The Stanley Brothers and the Clinch Mountain Boys
Shoutin’ on the Hills of Glory
“Shouting on the Hills of Glory” is a Southern gospel song of the older revival-and-quartet tradition, widely recorded across bluegrass, country gospel, and Southern gospel quartet settings through the second half of the 20th century. The lyric is a heaven-bound narrative: the singer anticipating the joy of arriving in glory, the saints already shouting and singing on the heavenly hills.
The recording associated with this entry is Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys’ 1973 reading. The Stanleys’ deep gospel catalogue from the post-Carter-Stanley era (Carter died in 1966) drew on traditional gospel material like this and on Ralph’s own writing in the gospel-quartet tradition; the recordings established the bluegrass-canonical version of much of this song family.
The song’s authorship is not consistently documented in the publicly available discographic sources, and the song’s place in the tradition is sufficiently old that it has acquired the floating-verse character common to gospel pieces of its kind. It works as an up-tempo gospel quartet feature in G with a strong four-part harmony slot on the chorus refrain — the kind of celebratory-rather-than-mournful gospel piece that anchors the brighter end of a bluegrass gospel set.
