Sammy Adkins

Before he joined Stanley he recorded with the Mountain Echoes, whose albums On and On (Nashville Bluegrass Co., 1980) and Hand in Hand with Jesus (around 1982) he is on, and he made the album Sweetest Love with Buddy Moore in the 1980s.

Stanley recruited him at the Cannonsburg festival at the start of August 1986, when Sizemore left the band. Adkins sang lead and played rhythm guitar alongside Junior Blankenship on guitar, Curly Ray Cline on fiddle and Jack Cooke on bass, and the band can be heard on a live recording from the Thomas Point Beach Bluegrass Festival in Maine on 6 September 1987. On 15 January 1988, at Maggard Recording Studio in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, the same lineup recorded the Rebel gospel album I’ll Answer the Call, with Adkins singing lead and baritone. That year he also sang high harmony with Stanley behind the singer Sam Wilson on an album recorded at River Track Studio in Louisa, Kentucky, and River Track issued an album by Adkins and Stanley together, You’re Still to Blame.

On 26 September 1989 he played guitar on Stanley’s album with the banjo player Raymond Fairchild, and on 15 December 1989, back at Maggard Sound Studio, he sang lead on Like Father, Like Son, the album Stanley made with his son Ralph Stanley II, with Ernie Thacker on mandolin, Cline on fiddle and Cooke on bass. The songs included Bill Monroe’s “My Rose of Old Kentucky” and Reno and Smiley’s “Long Gone.” Early in 1990 he appeared with the band on the TNN program Nashville Now, and he left late that March; Thacker, then eighteen, became Stanley’s lead singer and guitarist.

His later albums include Tribute to Keith Whitley (Crosscut, 2001), Most Requested with Darrell Winkleman (Crosscut, 2002) and What a Day That Will Be (2005). With the Sandy Hook Mountain Boys he opened Rudy Fest in Rowan County, Kentucky, in June 2022, with Jarrod Church on banjo, Danny Davis on bass, Charlie Conkright and Junior Blankenship, and in October 2025 the band played the Court Square Theater in Harrisonburg, Virginia.