Ralph Stanley II

He was born on 20 August 1978. His mother’s taste ran to older bluegrass and to country singers such as George Jones. At two she saw him strumming a broom as if it were a guitar, and at three his father taught him a roll on the banjo and had him playing spoons on stage. The guitar won out: at five he borrowed his sister’s guitar and began learning, and by his own account he has played it ever since. He traveled with the band on the road as a boy, and on 15 December 1989, aged eleven, he played guitar at a Copper Creek session at Maggard Recording Studio in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, and sang on one track, “Haunted House.” He played guitar on his father’s Rebel sessions there in December 1990. What made him want to do it for a living, at about twelve, was a 1977 video of Keith Whitley singing lead with the Clinch Mountain Boys, and he worked on his playing for hours in the family basement.

In June 1995 he took over as lead singer and rhythm guitarist of the Clinch Mountain Boys, a part sung before him by his uncle Carter Stanley and then by Larry Sparks, Roy Lee Centers, Keith Whitley and Charlie Sizemore. In 1997 he sang lead on “Jesus on the Mainline” on one of his father’s Rebel albums, and he was in the band on the 1997 Nashville sessions for Clinch Mountain Country. His first record outside the band was Clinch Mountain Echoes (1996), made with the band’s mandolinist John Rigsby. For Rebel he then produced his own albums at Maggard’s studio, with the Clinch Mountain Boys behind him: Listen to My Hammer Ring, cut in the fall of 1998 with Steve Sparkman, Rigsby, James Price, James Alan Shelton and Jack Cooke and with his father singing harmony, and which included Carter Stanley’s previously unrecorded “Mary, Merry Christmas”; Pretty Girls, City Lights (2000), on which he began writing, alone on “I’ll Remember You in My Dreams”; Stanley Blues (2002), with his own title song and “Taylor Brooke”; and Carrying On (2004), whose title song he co-wrote and on which he and Shelton wrote the instrumental “Arizona Line.” Both Stanley Blues and Carrying On were nominated for the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album, at the 2003 and 2005 awards.

He also sang on his father’s two albums with Jim Lauderdale. I Feel Like Singing Today (Rebel, 1999) was nominated for the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album, and Lost in the Lonesome Pines, recorded early in 2002 at Maggard’s studio with Ralph II among the background singers and credited to Lauderdale, Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys, won that Grammy at the 2003 awards. In 2004 he produced a Rebel album for his father.

In 2008, after some fifteen years beside his father, he left the Clinch Mountain Boys to lead his own group. His album that year, This One Is II (Lonesome Day, September 2008), produced by Mike Latterell, was a break from the Stanley sound, mixing bluegrass with acoustic country and songs by Garth Brooks, Lyle Lovett, Tom T. Hall and Townes Van Zandt. Born to Be a Drifter, cut early in 2011 with Rigsby on fiddle and mandolin and issued on Stanley Generation Records, a label run by his nephew Nathan Stanley, returned to the family style; his touring band then was Rigsby, Randall Hibbitts on bass and Jayd Raines on banjo. In 2013 he and his father recorded Side by Side at Appal Studio in Paintsville, Kentucky, sharing the lead singing, with Steve Sparkman on banjo and Rigsby on mandolin and fiddle; Rebel released it in February 2014.

Ralph Stanley died on 23 June 2016, and as his father had wished, Ralph II took over the Clinch Mountain Boys name. The first record under it, Ralph Stanley II & the Clinch Mountain Boys (Stanley Family Records, 26 May 2017), had Rigsby on fiddle and mandolin, Alex Leach on banjo and Hibbitts on bass; Lord Help Me Find the Way, a gospel set, followed in 2019. On 17 January 2025, 25 years after his father joined the Grand Ole Opry, he played the Opry at the Ryman for the first time under his own name, with Leach now on guitar, Curtis Coleman on banjo, Stanley Efaw on fiddle, Hibbitts on bass and Wyatt Ellis guesting on mandolin. The same band made the single “Polly’s Revenge” (2025), on which he sings lead and plays lead guitar, and the album Rollin’ on Rubber Wheels (2025), whose title song Carter Stanley had written and recorded with Ralph in 1964. On 16 October 2026, two days before the Stanley Brothers were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, he played the Opry to mark eighty years since the brothers first played together.