Ralph Stanley

He was born on 25 February 1927 at Big Spraddle Creek, near McClure, in the Clinch Mountains, the son of Lee and Lucy Smith Stanley. Music came from both sides of the house. His mother was one of twelve children who all played the banjo, and she taught him to play it clawhammer style; his father sang church songs and old ballads, among them “Man of Constant Sorrow,” a song Ralph and Carter would later record for Columbia.

Ralph went into the Army in May 1945, within weeks of finishing high school, and served for a little over a year. Both brothers were discharged in 1946 and spent a short time with Roy Sykes and the Blue Ridge Mountain Boys before starting a band of their own, the Clinch Mountain Boys, that November: Carter played guitar and sang lead, and Ralph played banjo and sang tenor. From December 1946 they were regulars on Farm and Fun Time on WCYB in Bristol, and it was in Bristol, in 1947, at the studio of radio station WOPI, that they made their first records, for Rich-R-Tone, with Darrell “Pee Wee” Lambert on mandolin and Leslie Keith on fiddle. “The Little Glass of Wine” came out on Rich-R-Tone in March 1948, and their “Molly and Tenbrooks” followed that September, a full year before Columbia issued Bill Monroe’s own recording of it.

His banjo playing changed in those first years. He had started with a two-finger style that came from Wade Mainer, and in 1948, following Earl Scruggs, he switched to three fingers. What came to be called the “Stanley style” is built on fast forward rolls led by the index finger rather than the thumb, often with the capo high on the neck and the strings picked close to the bridge, and it can be heard on “Clinch Mountain Backstep,” the banjo feature he cut for King a decade later.

Columbia recorded the brothers at Castle Studio in Nashville from March 1949 to April 1952, with Lambert still on mandolin. Their first Columbia single paired Carter’s “The White Dove” with “Gathering Flowers for the Master’s Bouquet,” and a session that November produced “The Fields Have Turned Brown.” Another, in November 1950, gave them “The Lonesome River” and their first “I’m a Man of Constant Sorrow,” but the band then took a break, during which the brothers went to work for the Ford Motor Company in Detroit, and in August 1951 Ralph was badly hurt in a car accident. The brothers moved on to Mercury, where between 1953 and 1957 they recorded his own banjo feature “Hard Times” and, in December 1955, “Angel Band,” a side that would find a far larger audience decades later on the O Brother soundtrack. From 1958 they recorded for both King and Starday while headlining the Suwannee River Jamboree in Live Oak, Florida, a three-hour radio show on WNER that was syndicated across the Southeast and ran until 1962; in the early 1960s they also had a television show of their own in central Florida. Albert E. Brumley’s “Rank Stranger” was a Starday recording of 1960, and the same year King issued “How Far to Little Rock,” their biggest country radio hit. They played the Newport Folk Festival in 1959 and 1964, appeared in 1965 at Fincastle, Virginia, at what is now regarded as the first bluegrass festival, and in March 1966 toured Germany, filming for television in Baden-Baden and giving a concert in Bremen.

Carter died on 1 December 1966, and Ralph briefly thought about giving up. Some 3,000 letters from fans, and the urging of King’s Syd Nathan, persuaded him to keep the band going. At his first King session as leader, in May 1967, Larry Sparks sang lead, with Melvin Goins, Earl Taylor, fiddler Curly Ray Cline and Jim McCall in the band; Roy Lee Centers, Charlie Sizemore and his son Ralph Stanley II would take the lead part in later years, while George Shuffler’s cross-picked guitar stayed part of the sound. Without Carter he also turned back toward an older music, bringing a cappella solo and quartet hymns, sung in the Primitive Baptist manner, onto the bluegrass stage.

In 1970, arriving late to a show, he found two Kentucky teenagers, Ricky Skaggs and Keith Whitley, holding the crowd with Stanley Brothers songs, and he hired them both. They are on Cry from the Cross (1971), one of his first albums for Rebel, the label that went on to issue his records for more than forty years, and they were in the band in May 1972 when it was recorded live at McClure. He held a bluegrass festival in his name near McClure each May, the thirteenth in 1983 and the twenty-sixth in 1996; by the end of his life its site was Hills of Home Park on Smith Ridge, between Coeburn and McClure. In May 1971 the band recorded Live in Japan in Tokyo; he later played at the inaugurations of Jimmy Carter in 1977 and Bill Clinton in 1993. In March 1980 he sang tenor to Jimmy Martin’s lead on a set of duets for Gusto, issued as First Time Together. By the end of the 1980s Ralph Stanley II was playing guitar in the band, and by the late 1990s he was singing lead on its records; he and Ralph’s grandson Nathan Stanley eventually became its lead singers.

A run of albums with guest singers brought him new listeners: Saturday Night & Sunday Morning (1992), with Bill Monroe, George Jones and Emmylou Harris, the IBMA’s Recorded Event of 1993; Clinch Mountain Country (Rebel, 1998), with Bob Dylan, Jones, Patty Loveless and Skaggs, which the IBMA named both Album of the Year and Recorded Event of the Year in 1999; and Clinch Mountain Sweethearts (2001), with Dolly Parton and Gillian Welch, the Recorded Event of 2002.

When T Bone Burnett asked him to sing “O Death” for O Brother, Where Art Thou?, he wanted it in the banjo style of Dock Boggs. Stanley laid the banjo down and sang it unaccompanied instead. The soundtrack, which also carried the Stanley Brothers’ “Angel Band,” was the IBMA’s Album of the Year for 2001. “O Death” won the Grammy for Best Male Country Vocal Performance in February 2002, on the same night the soundtrack was named Album of the Year. That year he closed the shows of the Down from the Mountain tour, which brought the soundtrack’s performers to a sold-out Rupp Arena in Lexington, Kentucky, on its opening date, and Burnett produced his album Ralph Stanley (DMZ/Columbia, 2002), with Norman Blake, Stuart Duncan, Mike Compton and Dennis Crouch behind him. A year after “O Death,” Lost in the Lonesome Pines, made with Jim Lauderdale, won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album.

A museum in his name opened in Clintwood, Virginia, in 2004, and in 2009 he published a memoir, Man of Constant Sorrow, written with Eddie Dean; the IBMA named the two of them Writers of the Year in 2010. He recorded Side by Side (2013) with Ralph Stanley II, and his last album, which shares the memoir’s title, Man of Constant Sorrow (2015), paired him with Robert Plant, Del McCoury and Elvis Costello. He died at home in Sandy Ridge, Virginia, on 23 June 2016, aged 89, by then the oldest member of the Grand Ole Opry.

• 1976: honorary doctorate, Lincoln Memorial University (hence “Dr. Ralph Stanley”)
• 1984: National Heritage Fellowship
• 1992: the Stanley Brothers enter the IBMA Hall of Fame
• 1993: IBMA Recorded Event of the Year (Saturday Night & Sunday Morning)
• 1999: IBMA Album of the Year and Recorded Event of the Year (Clinch Mountain Country)
• 2000: Grand Ole Opry membership; Library of Congress Living Legend
• 2002: Grammy, Best Male Country Vocal Performance (“O Death”); IBMA Recorded Event of the Year (Clinch Mountain Sweethearts)
• 2003: Grammy, Best Bluegrass Album (Lost in the Lonesome Pines, with Jim Lauderdale)
• 2006: National Medal of Arts
• 2008: Outstanding Virginian award
• 2010: IBMA Writer of the Year, with Eddie Dean
• 2014: honorary doctorate, Yale; elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 2026: the Stanley Brothers named to the Country Music Hall of Fame