Album
Musicians
- Roy Lee Centers — Lead Vocals, Guitar
- Ralph Stanley — Banjo
- "Curly" Ray Cline — Fiddle
- Jack Cooke — Bass
“Love Me, Darling, Just Tonight” came to the Stanley Brothers from M.H. “Red” Malone, an entertainer who spent time on WCYB’s Farm & Fun Time radio show, and the record credits Malone together with Ruby Rakes. Ruby Rakes Eubanks was the brothers’ half-sister, and the rights to a number of their songs were put in her name. Carter and Ralph Stanley recorded it on 30 September 1958 at the King studio on Brewster Avenue in Cincinnati, Carter singing lead and playing guitar and Ralph singing tenor and playing banjo, with Bill Napier on mandolin, Ralph Mayo on fiddle and Al Elliott on bass. King issued it in December 1958 on King 5165, backed with the banjo tune “Midnight Ramble” from the next day’s session, and in March 1959 it appeared on the brothers’ first King album, The Stanley Brothers and the Clinch Mountain Boys (King 615).
The singer’s sweetheart has told him she is leaving tomorrow. He asks her to look for true love in her heart, prays she will not go, and allows that tomorrow she may hold another; every verse comes back to the plea of the title, to love him just for tonight.
Ralph Stanley kept the song after Carter’s death. His Clinch Mountain Boys played it in Tokyo on 5 May 1971 for the Live in Japan album, with Roy Lee Centers on guitar, Curly Ray Cline on fiddle and Jack Cooke on bass, and recut it in the studio on 18 February 1973 at Lemco in Lexington, Kentucky, for The Stanley Sound Around the World (King Bluegrass, 1973). Centers sang lead there, with Ralph on tenor and Cooke on baritone. Other recordings followed from Bill Wells and the Blue Ridge Mountain Grass (Old Homestead, 1979), the Keen Brothers (1982) and Chief Powhatan (1984). The Vern Williams Band’s live performances from 1982 to 1988 appeared on Arhoolie’s Traditional Bluegrass in 2004. Shawn Lane recorded it for All for Today (Rebel, 2003), singing both lead and tenor and playing guitar, mandolin and fiddle, with Tom Adams on banjo, Rob Ickes on dobro and Barry Bales on bass.
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