Скачать или смотреть The Bowen Bash Goes Public, 1977-79

After five years of hosting those semi-annual semi-private house parties that the our friends called “The Bowen Bash,” we figured in the summer of 1977 that, gee, it was high time we made them public. Well, no, that’s not really how it happened at all. The public version of the bashes came about, not through the Bowens’ efforts, but rather through the good work of a couple of dear friends.

John Koenig’s wife-to-be Barbara — who had been an enthusiastic regular at Bowen Bashes for several years by then — was working at the local art museum — called the Huntington Galleries, in those days — on the staff of the museum director, the beloved Roberta Emerson.

Now the late Roberta Emerson, who is still a local legend for all did for her adopted hometown of Huntington, firmly believed that an art museum should abstain from any form of elitism; instead it should try to attract all the community’s residents to enjoy its treasures. So when she heard her young friend Barbara raving about the good times she’d had at the latest Bowen Bash, Roberta had an idea. Thinking back to the great folk music “hootenannies” of the 1950s and ‘60s, she proposed that we bring the whole gang to her museum and its lovely amphitheater to do a free concert.

Well, everybody loved that idea, and we staged the first one in July 1977. It was such a good time that we kept coming back. We had the second public bash in August of ’78, another in September of ’79. Shoot, we even once took the show in the road, staging another version of the public bash in Charleston in the theater of the then-new West Virginia Cultural Center.

For these shows, all the regulars were on hand — The Kentucky Foothill Ramblers, the Samples Brothers, Front Royal and, of course, The Flood — and also had some great guest artists. For instance, the inaugural public bash was the first performance we have on tape of our old friend, guitarist/singer Bob Toothman, and it was only time we got to hear from the late great Ashland, Ky., singer Dan Gore, who honored us with some great classic blues. We even had an international connection, when Joe Dobbs introduced us to visiting Australians Rod and Judy Jones who wowed us with their traditional banjo-fiddle numbers.

And of course, in keeping with the old hootenanny tradition, we always tried a couple times during the night to get all the pickers on stage at one time for a tune or tune. So, grab you sunglasses and your bug spray and come on out.