It hasn’t happened all that often that I hear a song that so impresses me that I can remember just where I first heard it, and that I spent the next few days learning it, and it is still one of my five or ten favorite bluegrass songs 30 years later.
The death last month of the great bluegrass songwriter Pete Goble at the age of 86 moved me, not because I knew him personally, but because I have had such pleasure singing his songs, particularly “Blue Virginia Blues” and “Tennessee 1949.”
It was back in 1995, the year it rained so much in Grass Valley that the festival went into legend as “mudfest.” I was still a working person back then, so we usually drove to Grass Valley on Thursday morning. We had the van packed, but when we woke up in Point Richmond it was pouring down rain, and the weather report was saying Grass Valley was getting it, too. In those days we had a “vintage” canvas tent and no E-Z UP canopy so we just rolled over and went back to sleep.
Friday was damp, but not raining, so we drove to Grass Valley where there was mud everywhere, hay all over the dirt places, but a festival in full swing. We managed to get camped up and ended up having a great time, although we sort of missed out by not having “war stories” about the rainstorm as so many of our friends had.
I was in a jam under someone’s nice canvas awning when someone started singing “Blue Virginia Blues.” I perked up when he sang the first line, “Have you ever been in Richmond in November….” because just for a moment I thought — maybe! — someone had written a song about my home town. But no: it was that other Richmond.
But the song! Great chords, great lyrics! I knew I had to add it to my repertoire. The singer told me it had be written by one Pete Goble. When the jam broke up I went to the bazaar area of the festival and asked the music store person if he had a CD with that song on it. I didn’t have a CD player with me (those of you who have seen my blue van will understand) but a few days after the festival I had it memorized and it’s been a favorite ever since.
It wasn’t until Goble died and I started looking at his obituaries that I realized he had written (or possibly co-written — he had a writing partner, also now deceased, named Leroy Drumm) another of my most favorite songs, “Tennessee 1949,” that was a classic hit for Larry Sparks. That one has such a beautiful harmony on the chorus that I always call it when I am in a jam with good singers.
Then I googled “songs by Pete Goble” and turned up yet another fave: “Colleen Malone.” Somehow I had assumed someone in Hot Rize had written that tune, but it was Goble.
I hope he had a great life. I will think of him whenever I sing his songs.
