Ralph Stanley, a masterful bluegrass singer and banjoist whose performances on the Grammy Award-winning movie soundtrack album O Brother, Where Art Thou? helped inspire a bluegrass resurgence in the 2000s, died June 23. He was 89.
His publicist, Kirt Webster, announced the death but did not provide further details. A grandson, Nathan Stanley, posted on his Facebook page that the cause was complications from skin cancer,
Stanley, widely regarded as an eminence in bluegrass, helped launch the careers of such country and bluegrass stars as Larry Sparks, Ricky Skaggs and the late Keith Whitley.
In recent decades, Stanley won some of the highest honors in his profession — including a National Medal of Arts — and recorded with such performers as Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris, George Jones, Lucinda Williams and Joan Baez. Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead once called him “the most perfect singer alive.”
It was a plaintive, nimble and haunting voice that blended elements of Primitive Baptist church choirs and the Grand Ole Opry, music on which Stanley was weaned in far southwestern Virginia.
With his older brother Carter, Stanley rose to musical prominence in the 1950s as a member of the bluegrass band known as the Stanley Brothers and the Clinch Mountain Boys. They were immediately at the forefront of a bluegrass sound first popularized by Bill Monroe – with its gospel harmony, Celtic fiddling, and blues, pop and jazz influences — and the mutual rivalry and admiration between Monroe and the Stanley Brothers continued for years.
Dark-tinged and mournful Stanley Brothers recordings from the late 1940s and 1950s — White Dove and The Fields Have Turned Brown, both written by Carter Stanley, and Rank Stranger — tapped into the sorrows of rural people, many of whom had moved to the city.
Not all Stanley Brothers music was doleful. The rollicking How Mountain Girls Can Love and Stanley’s vibrant instrumental showcase Hard Times showed their up-tempo side. How Far to Little Rock (1960), a vaudeville routine set to an old fiddle tune, Arkansas Traveler, gave the Stanley Brothers their biggest country radio hit.
When Carter, at 41, died of cirrhosis in 1966, became the group’s frontman.
Stanley led the Clinch Mountain Boys for the next five decades with other singers, such as Larry Sparks, Roy Lee Centers, Charlie Sizemore and Stanley’s son, Ralph Stanley II, in the tenor vocal slot originally held by Carter Stanley.