Ralph Stanley’s keening conversation with mortality, “O Death,” became the new wave of bluegrass’ strongest link with tradition. His mournful voice evoked the lonesome spirit of the Clinch Mountains of Virginia where he was born, lived and died, an end that came Thursday from difficulties with skin cancer. He was 89.
With more than 50 years of performing behind him, Stanley’s career reached a commercial peak with the 2000 Coen Brothers film “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” The film and its soundtrack will forever be known as the instigator of a new wave of popularity for traditional mountain music. Though the film, a Depression-era take on Homer’s “Odyssey,” did well, it was the soundtrack that made the biggest impact.
Others among the all-star line-up, such as Emmylou Harris and Alison Krauss, were better known by a modern audience, but it was Stanley’s chilling a cappella rendition of “O Death” that felt umbilically linked with the past.
The Recording Academy, ever ready to make belated good to great artists it has ignored in the past, gave Stanley his first Grammy (for best male country vocal performance). The soundtrack also took home album of the year honors.
Before the new bluegrass deluge of 2000, Stanley’s most visible impact on country music’s mainstream was largely indirect. Musicians such as fellow soundtrack contributors Harris and Krauss kept the mountain tradition before a national audience, while former proteges Ricky Skaggs and the late Keith Whitley, both one-time Clinch Mountain Boys, became bona fide country hitmakers.
In the bluegrass world, his revered status was always assured. His yearly concert appearances often topped 100, and on the bluegrass circuit, the audiences would be familiar with earlier Stanley Brothers and Clinch Mountain Boys classics like “Little Maggie” and “Rank Strangers.”
Auspiciously, Stanley was born in remarkable proximity to country music’s birth, both geographically and chronologically, on Feb. 25, 1927. The place was the Clinch Mountain district of Virginia, where the state rolls to its thin, westernmost point sandwiched between Kentucky and Tennessee. Later that year, Jimmie Rodgers and fellow Clinch Mountains musicians A.P., Sara and Maybelle Carter would record their first sessions in nearby Bristol on the Virginia/Tennessee.
Stanley was born into a musical family, his father a singer and mother a banjo player. His mother was an immeasurable influence on Stanley and, through him, succeeding generations of banjo players. Her son would grow up to become one of the instrument’s innovators, adding the three-finger picking style to the more traditional clawhammer and two-finger techniques.
Ralph and his brother Carter first started performing together in their teens before doing stints in the military at the tail end of World War II. Once civilians again, the brothers formed the first edition of the Clinch Mountain Boys and made their first recordings in 1947.
Soon after, the pair signed to Columbia Records, recording several albums for the label before breaking up the band. The brothers both joined up with Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys in 1951 before a car accident briefly sidelined Ralph. Less than a year later, the band was back together and scored a new record deal with Mercury in 1953.
The brothers spent the rest of that decade recording and touring, but later releases on smaller labels meant decreasing sales and financial difficulties forced them to drop the band in the early ’60s. The pressures of touring took their toll on Carter, who died at age 41 in 1966.
A short retirement later, Stanley reformed the Clinch Mountain Boys, providing a proving ground for some great bluegrass and country talents.
He was still keeping up a formidable schedule of recording and touring when the International Bluegrass Music Association inducted the Stanley Brothers into its hall of fame in 1992. The same year, he put together a Grammy-nominated recording project titled “Saturday Night/Sunday Morning,” which found Stanley working with a stellar gathering of country and bluegrass musicians including Harris, Krauss, George Jones, Tom T. Hall, Bill Monroe, Vince Gill, Patty Loveless and Dwight Yoakam.
The subsequent flow of reissued recordings assured that his legacy was available to the public when stardom came knocking in 2000.
Two years later in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, former Clinch Mountain Boy Ricky Skaggs would observe of Stanley’s new-found fame, “When Ralph Stanley walks on stage, it’s like Elton John or Mick Jagger. It’s so long overdue. He’s 75 and going strong, buying new buses, I just can’t believe it.”
He would be remembered as one of the bluegrass greats, whether “O Brother” had happened or not, but he always seemed to associate the term “bluegrass” with Bill Monroe’s more modern take (relatively speaking) on the older traditions. It may be hard for casual listeners or modern ears in general to hear, but the Stanley Brothers’ style hewed closer to the sounds of an earlier time. Stanley often called what he did “old-time music.” “The old-time mountain music … was born and bred in me, I guess,” he told the (Cleveland) Plain Dealer in 2002. “I don’t try to be extra special with it. I sing it just like I feel it. It just comes natural to me.”
That’s what made him such as treasure. The music came from his soul. No matter how many followers he inspires and no matter how faithful they are to the tradition, the acolytes are working at a disadvantage. They didn’t actually bring this music down from the mountain. He did.
