Charlie Sizemore

He was raised on Puncheon Creek in Magoffin County, Kentucky, where his father and grandfather played the banjo and the house was full of Stanley Brothers records. In 1966, when he was five, he saw Carter and Ralph Stanley play a concert at his elementary school. His first instrument was the fiddle, which he started at six, and by his teens he was good enough on guitar to play with the local performer Lum Patton and then to tour with the Goins Brothers, Melvin and Ray, playing lead guitar.

Through the Goins Brothers he came to know Keith Whitley, then Ralph Stanley’s lead singer. When Stanley’s guitarist Renfro Profitt left in September 1977, Whitley brought Sizemore to play Stanley’s festival, but the job went to Danny Marshall. Then Whitley himself left in November 1977, and Stanley asked Sizemore to sing a few songs with him, on stage and off, and hired him as lead singer and guitarist. His first studio album with the band, Down Where the River Bends, was recorded at Lemco Sound Studio in Lexington, Kentucky, on 29 March 1978, with Junior Blankenship, Dan Marshall, John Johnson, Curly Ray Cline and Jack Cooke, and issued by Rebel. Over the next eight years the band, settled around Blankenship on lead guitar and mandolin, Cooke on bass and Cline on fiddle, recorded the Rebel albums I’ll Wear a White Robe, The Stanley Sound Today (1981), The Memory of Your Smile (1982), Child of the King (1983), I Can Tell You the Time (1985) and Lonesome and Blue (1986), as well as Snow Covered Mound for Stanley’s own Stanleytone label. A cassette made for regional sale, Sixteen Years, cut live in the studio in a single day with Sizemore singing lead, was reissued on Copper Creek and then in 2009 by Rounder as Can’t You Hear the Mountains Calling, credited to the band featuring Charlie Sizemore. In all he appeared on sixteen of Stanley’s albums; his last studio session with the band was at Maggard Recording Studio in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, in April 1986.

Within a month of leaving, at 26, he had formed his own band and enrolled in college. He graduated from the University of Kentucky in political science and spent some time in graduate school in history at Middle Tennessee State University before moving to Nashville, where he wrote songs for Paul Craft Music. His songs have been recorded by Ralph Stanley, Jimmy Martin, Doyle Lawson, the Dry Branch Fire Squad and Del Reeves. His own records in these years began with Congratulations on Acoustic Revival in 1985, followed by Gravel Road (1988), Singing with the Angels (1989) and I’ve Got a Good Memory (1990) on Rutabaga.

By 1994 he was working as a Nashville attorney as well as a performer. That year Rebel released Back Home, produced by Paul Craft, with six songs written or co-written by Sizemore and guests including Alison Krauss, Tim O’Brien, Claire Lynch, Bobby Clark, Glen Duncan and Mark Schatz. In My View (1996) introduced a new Charlie Sizemore Band, with Danny Barnes on mandolin, Will Parsons on banjo and John Berry on bass, plus Rickie Simpkins on fiddle and Jimmy Stewart on Dobro; it included “Made in the Shade (If the Tree Don’t Fall),” which he wrote with Jimmy Martin, and his recording of Tom T. Hall’s “That’s How I Got to Memphis” went to No. 1 on Bluegrass Unlimited’s National Bluegrass Survey. That success led to The Story Is… The Songs of Tom T. Hall (Rebel, 2002), with guest appearances by Ralph Stanley, Kathy Mattea, the Oak Ridge Boys, J. D. Crowe and Hall himself. Late in 1998 he had taken a break from the road, and while working for a Nashville law firm he finished law school; he passed the bar in Tennessee and Kentucky and went into private practice.

In 2007 he signed with Rounder, which released Good News, his first new studio album in five years, on 14 August 2007. Co-produced with Buddy Cannon and recorded largely live in the studio, it had four new songs of his, among them “Alison’s Band” and “Silver Bugle,” about a Civil War event from his part of Kentucky, alongside songs by Tom T. and Dixie Hall, Harley Allen and Hank Cochran. His band then was Danny Barnes on mandolin, Matt DeSpain on Dobro, John Pennell on bass and Wayne Fields on banjo, and his law practice was in Goodlettsville, Tennessee. Rounder followed it with Heartache Looking for a Home in February 2011. The Kentucky Music Hall of Fame inducted him in 2024.