A singular voice in bluegrass: Ralph Stanley
-
Ralph Stanley.
Share with others:
Ralph Stanley has already won three Grammys, and tonight he goes for his fourth. But there are a lot of other great talents bidding for best bluegrass album -- Alison Krauss, Jim Lauderdale, Steve Martin, Del McCoury and Chris Thile.
"I guess I don't have a chance," Mr. Stanley says with his customary stoicism, "but I'd really like to win this one. I've got some stiff competition, but I've beat some of those country singers before on the Grammy Awards."
Indeed, in 2002 he beat out Tim McGraw, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Lyle Lovett and Ryan Adams for best male country vocal performance for his version of "O Death" on the "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" movie soundtrack. But even if Mr. Stanley's "A Mother's Prayer" doesn't win, his influence will be heard in whatever album does, because the 84-year-old singer and banjo picker helped create the template for the genre.
"Three groups really shaped bluegrass music," Ricky Skaggs told me in 1999. "Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys, the Stanley Brothers, and Flatt and Scruggs. Everyone who came after them was just following in their footsteps."
Mr. Stanley is still out there performing. In concert, he plays songs from the nominated album as well as songs he recorded with his older brother Carter as the Stanley Brothers from 1947 to 1966 and songs from his years as leader of Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys.
The newest songs will not sound all that different from the oldest. "A Mother's Prayer" is devoted to the kind of gospel hymns Mr. Stanley sang as a boy at the foot of Clinch Mountain in the southwestern corner of Virginia. His family attended the McClure Church, a Primitive Baptist church nearby.
"It was just an old wooden building painted white," Mr. Stanley says by phone from Clinch Mountain, where he still lives. "Maybe 20 to 30 people would come on Sunday; there weren't too many Primitive Baptists around here. They didn't allow any instruments in the church; you could sing, just no instruments. If you've heard my a cappella singing, that's what it sounded like."
First Published February 12, 2012 12:00 am
