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Charlie Sizemore

Recording Artist · Active 1985–present · Magoffin County · Also a musician
Contemporary Bluegrass

Charlie Sizemore is a Kentucky-born lead singer and guitarist whose nine-year tenure replacing Keith Whitley in Ralph Stanley's Clinch Mountain Boys (1977–1986), parallel career as a Nashville attorney, and multi-album Rebel Records run have made him one of the most distinctive Stanley-tradition voices of the post-Whitley era.

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  • Raised on Puncheon Creek in Magoffin County in the Appalachian region of eastern Kentucky; father and grandfather were banjo players and the family home was loaded with Stanley Brothers recordings.
  • Saw Carter and Ralph Stanley play his elementary school in 1966 at age five — the encounter that set the course of his life.
  • Replaced Keith Whitley as guitarist and lead singer of Ralph Stanley & the Clinch Mountain Boys in 1977 at age 17, and held the chair for nine years through 1986.
  • Left Stanley in 1986 to form his own band and return to school; graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1990 and later passed the bar in Tennessee and Kentucky.
  • Built a parallel career as a Nashville attorney while continuing to record for Rebel Records: "Back Home" (1994), "In My View" (1996), and "The Story Is...The Songs of Tom T. Hall" (2002), the last featuring Ralph Stanley, Kathy Mattea, J.D. Crowe, the Oak Ridge Boys, and Hall himself.
  • Returned to full-time touring in 2007 with "Good News" on Rounder, followed by "Heartache Looking for a Home" (2010).
  • His recording of Tom T. Hall's "That's How I Got to Memphis" topped Bluegrass Unlimited's National Bluegrass Survey.
  • Inducted into the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame in 2024.

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