week of 8/7/02
 
 
 

Music with a message
By Karl Rohr

I detest fads, commercialism and corruption of all things sacred and pure, but it takes a cruel streak of insensitivity to not like what the movie “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou” has done for bluegrass music.

Anything that popularizes Ralph Stanley deserves high praise, and if it brings more money into his wallet, I say buy him more wallets and fill those up too. True, I cringe when I think that Stanley’s voice in “Oh Brother” was supposed to belong to a Ku Klux Klansman, but that was probably just some actor under that hood. It wasn’t really Ralph, I keep telling myself.

You get a hint of the real Ralph Stanley on the soundtrack, but if you’re a newcomer, you have no idea what lies ahead if you dig deeper into his catalog. I don’t care how hot it is now, you’ll still get chills from this stuff, and if Jesus Christ isn’t your savior yet, you might seriously consider it after a gospel album or two.

Stanley repeatedly warns us that nobody knows what lies ahead except God, and we had better start being accountable now or it’s going to get even hotter for us very soon. It’s a trip not for the faint of heart, but what wonderful rewards await those who stick it out.

Welcome to the haunting world of Ralph Stanley.

The 1995 box set of Stanley and his band, the Clinch Mountain Boys, and the re-release of one of their classic gospel albums totally eclipse the bluegrass anthologies that have followed the “Oh, Brother” craze. But admittedly, they aren’t for everyone. Those who like their bluegrass highly polished and user friendly may find this stuff too much of the real thing. Others, after hearing this, might find that some of their favorite records on the shelf have suddenly become boring relics.

The four-CD box set is not a complete retrospective. It only takes a listener through three years of Stanley’s career. But, folks, these years are 1971-73. That means you get the albums “Cry From the Cross” “John Henry,” “Something Old-Something New,” “The Old Country Church,” “Ralph Stanley Plays Requests,” “The Stanley Sound Around the World,” “I Want to Preach the Gospel” and “A Man and His Music.” Have mercy.

While it only covers three years, the collection has an epic, sprawling feel that staggers a listener with its raw production, depth of emotion and spirituality that borders on eeriness. The picking is what we’ve always expected from Stanley. His banjo sounds like a rattling coal car clacking along a track in the mines of his childhood, and Curly Ray Cline’s fiddle sounds like more tree than fiddle, maybe a giant white pine, one atop a windswept mountain ridgeline, creaking and moaning with every gust, and spreading its dark limbs over a listener so that it even blocks out the sunlight on a bright day.

But it’s the singing that really grips listeners, and Stanley’s other-worldly, wizard-like incantations aren’t the only highlights. This collection might also be termed the Roy Lee Centers box set, because it provides our best look at the man who fearlessly stepped into the shoes of Ralph’s brother, Carter.

The death of singer/songwriter Carter Stanley from alcoholism in 1966 left Ralph in an emotional void and his career in doubt. He was nearly 40 and had just lost his creative force. He was under contract to King Records to produce three more albums, but luckily, new talent found him. Cline and vocalist Larry Sparks helped Stanley continue the music he had played with his brother, with ever more leanings toward a style of bluegrass that became known as “mountain style.”

Who knows what the term really meant? But somehow it fit the music perfectly. In 1971, Stanley cut a debut album for Rebel Records, a basement-run operation in Maryland headed by entrepreneur Dick Freeland, who had also signed the Country Gentlemen and a then-unknown Washington group called the Seldom Scene. While these two groups would bring new material into bluegrass and reach a younger base of pickers, Stanley went the opposite direction, bringing in bluegrass versions of old-time fiddle and folk songs, and reviving haunting a capella versions of old hymns from his Primitive Baptist childhood.

He had some great help. Centers would replace Sparks in 1971 and gain a reputation as one of the best lead singers bluegrass has known. Then, there was that skinny little mountain kid with the nerdy big-frame glasses who had way too much talent for someone his age. Kids as young as Keith Whitley should have still been at home with mama, not traveling around with Ralph Stanley picking lead guitar and singing all those deep songs about death, heaven and hell. But Whitley had help from his best friend and bandmate, a fleet-fingered mandolin picker from Kentucky named Ricky Skaggs.

The collection features some fearsome instrumentals, and some of the selections were recorded informally during a 1971 tour of Japan (minus Whitley and Skaggs), with a quick jump into a studio and the tape capturing what came down. Stanley’s richly percussive clawhammer banjo drives “Bound to Ride” and “Little Birdie,” while the inspired sloppiness of “Mississippi Sawyer” shows that touring fatigue must have set in.

Other sessions spotlight classic Stanley solos that showcase his rough banjo tone and unpolished three-fingered technique, most notably “Clinch Mountain Backstep,” “Little Maggie,” “Hard Times” and “Cumberland Gap.”

But the box set is far more reliant on the songs that combine a deep lyrical quality with a stunning vocal delivery. Jesse Winchester’s “Brand New Tennessee Waltz” starts off graceful and stately, but some ghostly fiddle strokes from Cline and the wistful tone of Stanley’s voice turn this impressionistic tale of loss into a bittersweet journey that takes on a different meaning with every listen.

Stanley is no slouch of a songwriter himself, and tells us about far more than the little ol’ bluegrass sweetheart back home. His “war story,” written in the Vietnam War era, is far from patriotic. In Stanley’s view, all war is evil, and “A Little Boy Called Joe” describes the guilt suffered by an American soldier who fathers an illegitimate child to an Asian woman who dies in childbirth:


In a war-torn land of poverty somewhere across the sea/A little boy is waiting, he looks a lot like me/His hair is like the sunlight on the wings of a crow/I don’t know what they named him, but I’m sure they call him, “Joe.”


We never know if the soldier finds his son, or even tries to.

Sure, like a good bluegrass musician, Stanley has written a train song, but this one isn’t about the ol’ 97 or the romance of hoboing. Instead, “Shotgun Slade” immediately puts the listener into a standoff between a right-of-way work crew foreman and a 17-year-old armed with a shotgun. The young man vows to uphold the dying request of his father, who told his son never to give up the land. After the foreman laughs the youth off, a shotgun blast kills him, and the listener freezes in shock like the foreman’s crew. The production here is masterful. Cline’s fiddle shuffles and the spare, direct dialogue between the characters create tension up to the moment the trigger is pulled, leaving the listener breathless up to the chorus.

It’s the gospel songs, though, that hit the hardest, and some of them transcend anything heard anywhere on this planet. “Village Church Yard,” the most chilling song in the set, is so eerie that one has to wonder what goes on in Stanley’s head when the lights go out. Sung in a call-and-response with no instrumentation, it describes a man who makes regular nighttime visits to his mother’s grave and wishes he could join her in the afterlife. How creepy is it? I first heard it many years ago on a bluegrass radio program while I was in rush hour traffic on I-285, and it shook me to the core. I thought God had sent me a death angel for sure.

Tragedy lies at the heart of this collection, and not just in the song content. In 1974, Stanley once again found himself picking up the pieces, emotionally and professionally. Roy Lee Centers, his gifted lead singer, was shot and killed by a man who had accused him of having an affair with his wife, an apparently false charge. Stanley had once again lost his right-hand man. Centers was only 29. Exit Centers. Enter Keith Whitley.

Allison Krauss had the best assessment of the recently re-released “Clinch Mountain Gospel” when she said, “I can’t think of anything better than this record.” Gillian Welch claimed that the album changed her life. I won’t dispute the album’s wallop, and it arguably includes even finer gospel material than the box set. This much is certain: “Clinch Mountain Gospel” gives us the finest work Whitley ever did, and that includes his hits as a Nashville country star.

Something about Whitley’s voice hinted that he was wise beyond his years and never quite found his home in his earthly existence. While Stanley could sing with the comforting wisdom of a sage prophet, Whitley’s voice on sacred songs often contained unmistakable fear, and his natural mountain inflection could convey innocence as well as tortured guilt.

“Clinch Mountain Gospel” was recorded in an amazing one-day session. Whitley had recently rejoined the band after an attempt to explore the country market, and his musical maturation during his absence still stuns listeners. Yes, “Oh, Death,” is here, but forget the “Oh, Brother” version. Until you’ve heard the duet between Stanley and Whitley, you haven’t heard it at all. Stanley sings with an acceptance of death, while a frightened Whitley seems determined to run away from it, while all the time knowing the race is already lost.

“Over in the Gloryland” and “Traveling the Highway Home” are the Clinch Mountain Boys at their most rocking, showcasing Stanley’s driving banjo work and providing counterpoint to the more subdued songs. It’s darn near impossible to sit down during these soul-saving workouts.

While it’s hard to single out highlights on such a collection, the best moments belong to Whitley on “What a Price.” His earnest testimony before his Lord, in that resonant baritone with that unadorned mountain twang, will stay with you for a long time: How could I repay you, dear Savior/What sacrifice could I make?/To You most holy and righteous, How much, oh, could it take?/What a price you paid for me/What a debt I owe, Lord, to thee.

Of course, many of you know how this story turned out. Whitley went on to Nashville stardom, a well-publicized marriage with country starlet Lorrie Morgan and death from alcoholism in 1989. He was 33.

The roots of everyone who played on these two superb collections ran incredibly deep. Maybe that’s why all the music sounds so intensely aware of the joys and pitfalls and certain death that await all of us. Stanley never wavered from what he saw as the best path for mankind, and his convictions reach a listener now with as much clarity as they did in 1971. Maybe even more now, for Stanley’s message — and indeed, this is music with a message — is that at some point, no matter how lofty we think ourselves to be, we will answer to someone higher.

This box set and “Clinch Mountain Gospel” show us that Stanley might have more of a direct line to above than most of us, or at least a firmer handle on how we should live. He shows us how deep bluegrass can get without losing its fun.

Still, I don’t recommend listening to any of this in the dark by yourself.

(Karl Rohr teaches history at Western Carolina University and lives in Cullowhee.)