Ernie Thacker

Musician · 1971–2018
Best known for Lead Vocals Guitar Mandolin

Ernie Thacker was a Clinch Mountain Boy at sixteen and Ralph Stanley’s lead singer by eighteen — one of the youngest to hold that job — and went on to lead his own band, Route 23, through a career that a 2006 car wreck could not stop.

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  • He joined Ralph Stanley’s Clinch Mountain Boys on mandolin in 1988 at sixteen, rejoined in 1989, and became the band’s lead singer and guitarist in 1990.
  • Stanley’s lead singers are a particular lineage — Roy Lee Centers, Keith Whitley, Larry Sparks — and he was hired into it very young.
  • He formed Route 23, named for the highway out of eastern Kentucky, in 1997, and recorded Tennessee Blues and Chill of Lonesome.
  • He was paralyzed and lost a leg in a car accident in 2006, and continued to record and perform afterward.
  • He died in 2018. In this catalog he appears on Clinch Mountain Boys recordings from 1991 and 1992, on mandolin and guitar and in the harmony.

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