The Stanley
Brothers

Carter Stanley | McClure, Virginia | Born: August 27, 1925 | Died: December 1, 1966

Ralph Stanley | McClure, Virginia | Born: February 25, 1927 | Died: June 23, 2016

Bluegrass music was still in its infancy when brothers Carter and Ralph Stanley formed their band, the Stanley Brothers & the Clinch Mountain Boys, in 1946. Inspired by the high lonesome sound of Bill Monroe & His Blue Grass Boys, the old-time music of J. E. and Wade Mainer, and the Carter Family’s harmony singing, the Stanleys helped shape and popularize bluegrass as a distinct style of country music.

More than any other bluegrass act, the Stanley Brothers imbued the genre with a haunting sense of emotion, drawn from their roots in the Primitive Baptist Church and the rugged land of their origins. They are remembered as bluegrass music’s most soulful foundational act, whose performances cut to the core of our humanity. The Stanleys also were influential, inspiring and mentoring fellow bluegrass stars including young Ricky Skaggs and Keith Whitley, and collaborating with artists such as Bill Monroe, whom they were originally accused of imitating.

Raised in the Clinch Mountains near a lumber camp in McClure, Virginia, Carter (born August 27, 1925) and Ralph (born February 25, 1927) Stanley came from a musical family. Their father, Lee Stanley, was a logger and a gifted singer who taught his boys traditional songs such as “Man of Constant Sorrow” and “Pretty Polly.” Lee performed in the local McClure Church, a Primitive Baptist congregation that sang in a “lined out” call-and-response style without musical accompaniment, which in part motivated his boys to sing.

Clinch Mountain Roots

Carter and Ralph’s mother, Lucy Smith Stanley, was a five-string banjoist who began teaching Ralph the clawhammer style of playing when he was a child. The first song he learned was the instrumental breakdown “Shout Little Lulie.” Over the years, he developed a singular three-finger picking style with fast, forward rolls known as the “Stanley style.” Lucy also encouraged Ralph to begin “lining out” songs when he was five years old. Leading the church congregation in song lent a timeless—and at times eerie—quality to Ralph’s higher-register tenor voice.

Believing that music was a better career than logging, farming, or coal mining, Carter ordered his first guitar from the Montgomery Ward catalog when he was about fourteen years old. Around the same time, the boys’ uncle bought a much better banjo from the Spiegel catalog for Ralph, who’d been learning to play on a cheap, hollow-back instrument he’d purchased for five dollars from his aunt. To help strengthen their playing, the brothers joined a local band called the Lazy Ramblers. All of its members were beginner players, and they shared chords and runs with one another as they learned them.

Though the boys were exposed to music from a young age, their enthusiasm for it grew as they absorbed live music on the radio and in concert. As teenagers, they tuned in to WSM broadcasts of the Grand Ole Opry, and performances by the Carter Family and Mainer’s Mountaineers on powerful “border blaster” radio stations in Mexico located just south of the Texas border. Carter knew he wanted to be a musician after seeing another sibling duo, the Delmore Brothers, perform in 1936 at a local high school. “The curtains opened, they started playing, and I said, ‘That’s for me,’” he told musician and folklorist Mike Seeger.

Forming a Band

After both were discharged from the army and briefly performed with Roy Sykes & the Blue Ridge Mountain Boys, Carter and Ralph formed the Stanley Brothers & the Clinch Mountain Boys in November 1946. Carter played guitar and sang lead, and Ralph played banjo and sang in a strong tenor voice. Joining them were Sykes’s mandolin player, Darrell “Pee Wee” Lambert, also a vocalist, and Bobby Sumner, a fiddler from eastern Kentucky. The band often changed members, with the longest-serving musicians being guitarist-bassist-vocalist George Shuffler and bassist Jack Cooke.

Named after a mountain range in the brothers’ home region, the Stanley Brothers & the Clinch Mountain Boys gained exposure through regular performances on the Farm and Fun Time radio show on station WCYB in Bristol, Tennessee, where producer Ralph Peer first recorded the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers in 1927.

The group soon made their first commercial recordings, for Rich-R-Tone Records out of nearby Johnson City, Tennessee, in 1947. These included original songs such as “Death Is Only a Dream,” “I Can Tell You the Time,” “Mother No Longer Awaits Me at Home,” and “The Girl Behind the Bar.” The singles they released in this period were regionally popular, particularly in Kentucky, but not a runaway success.

Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, Carter and Ralph Stanley released recordings on Columbia Records, Mercury Records, and King/Starday Records with varied configurations of the Clinch Mountain Boys following the departure of Pee Wee Lambert in 1952. After briefly quitting the business in the early 1950s, amid economic hardship, and taking jobs at the Ford Motor Company in Detroit, they returned to music. The brothers befriended Bill Monroe, their biggest inspiration, who once resented the group for copying his sound as he saw it. Their bond became so strong that Carter even performed with Monroe for a few months in the summer of 1951.

After reforming the Clinch Mountain Boys, the Stanley Brothers eventually took up residence in Live Oak, Florida, where they headlined the weekly Suwannee River Jamboree radio show broadcast on WNER. In 1966, the group toured throughout Europe and played together until Carter’s death from liver cirrhosis at the age of forty-one in December 1966.

A Powerful Musical Legacy

Between 1947 and 1966, the Stanley Brothers and the Clinch Mountain Boy recorded about 350 songs, many now bluegrass standards. Their version of “Rank Stranger” remains definitive for its soul-baring, lonesome qualities. Following Carter’s death, Ralph led the Clinch Mountain Boys for fifty years and became a revered elder statesman of the genre. In 1970, two virtuosic teenage players, Ricky Skaggs and Keith Whitley, joined the Clinch Mountain Boys, learning from and performing with their hero for a few years before each became a star in his own right.

Ralph Stanley joined the Grand Ole Opry in 2000 and won a Grammy award in 2002 for his chilling performance of the Appalachian traditional folksong “O Death” for the film O Brother, Where Art Thou.

“T Bone Burnett had several auditions for that song,” Ralph told Virginia Living magazine in 2008. “I went down with my banjo to Nashville and I said, ‘T Bone, let me sing it the way I want to sing it,’ and I laid my banjo down and sung it a cappella. After two or three verses, he stopped me and said, ‘That’s it.’”

Ralph Stanley died from cancer at age eighty-nine at his home in Dickenson County, Virginia, in 2016. Among the many artists who have expressed admiration for the Stanley Brothers are Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris, Vince Gill, Alison Krauss, Patty Loveless, and Dwight Yoakam.