Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 18, 1993 TAG: 9306180232
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
By all accounts, Chuck Sublett was a modest man who wouldn't have known what to make of all the commotion his death has stirred up.
But Lord, what a commotion it is.
His friends are throwing a bluegrass concert in his memory, the first of what they hope will be an annual series of remembrance jams. They'll open the mike to anyone who wants to pick a few tunes and share a eulogy about what Chuck Sublett meant to them.
His sister's been busy sewing a flag to fly over the bandstand, a banner that shows a shattered heart dripping bright drops of blood, to symbolize both the heart attack that killed Sublett a year ago at age 43 and the broken hearts his sudden passing has left behind.
She'll also be passing out heart-shaped stickers for everyone to wear.
She may need a lot.
In Clifton Forge, just up the road from the concert grounds, and the tiny community of Selma where Sublett grew up, radio station WXEF-AM has been promoting the jam at the furious pace of a bluegrass breakdown.
"They've gone overboard," says Curtis "Bootie" Wrenn, a Clifton Forge builder and part-time musician who used to play with Sublett in a band called Mountain Magic. "They really have. The whole community's trying to chip in and help.
"Lord knows, they're calling from all over. This phone hasn't stopped ringing. Richmond, Charlottesville, Lynchburg, Roanoke, Beckley, all through West Virginia - and then all the local people. There's been a pile of local people."
So just who was Chuck Sublett and what did he do to prompt this kind of community outpouring?
"Basically," says his brother-in-law, Kevin Findley of Glenvar, "Chucky was just an old common man nobody would ever hear about."
By trade, he was a heavy-equipment operator, a skill he picked up in Vietnam and continued with the Thomas Brothers Inc. construction company in Salem. "They always said Chuck could pick your teeth with a backhoe," says his friend Rusty Crance, assistant principal at Maury River Middle School in Rockbridge County.
By love, Chuck Sublett was also a musician. He was no celebrity, at least not in the sense of being famous. He was just one of many pickers who came out of the Alleghany Highlands, where playing bluegrass music comes as natural as breathing and praying, and folks think more about using their music to make others happy than to make money for themselves.
"Up there in the mountains, it goes on all the time," says Crance, who grew up with Sublett. "Anytime something's going on, there's music being played all the time. It's a good way of expressing yourself.
And Chuck Sublett could sure express himself.
The son of a music-minded preacher, Elwyne Eugene "Chucky" Sublett grew up listening to gospel songs in church and bluegrass standards from Don Reno and Red Smiley on their "Top O' The Morning" radio show out of Bluefield.
"When we were in fourth and fifth grade, we listened to the radio getting ready for school in the mornings; and one day he said, `I'd like to do that,'" recalls his sister Wynona Findley.
"Daddy had an old guitar with a broken neck. Chucky asked if he'd fix it, and Daddy did. He'd sit up at night, in bed, with the covers over his head and a flashlight, learning to play the guitar."
From then on, there was no stopping him.
"Every instrument he picked up, he could play," Findley says. Banjo, fiddle, mandolin, dobro, bass, you name it. Sublett would mess around with it, and before long, tunes were coming out.
And what tunes they were.
Sublett knew so many songs - bluegrass, country, gospel, rock, the style didn't matter - that his sister says "he could play for two days and nights and not play the same song."
Sometimes, he even tried.
"Once he got going, he was hard to stop," says Crance, who once played with Sublett in a group called the Alleghany Mountain Boys. "I've seen him start at a party at 7 in the evening and the next morning at 7, when people are eating breakfast, he was still playing, and kept going 'til noon. It was like a thirst; he couldn't get enough of it."
Other pickers marveled at Sublett's extensive repertoire. "He was just like a Webster's Dictionary with songs," says Wrenn. "Most people can only go two to three hours and eventually they run out. He was endless. He knew every Beatles song and could do 'em in order. I've seen him do it. I thought that was pretty amazing."
In the tight-knit bluegrass fraternity of Western Virginia, so did lots of other folks.
"He was a local musical folk hero," Crance says.
Wrenn is more emphatic. "In this area, he's a legend."
Once, in high school, Sublett and a friend ran off to San Francisco, paying their way by playing on street corners across the country. Sublett told his daddy - Herbert Sublett, who now pastors the Bethel Assembly of God in Salem - that he wanted to "make some music." But he soon grew so homesick for the Virginia mountains that he pawned his equipment and returned.
Except for a tour of duty with the Army Corps of Engineers in Vietnam - where he was an extra in "The Ballad of the Green Berets" and got a chance to meet his hero, John Wayne - Sublett lived here ever since.
Instead of making a living by playing music, music became a way of life.
"Wherever the music was, Chucky was there," Findley says. "And wherever Chucky was, music was there."
Friends remember not only his music, but his mood.
"What you always saw of Chucky," Crance says, "was he always wore a hat - he had a little receding hair - and he always wore a smile."
"He had a magnetic personality," Findley says. "Everyone wanted to be around Chucky. He sort of kept the party going," even when he wasn't picking a tune.
Sometimes he was more gentle, and more kindhearted than people have a right to expect these days. "If you were going down the road and saw somebody needy, he'd turn around and go back and give something to them," Findley says. "And he always told me and his wife, if you ever see a serviceman hitchhiking, to give him a ride."
The last few years, Sublett's mother was fighting a losing battle with cancer. At Christmas, the family would bring their instruments, gather around her bedside and serenade her. It usually fell to Sublett to sing, because he was the only one who knew all the words.
In April 1992, his mother died.
"He just grieved so much," Findley says. The mourning took its toll two months later, on June 21. "They said his heart just blew up."
Last fall, Crance and some friends were picking bluegrass tunes at a party and reminiscing about Sublett. "Everybody felt kind of cheated because he didn't get the recognition he deserved and well, we missed him," Crance says.
They decided to stage a bluegrass jam in his memory. Maybe make it an annual event. When they found out that Sublett's widow, Vanessa, hadn't been able to pay the $4,572 funeral bill, his friends suddenly had a mission.
They found a farm in Alleghany County that would host the event. In the past few weeks, they've pasted fliers on country stores from West Virginia to North Carolina. They've reassembled locally bands of yesteryear, such as Mountain Magic, that hadn't played together in a decade. And they're bracing for what they hope will be a turnout of thousands.
Or maybe not.
"If we have eight people in that hayfield, we'll be satisfied," Crance says.
"It's just something to say we love him and we miss him," Wrenn says. "Just our way of saying it."
The concert runs Saturday from 1 p.m. to 11 p.m. Directions: From Clifton Forge, take Interstate 64 west. Get off on Exit 21-W at Low Moor. Turn right and follow Valley Ridge Road. Signs will be posted. Concert is free; donations accepted.
by CNB