Ralph Stanley, born deep in the hills of Appalachia back in 1927, is a living, breathing, singing bridge to an America that no longer exists, but that still echoes through the coves and hollers. It is a world that my father, born a few years later into a family with roots going back more than two centuries in that mountain region, also knows well.
And it's funny how accurately the music from that time and place seems to capture the lives that those people lived, probably because they themselves wrote it and played it. It wasn't given to them, storebought. They had to create it from the things they saw and felt and did.
My father, for example, still talks in awe of the man whom he remembered as the strongest man in town, the man who could dig more coal in a day than any two other men, but who died in a mine collapse. He tells stories of the company store, the company scrip, the union fights, and the years that he spent hanging out and working in the pool hall instead of going to school.
To this day he has beautiful handwriting, which he attributes to the job he had as a little kid in the pool hall. As baseball results came over the teletype machine, Dad would read them, walk out onto a piece of scaffolding and then write them on a large chalkboard, inning by inning. Pool games would come to a halt as he wrote, with the clientele watching closely to see who would be collecting on their bets, and who would be paying.
If you play Dad a game of eight ball, you'll soon discover that it isn't just storytelling.
But I digress, because we were talking about Ralph Stanley. While he became famous thanks to his iconic performance of "Oh Death" in the movie "O Brother Where Art Thou," he has been bringing mountain music -- "hillbilly music," Dad calls it -- to the rest of the world for decades now.
He and the Clinch Mountain Boys play Eddie's Attic Sunday, so here he is singing "Pretty Polly", a traditional mountain folk song with origins "as old as the hills."
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