“Willow Creek Dam” was written by the songwriting team of Pete Goble and Leroy Drumm. The Country Gentlemen recorded it in the 1970s.
The song is a bitter lament about the cost of progress. A man watches his mountain home destroyed by the building of a dam: the valley flooded, his father’s grave moved to unfamiliar ground, the beauty of Willow Creek Mountain lost beneath cold water. It speaks for everyone displaced by such projects.
The song’s hard look at development and displacement gave it a lasting place in bluegrass.