“Cry from the Cross” is a bluegrass gospel song that came up through the close-knit world of Southern sacred music. The Masters Family, a gospel group, recorded it in the early 1950s, and the Stanley Brothers cut their own version for Mercury later in that decade.
The song meditates on the suffering of the crucifixion — the cry from the cross — and the redemption held to flow from it, the kind of solemn, vivid sacred text that bluegrass quartet singing renders with real weight.
Ralph Stanley returned to it for the title track of his 1971 album Cry from the Cross, the first record he made for Rebel after his brother Carter’s death. The album is widely regarded as one of the strongest of Stanley’s long career, and the song anchors it.
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