“Blue Virginia Blues” is a song by Pete Goble and Leroy Drumm. Goble was born in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, in 1932 and moved with his family to Detroit in 1948. He began writing in the 1960s after befriending J. D. Crowe, then playing with Jimmy Martin’s band on WJR in Detroit. Drumm, born in Algonac, Michigan, in 1936, was his long-time writing partner. Goble later described how they worked: if he got stuck and needed another verse, Drumm could get it started. The two wrote “Tennessee 1949” and “Colleen Malone,” and the second won the IBMA Song of the Year award in 1991.
The song is a hard-luck story set in Richmond in November, in the cold Virginia rain. The narrator says he likes East Virginia and Richmond’s hospitality well enough, all except one Virginia girl who “made a perfect love wreck out of me.” She had called him in St. Paul, Minnesota, and told him to take the bus and bring some clothes, because she might want him to stay. His bus pulls in late in the evening. No one is there, and her name is not in the phone directory, so he is left standing in the rain without the money for a taxi. The chorus sums it up: there ain’t no blue like blue Virginia blues.
Bill Harrell and the Virginians put it on record in 1986. They cut it at Bias Recording in Springfield, Virginia, with Harrell singing lead, and made it the opening track of their Rebel LP Blue Virginia Blue. The album title drops the final “s,” a slip people still make with the song itself. On 30 October 1986, Larry Sparks recorded it at Chandler Audio in Ashland, Kentucky, singing it alone with Barry Crabtree on banjo, David Harvey on mandolin, Art Stamper on fiddle and Tim Sargent on dobro, for his 1987 Rebel album Silver Reflections. Goble recorded it himself for Tennessee 1949 (Webco, 1987), his album with the banjo player Bill Emerson, singing lead over Larry Stephenson’s tenor and Emerson’s baritone. Sparks sang it again on his 2000 live album from Bean Blossom, and it is on Rebel’s 2008 collection The Best of Larry Sparks: Bound to Ride. Later recordings include ones by Marty Hays (2013) and Chase Long (2016).
Leroy Drumm died in 2010 and Pete Goble in July 2018, at 86. Goble received the IBMA’s Distinguished Achievement Award in 2002 and was inducted into the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame in 2022.
