Love and Wealth · Lonesome Hearted Blues

Carl Story is often called the Father of Bluegrass Gospel, and the title is well earned. A North Carolinian who had played fiddle in Bill Monroe's band in 1942, Story spent the post-war decades building a catalog devoted, more than almost any other, to sacred song.

His recording career began in 1947 with Mercury, and the earliest sessions were cut at radio station WROL in Knoxville — the same Knoxville studio where Flatt and Scruggs would record the following year. Story stayed with Mercury for eight prolific years, with a concurrent run on Columbia in the mid-1950s, before moving to the Starday label, which became the great clearinghouse for bluegrass gospel in the late 1950s and 1960s.

Story's band, the Rambling Mountaineers, was a fixture of southern radio for decades, and over the years it employed an outstanding cast of pickers — among them the mandolinist Red Rector and resonator-guitarist Ray Atkins. The records leaned heavily on quartet singing and on the old hymns and convention-style gospel numbers Story arranged for a bluegrass band.

While his peers chased honky-tonk hits and folk-revival crowds, Story kept his focus narrow and deep. The result is one of the most consistent bodies of work in the music: hundreds of sacred sides that set the template for bluegrass gospel and gave the genre its devotional center. Almost every gospel quartet number a bluegrass band reaches for today runs back, somewhere, through Carl Story's singles.

Session details drawn in part from the Bluegrass Discography.