When The Joe Dobbs Story Went National
#565 / Flood Time Capsule: 1979
Rambling across the country looking for stories to tell, award-winning journalist Jules Loh landed in Huntington on a winter’s day 47 years ago this week and almost immediately he heard about fiddler Joe Dobbs.
“I think I may have recommended Joe,” recalls writer Strat Douthat, who ran The Associated Press bureau in Huntington in the 1970s and ‘80s.
During Loh’s week in West Virginia, “I hung out with Jules, drinking with him,” Douthat said. “He was one very talented rascal.”
A Macon, Ga., native, Loh worked at AP for 40 years, part of a group of feature writers the wire service called “The Poets’ Corner,” specializing in stories that explored news topics at length and in detail that belied the AP’s image as strictly a hard-news agency.
In 1976, Loh began writing a column called “Elsewhere in America,” telling stories about unusual people and places. It was this mission that brought him to Strat Douthat and, via Strat, to Joe Dobbs.
Douthat had met Joe a few years earlier through the Bowen Bashes, where Dobbs was a favorite fixture, and via Flood co-founders Dave Peyton and Rog Samples.
Jules’ Story
Finding Joe as fascinating as Strat did, Loh wrote in his Feb. 1, 1979, story, “Dobbs is a bouncy man of 45 put together in the shape of a barrel.”
“When he tucks his fiddle under his chin, under a shaggy brown and gray beard, and cradles it in his big round shoulders and thick arms, the fiddle seems fragile, toy-like.
“The music it makes is far from fragile, though. Lids close over deep blue eyes, warm red wood presses against neck and the music is alive, driving, laughing, wailing.”
Loh’s story, which was distributed on the AP national wire and printed in newspapers across the country, is preserved in The Flood’s archive. Click the button below to see a .pdf of it:
The National Joe
Jules’ story that winter was the beginning of a heady period, the first of a slew of national attentions to come to Joe and the little Fret ‘n Fiddle music store that he and his baby brother Dennis had just started in the West End of Huntington.
As reported here earlier, two months after the Loh story hit the AP wires, Joe was featured in the second issue of the new Frets magazine in a feature story about his good will mission to Africa with folk artist Mary Faith Rhoads.
Click the button below to see a .pdf of that three-page article:
Then a couple months later, PM Magazine, a syndicated TV series with a news and entertainment format, aired a feature on the Dobbses and Fret 'n' Fiddle.
The feature, produced by the show's Steve Shannon, offered extensive interviews with both the brothers as they worked on repairing guitars and fiddles, then ended with some great footage of a typical Saturday jam session at the West 14th Street shop.
Here is that complete seven-minute feature: