Carter Stanley wrote “The White Dove,” and the Stanley Brothers recorded it on 1 March 1949, at their first session for Columbia, held at Castle Studio in Nashville’s Tulane Hotel. Carter sang lead and played guitar. Ralph Stanley sang tenor and played banjo, and Darrell “Pee Wee” Lambert sang a high baritone and played mandolin, with Bobby Sumner on fiddle and Jay Hughes on bass. Columbia released it on 4 April 1949 as 20577, the brothers’ first record for the label, backed with “Gathering Flowers for the Master’s Bouquet.” Billboard reviewed it on 7 May and called it “a strong weeper job, harmonized in the mountain manner.”
Both brothers told how the song was written. In a 1966 interview with Mike Seeger, Carter said it was one of the first songs he ever tried to write, and that he wrote most of his songs at night while travelling. He remembered writing this one on the way from Asheville, North Carolina, to Bristol, Tennessee, with the car light on so he could get the words down, while Ralph, at the wheel, complained that the light bothered him. Ralph told the same story in his memoir Man of Constant Sorrow, written with Eddie Dean. Carter hummed a melody and then sang some words. Ralph told him to switch off the dome light because he couldn’t see the road, and within an hour or so they were singing the new song together in the car.
The lyric looks back on a childhood in a cabin in the hills of Virginia and on a family once happy together. In the chorus the white dove mourns and the willows hang their heads, because mother and daddy are dead. The later verses picture them singing around the throne in heaven, and the singer wondering whether the family will be together again, kneeling to pray in the graveyard at night. When Carter wrote it, both parents were still alive. Ralph said Carter “was writing about what he dreaded most,” the day he would have to give them up, and he called the song “the backbone of the Stanley Brothers.”
The brothers recorded it again for King on 10 February 1959 in Cincinnati, a version issued that August as a single backed with “Mother’s Footsteps Guide Me On” and on the album Hymns and Sacred Songs. Red Allen recorded it for the Kentucky label in Cincinnati in 1953, and Earl Taylor and the Stoney Mountain Boys put it on Folk Songs from the Blue Grass (United Artists, 1959). Old & In the Way recorded it live in October 1973 for their 1975 album, and Levon Helm sang it on Electric Dirt (2009). Bob Dylan sang it in concert ten times between December 1997 and April 2000.
