Joe Dobbs' Car Wreck
#227 / Flood Time Capsule: 1995
A car wreck 28 years ago today on a dark Kanawha County highway caused serious injury to Joe Dobbs’ shoulder. He survived ... and so did a passenger: his favorite fiddle.
Beyond that, the accident also played a significant part in The Flood’s story. That’s because the wreck — and his recovery from it — revived Joe’s interest in the band after a period of inactivity in the 1980s.
But let’s back up and figure out why Joe was on that lonely road in the first place in the wee hours of June 27, 1995.
Diane and Harold’s Wedding
Joe's daughter Diane, married Harold Johnson in the early summer of 1995 in Gallatin, TN, outside Nashville, and Joe traveled there from his Hurricane, WV, home to jam with other musicians gathered in the couple’s backyard for the wedding reception.
At the jam, Joe played a 200-year-old fiddle, which had its own story. Dobbs got the instrument from an old gentleman named Lee Brill who had actually played it in the Armed Forces Orchestra in World World I.
Predictably, the old fiddle was the star of that lovely afternoon as it passed from hand to hand among the players under Diane's lush maple trees. (Joe even commented that the violin was a contemporary of a famous American fiddler: President Thomas Jefferson.) At one point, it was even played by Tennessee fiddling legend Frazier Moss from Cookville, TN.
The Wreck
The next morning, Joe got up early and drove the 500 miles from Gallatin to Clarksburg,WV, where he played at a conference he was attending.
"Two days later," Joe later wrote in his 2012 autobiography, A Country Fiddler, "on my return trip from Clarksburg, in the early hours of the morning, I lost control of my Dodge mini van in a construction area of I-79 near the Clendenin exit."
Hitting some loose gravel, the van rolled several times down the median between the northbound and southbound lanes. When it stopped rolling, the van landed on its wheels in the grass of the median.
"First, I checked to see if all my limbs worked,” Joe wrote. “Having no broken bones or pain, I got out of the van and noticed the violin case was lying in the southbound lane.” Joe hurried onto the deserted road and retrieved the fiddle. He was placing the case on the top of the wrecked van when a passing traveler stopped.
“’Are you OK?’ asked the man as he got out of the car. “I reported the accident on my cell phone.“
Thanking him for stopping, Joe told him he was okay.
“After looking at your car,” the stranger said, “I don’t see how you walked away from that wreck.” The van was totaled. The side doors and the back doors were all left open by the impact.
Later, while answering questions from a state police officer, Joe watched his son Scott drive up.
“Look at the van, Dad!,” Scott exclaimed. “You could have been killed!’
Scott had been so upset when he was awakened by the emergency call that he rushed out of his house without dressing. Now beside the interstate he stood in his pajamas. Joe then sat in Scott’s truck as the young man gathered his father’s things from the wreck.
“Don’t forget the violin case,” Joe said.
On the way home, Joe started feeling so much pain that Scott took him directly to a Charleston Hospital where he spent the night. The next day, Scott returned to check on him.
“You know, Dad,” he said, “when I got home I opened the fiddle case. I knew it had been thrown out on the road … but I can’t find a scratch on it. In face, it’s still in tune.”
“‘I just have to keep that fiddle,” Joe said with a grin.
And, of course, he did. In fact, he was still playing it the next year when he started reuniting with his old Flood family.
Joe’s shoulder pain — which continued to trouble him occasionally over the remaining 20 years of his life — was one of the reasons he was eager to start playing again. It was a kind of therapy.
It turned out to be good for what ailed all the rest of us too.