Down Where the River Bends, released on Rebel in 1978, is a Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys album from the heart of the band's long Rebel tenure. By this point Stanley had spent more than a decade leading the group on his own, after his brother Carter's death in 1966, and had assembled a Clinch Mountain Boys lineup — Curly Ray Cline's fiddle, Junior Blankenship's lead guitar, Jack Cooke's bass, with Charlie Sizemore among the younger voices — that carried the old mountain sound forward with conviction. Stanley always described his music as old-time mountain music rather than bluegrass, and these recordings bear that out: the stark harmony, the clawhammer-rooted banjo, the unhurried gravity. Cut at Lemco Studios in Lexington, the set gathers the kind of ballad and sacred material that defined his repertoire, delivered with the plainspoken authority that made Stanley one of the music's irreplaceable figures.
Tracklist
- 1 Down Where the River Bends Source Recording 3:03
- 2 Put My Little Shoes Away 2:53
- 3 Footprints in the Snow alt version 2:39
- 4 Henry Brown 1:51
- 5 Just Dreamin' 2:38
- 6 I'll Just Catch A Train And Ride 1:51
- 7 The Old Old House alt version 2:42
- 8 The Power Of Love 1:58
- 9 Dream of a Miner’s Child Source Recording 2:54
- 10 I Wanna Sing A Song For Carter 2:00
- 11 Cuttin' The Cornbread 1:53
- 12 Little Girl And The Dreadful Snake 3:48
- 13 The Little Girl and the Dreadful Snake Source Recording 3:48
- 14 Pretty Woman 2:13
- 15 Hometown 2:46
