“Colleen Malone” comes from the songwriting partnership of Pete Goble and Leroy Drumm. Goble grew up in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, and later moved to Detroit. Drumm was born in Algonac, Michigan, served in the Navy and worked as a welder while he wrote. The two co-wrote many of their best-known songs, among them “Tennessee 1949,” and Goble’s songs have been recorded by the Bluegrass Cardinals, the Osborne Brothers, Larry Sparks, Doyle Lawson, the Country Gentlemen and the Lewis Family.
The song is a homecoming that arrives too late. The singer went to sea from “old Ireland and home,” and for ten years and three he dreamed of green hills and of his Colleen Malone. When he returns, he learns that “the angels had called her away” to a grave on a hill overlooking the mill. In the chorus he climbs the path past the mill’s moss-covered stones to be with her. He remembers that she stayed faithful while he sailed, and he ends by vowing never to take a wife, to live alone in the valley, and to plant flowers in the ground that holds her.
Hot Rize made the first recording, and it opens their album Take It Home, released by Sugar Hill in August 1990. Tim O’Brien sang the lead and played mandolin. Nick Forster and Pete Wernick sang the harmonies, with Wernick on banjo, Charles Sawtelle on guitar and Forster on bass. Take It Home was nominated for a Grammy for best bluegrass recording in 1991. That same year the International Bluegrass Music Association named “Colleen Malone” its Song of the Year, crediting Goble and Drumm as writers.
Hot Rize disbanded in 1990 but kept playing reunion dates, and the song stayed in the set. A performance at the Boulder Theater on 6 March 1996, with O’Brien, Wernick, Sawtelle and Forster, was later released on So Long of a Journey. Other artists picked it up quickly. Fred Travers recorded it for Radio Tone (Pinecastle, 1992), the Irish Descendants for Rollin’ Home (1998), and Larry Sparks for Special Delivery (2000). Jimmy Gaudreau and Moondi Klein included it on 2:10 Train (Rebel, 2008).
