Joe and Dennis also were jamming regularly with The Flood’s extended family of friends, like Susan and David Holbrook, Bill Hoke, Jack Nuckols and Ron Sanders of The Kentucky Foothill Ramblers, Stewart Schneider, Buddy Griffin and The Samples Brothers, Bob and Cathie Toothman, and many more.

Going Forward in a Big Way

And now that the little FnF was officially opening for business, it quickly became a sensation, developing a local and regional following, of course, but also new fans nationally and internationally.

Two years later, for instance, PM Magazine, a syndicated TV series with a news and entertainment format, aired this seven-minute feature about Fret ‘n Fiddle and its founders:

Produced by the show's Steve Shannon, the feature show extensive interviews with both Joe and Dennis as they work on guitars and fiddles, then wraps up with some wonderful footage of a typical Saturday jam session.

Fret 'n Fiddle remained at that 524 W. 14th St. location until the early 1980s, then, after a brief relocation to downtown Huntington’s Heritage Village, made its final leap to the greener pastures of downtown St. Albans, WV.

Want to Wade in Further?

If you would like an even deeper dive into Flood’s history, continue your trawling in the Scrapbook section of our website. But, uh, do bring your lunch. Literally tens of thousands of words and hundreds of photos and audio and video clips are tucked away there. Enjoy!