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October 13, 2009
Ralph Stanley is one of the last, and surely the purest, of the traditional country musicians. He’s such a stickler that he has no use for the dobro, let alone electrified instruments, and he’s not overly fond of the term bluegrass. He prefers to call what he performs “that old-time mountain music.” He plays the five-string banjo in the claw-hammer style he learned from his mother — or he used to, until arthritis caught up with him — and he sings in a raw, keening Appalachian tenor.

Ralph Stanley performing at Carnegie Hall, surrounded by members of the Clinch Mountain Boys, including his grandson Nathan Stanley on guitar.

The songs tend to be about hard times, unfaithful lovers, deceased children, lonely graves. One of his most famous, “O Death,” is a pleading dialogue with the Grim Reaper himself. It used to be said that when you heard a Ralph Stanley tune, you either wanted to get drunk or go to church and get saved.

Mr. Stanley is 82 and, except for a dry spell in the early 1950s when he worked as a spot welder in Detroit, he has been performing steadily since he was a teenager. He still plays more than 100 dates a year, though he travels now in a customized bus rather than in an old Chevy, the band crammed in the back seat and the bass strapped to the roof. He has even been to Japan several times, where fans learn his songs by rote.

Mr. Stanley, who has called himself Doctor ever since being awarded an honorary degree from Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee in 1976, has been so busy, traveling and collecting awards — three Grammys (one for an a capella version of “O Death” on the soundtrack of the film “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”, the National Medal of Arts, a “Living Legend” designation from the Library of Congress — that he only just got around to writing his autobiography, with the help of the journalist Eddie Dean.

His book, “Man of Constant Sorrow: My Life and Times” (Gotham Books), which comes out on Thursday, takes its title from another famous song and is a lot like the man himself: warm, folksy, down to earth, plainspoken, a little blunt and prickly at times. (It has nothing good to say about the Nashville star Tim McGraw, who, Mr. Stanley notes, hasn’t “a lick of country” in him.)

Mr. Stanley talks of how death “brung together” his mother and father, and how he was “borned and raised way back in the hills.” About musical talent, he writes: “It tends to run in families like a good line of dogs, and there ain’t nothing you can do to change that.”

Last week, Mr. Stanley was in New York with his band, the Clinch Mountain Boys, as part of a double bill at Carnegie Hall with Steve Martin, who had teamed up with the Steep Canyon Rangers, a North Carolina group, to play some of the songs on Mr. Martin’s recent banjo album, “The Crow.” At the end of the show the two groups got together for a crowd-pleasing version of “Orange Blossom Special” and for “Little Maggie,” with Mr. Stanley singing the plaintive lyrics:

“Oh yonder stands little Maggie,
a dram glass in her hand.
She’s drinkin’ away her troubles.
She’s a-courtin’ another man.”

Mr. Martin said afterwards that appearing with Mr. Stanley, whom he had idolized for years, was “a scary dream come true,” and added, “I’m already old, and look at him, still going.”

Onstage Mr. Stanley looks a little like an undertaker. He’s a small, serious man with wiry, steel-gray hair, and when he’s not using his hands, he tends to keep them clasped in front of him. For concerts he favors coal-black suits and dark shirts with a few tasteful rhinestones. He’s been on the road so long, he said, that he seldom gets stage fright.

“I’ll sing in church sometimes, and maybe there’ll be 40 people — that scares me to death,” he added. “But I don’t mind singing in front of 10,000. Church just excites me a little, I don’t know why.”

So before the concert he was happy to sit in his dressing room and talk about his book. How it came about, he said, was that Mr. Dean would visit him at his home in Dickenson County, Va., near the Kentucky and Tennessee borders, and they’d “rehearse”: Mr. Stanley would reminisce, that is, and Mr. Dean would listen.

“I wanted it to sound natural,” he said. “Just like me a-settin’ and talking to someone — just like it was in person.” He added: “It was a lot of remembering, and sometimes it took a while to remember what happened and how, but it got done. Some of the memories maybe wasn’t like I’d like to have, but I wanted it to be just like it was.”

The book at times resembles one of Mr. Stanley’s sorrowful songs, full of pain and loss. He writes about how his father walked out on his mother when he and his beloved older brother, Carter, were just children, and about his brother’s death, probably from drinking too much, when Carter was just 40 and the lead singer and songwriter in what was then known as the Stanley Brothers.

Another singer, Keith Whitley, whom Mr. Stanley discovered as a teenager when Whitley was playing with Ricky Skaggs, drank himself to death at just 34. A third, Roy Lee Centers, was shot in front of his young son in a backwoods quarrel. “I’m going to silence that golden voice forever,” the killer supposedly said.

Outgoing and enterprising where his brother was shy and cautious, Carter Stanley was the driving force behind the Stanley Brothers, and yet he died with no inkling of how famous the Stanley sound would become. For years the group had a paying lunchtime gig on a radio show called “Farm and Fun Time,” broadcast by WCYB in Bristol, Va., but to make ends meet they had to barnstorm all over the country, driving to schools, honky-tonks, livestock auctions, even drive-ins, where they would set up the sound system on top of the refreshment stands. They kept their spirits up by playing pranks, many involving Ex-Lax.

In the 1960s bluegrass was almost eclipsed by Elvis and rock ’n’ roll: his band, Mr. Stanley writes, was like a hog standing under an acorn tree that had run out of acorns. It was probably the folk revival that saved traditional music, even though Mr. Stanley writes: “The hippie types didn’t know any better; they really thought they was playing bluegrass. You’d hear a solo on electric banjo and like to murder the man a-playing it.”

His secret, Mr. Stanley says he feels certain now, is that he never changed. “I give myself credit for being in this business for so long,” he said. “I started out the way I was raised, in the old-time mountain style, and I’ve never wavered from it. I’ve always stuck to my roots. I think that means a whole lot to the audience — the people knows exactly what to expect.”

He added that he thought now and then about slowing down, but not very seriously, explaining: “I’ve traveled so much that I’m used to it. I would hate to completely stop. I don’t hardly know what I’d do with my time.”

There are a lot of good bluegrass players these days, Mr. Martin among them, but Mr. Stanley said he didn’t listen to them much. He prefers to listen to the Stanley Brothers.

“I may be a little prejudiced, but I like my own music,” he said, and he smiled for an instant. “I guess I’m about my favorite entertainer.”

Description
October 13, 2009
Ralph Stanley is one of the last, and surely the purest, of the traditional country musicians. He’s such a stickler that he has no use for the dobro, let alone electrified instruments, and he’s not overly fond of the term bluegrass. He prefers to call what he performs “that old-time mountain music.” He plays the five-string banjo in the claw-hammer style he learned from his mother — or he used to, until arthritis caught up with him — and he sings in a raw, keening Appalachian tenor.

Ralph Stanley performing at Carnegie Hall, surrounded by members of the Clinch Mountain Boys, including his grandson Nathan Stanley on guitar.

The songs tend to be about hard times, unfaithful lovers, deceased children, lonely graves. One of his most famous, “O Death,” is a pleading dialogue with the Grim Reaper himself. It used to be said that when you heard a Ralph Stanley tune, you either wanted to get drunk or go to church and get saved.

Mr. Stanley is 82 and, except for a dry spell in the early 1950s when he worked as a spot welder in Detroit, he has been performing steadily since he was a teenager. He still plays more than 100 dates a year, though he travels now in a customized bus rather than in an old Chevy, the band crammed in the back seat and the bass strapped to the roof. He has even been to Japan several times, where fans learn his songs by rote.

Mr. Stanley, who has called himself Doctor ever since being awarded an honorary degree from Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee in 1976, has been so busy, traveling and collecting awards — three Grammys (one for an a capella version of “O Death” on the soundtrack of the film “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”, the National Medal of Arts, a “Living Legend” designation from the Library of Congress — that he only just got around to writing his autobiography, with the help of the journalist Eddie Dean.

His book, “Man of Constant Sorrow: My Life and Times” (Gotham Books), which comes out on Thursday, takes its title from another famous song and is a lot like the man himself: warm, folksy, down to earth, plainspoken, a little blunt and prickly at times. (It has nothing good to say about the Nashville star Tim McGraw, who, Mr. Stanley notes, hasn’t “a lick of country” in him.)

Mr. Stanley talks of how death “brung together” his mother and father, and how he was “borned and raised way back in the hills.” About musical talent, he writes: “It tends to run in families like a good line of dogs, and there ain’t nothing you can do to change that.”

Last week, Mr. Stanley was in New York with his band, the Clinch Mountain Boys, as part of a double bill at Carnegie Hall with Steve Martin, who had teamed up with the Steep Canyon Rangers, a North Carolina group, to play some of the songs on Mr. Martin’s recent banjo album, “The Crow.” At the end of the show the two groups got together for a crowd-pleasing version of “Orange Blossom Special” and for “Little Maggie,” with Mr. Stanley singing the plaintive lyrics:

“Oh yonder stands little Maggie,
a dram glass in her hand.
She’s drinkin’ away her troubles.
She’s a-courtin’ another man.”

Mr. Martin said afterwards that appearing with Mr. Stanley, whom he had idolized for years, was “a scary dream come true,” and added, “I’m already old, and look at him, still going.”

Onstage Mr. Stanley looks a little like an undertaker. He’s a small, serious man with wiry, steel-gray hair, and when he’s not using his hands, he tends to keep them clasped in front of him. For concerts he favors coal-black suits and dark shirts with a few tasteful rhinestones. He’s been on the road so long, he said, that he seldom gets stage fright.

“I’ll sing in church sometimes, and maybe there’ll be 40 people — that scares me to death,” he added. “But I don’t mind singing in front of 10,000. Church just excites me a little, I don’t know why.”

So before the concert he was happy to sit in his dressing room and talk about his book. How it came about, he said, was that Mr. Dean would visit him at his home in Dickenson County, Va., near the Kentucky and Tennessee borders, and they’d “rehearse”: Mr. Stanley would reminisce, that is, and Mr. Dean would listen.

“I wanted it to sound natural,” he said. “Just like me a-settin’ and talking to someone — just like it was in person.” He added: “It was a lot of remembering, and sometimes it took a while to remember what happened and how, but it got done. Some of the memories maybe wasn’t like I’d like to have, but I wanted it to be just like it was.”

The book at times resembles one of Mr. Stanley’s sorrowful songs, full of pain and loss. He writes about how his father walked out on his mother when he and his beloved older brother, Carter, were just children, and about his brother’s death, probably from drinking too much, when Carter was just 40 and the lead singer and songwriter in what was then known as the Stanley Brothers.

Another singer, Keith Whitley, whom Mr. Stanley discovered as a teenager when Whitley was playing with Ricky Skaggs, drank himself to death at just 34. A third, Roy Lee Centers, was shot in front of his young son in a backwoods quarrel. “I’m going to silence that golden voice forever,” the killer supposedly said.

Outgoing and enterprising where his brother was shy and cautious, Carter Stanley was the driving force behind the Stanley Brothers, and yet he died with no inkling of how famous the Stanley sound would become. For years the group had a paying lunchtime gig on a radio show called “Farm and Fun Time,” broadcast by WCYB in Bristol, Va., but to make ends meet they had to barnstorm all over the country, driving to schools, honky-tonks, livestock auctions, even drive-ins, where they would set up the sound system on top of the refreshment stands. They kept their spirits up by playing pranks, many involving Ex-Lax.

In the 1960s bluegrass was almost eclipsed by Elvis and rock ’n’ roll: his band, Mr. Stanley writes, was like a hog standing under an acorn tree that had run out of acorns. It was probably the folk revival that saved traditional music, even though Mr. Stanley writes: “The hippie types didn’t know any better; they really thought they was playing bluegrass. You’d hear a solo on electric banjo and like to murder the man a-playing it.”

His secret, Mr. Stanley says he feels certain now, is that he never changed. “I give myself credit for being in this business for so long,” he said. “I started out the way I was raised, in the old-time mountain style, and I’ve never wavered from it. I’ve always stuck to my roots. I think that means a whole lot to the audience — the people knows exactly what to expect.”

He added that he thought now and then about slowing down, but not very seriously, explaining: “I’ve traveled so much that I’m used to it. I would hate to completely stop. I don’t hardly know what I’d do with my time.”

There are a lot of good bluegrass players these days, Mr. Martin among them, but Mr. Stanley said he didn’t listen to them much. He prefers to listen to the Stanley Brothers.

“I may be a little prejudiced, but I like my own music,” he said, and he smiled for an instant. “I guess I’m about my favorite entertainer.”