Скачать или смотреть How the Bowen Bashes Began, Spring 1974

Charlie and Pamela Bowen were starting to feel quite grown up by mid-1972. They had been married for more than three years, had both graduated from college and had responsible jobs as reporters with the Huntington, WV, newspapers. But they hadn’t given up ALL their youthful diversions.

For instance, they both still loved music. Of course, Pamela and Charlie had played music together at coffeehouses and folk music parties during their years of dating in the late 1960s. After their marriage, they had given up music for a while (finding it more fun to play with each other than with their guitars!). By the time Charlie got back into music, Pamela had moved on to other interests — writing, photography, horseback riding — but she still loved going to the concerts and festivals.

And there were lots of them to choose from. With long-time friends like Jim Strother, Stew Schneider, Susan Lewis, Jack and Susie Nuckols, they traveled to rural setting in Kentucky and West Virginia to hear the fiddlers and banjos and to meet the new pickers who learned to play the old tunes, people like H. David Holbrook and Ron Sanders and John Morris and, of course, Roger, Mack and Ted, the incomparable Samples Brothers.

Before long, Pamela and Charlie were thinking about bringing some of this wonderful music to their own living room. That they did and in August of 1972, the invitations went out. The Bowens’ local music hero and mentor Terry Goller came with his guitar to pick with Nuckols and Strother and Holbrook and Schneider. Of course, such a good time demanded an encore. And then another, and then another. All told, the Bowen Bashes would become semiannual events for nearly decade, hosting dozens of musicians and nurturing the birth of a number of bands, including our host for this film series, The 1937 Flood.

Of course, such a good time demanded an encore. By the following April we have moved — okay, it turned out the old lady downstairs wasn’t nearly as deaf as we’d thought she was! — and our new home was a few blocks away, in a rented house on the 13th Avenue. This would be the site of all the rest of the Bowen Bashes for the next eight years. Coming to the spring 1973 bash were most of the original pickers from the previous summer plus some exciting newcomers. For instance, our dear friend Bill Hoke had just gotten out of the service the previous February and was looking for some fun. In Lexington, Ky., he met Holbrook and Strother and Jack and Susie Nuckols. Meanwhile, his cousin, Susan Lewis, told him how a bunch of them were all driving into Huntington for the party. Bill said later, “I remember hearing more music that weekend than I’d heard in every coffeehouse I had ever been to. Being just out of a six-year stint in the Navy, I’m thinking, ‘My God — life is GOOD. I was hooked.’” And of course, we were hooked on Bill too; he’d be at every bash from then on in that old blue house.

Sadly, those first two bashes are lost to the ages — stupidly we didn’t think to turn on a tape recorder! — but by the time of the third bash the following year, we had wised up. With the help of Stew Schneider at the control, we started recording the highlights of the May 1974 bash, and would record them from then on. That May 1974 party is the basis for this, the start of our “Bowen Bash” legacy film series.