Man of Constant Sorrow: My Life and Times - Hardcover

Stanley, Ralph; Dean, Eddie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1592404251 ISBN 13: 9781592404254

Publisher: Gotham, 2009

Synopsis

A giant of American music opens the book on his wrenching professional and personal journeys, paying tribute to the vanishing Appalachian culture that gave him his voice.

He was there at the beginning of bluegrass. Yet his music, forged in the remote hills and hollows of Southwest Virginia, has even deeper roots. In Man of Constant Sorrow, Dr. Ralph Stanley gives a surprisingly candid look back on his long and incredible career as the patriarch of old-time mountain music.

Marked by Dr. Ralph Stanley?s banjo picking, his brother Carter?s guitar playing, and their haunting and distinctive harmonies, the Stanley Brothers began their career in 1946 and blessed the world of bluegrass with hundreds of classic songs, including ?White Dove,? ?Rank Stranger,? and what has become Dr. Ralph?s signature song, ?Man of Constant Sorrow.? Carter died in 1966 after years of alcohol abuse, but Dr. Ralph Stanley carried on and is still at the top of his game, playing to audiences across the country today at age eighty-one. Rarely giving interviews, he now grants fans the book they have been waiting for, filled with frank recollections, from his boyhood of dire poverty in the Appalachian coalfields to his early musical success with his brother, to years of hard traveling on the road with the Clinch Mountain Boys, to the recent, jubilant revival of a sound he helped create.

The story of how a musical art now popular around the world was crafted by two brothers from a dying mountain culture, Man of Constant Sorrow captures a life harmonized with equal measures of tragedy and triumph.

About this title

About the Author:

DR. Ralph Stanley has been performing professionally for more than sixty years. He was awarded a Grammy in 2002 for his song “O Death,” featured on the soundtrack for O Brother, Where Art Thou? In 2006, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

Eddie Dean is a veteran music journalist who has written for Spin, the Washington City Paper, and Talk magazine, among other publications. Both authors are natives of Virginia.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Prologue
Hills of Home
“ I’d like to go back to the days of my childhood
And go to church in the village there
To meet my friends and old acquaintance
And sing again in the village choir”
—“Turn Back,” Ralph Stanley

When I was just a little boy growing up in the mountains of southwest Virginia, singing was as natural as breathing. I was borned and raised way back in the hills, and a lot of our forefathers, our grandpas and great-uncles and so forth, were of the old Baptist faith, and they all had lonesome voices to sing out those sad old hymns.

This was a long time ago, back in the 1930s, and a long way back in steep hills and deep hollows. Where I come from, people lived spread out from one another. There was no radio or telephone. Days would pass between you seeing anybody outside your family. Singing was a way to keep yourself company when you got to feeling lonesome.

You could hear singing everywhere from church to the back porch, from the high ridgetops to the head of the creek, wherever there were chores to do or miles to walk or fields to work. You’d hear people tell about a mule that wouldn’t budge unless the man behind the plow got to singing. Songs were handed down from father to son and mother to daughter. Singing gave you strength, and you needed plenty to get you through rough times. People from our mountains were used to going without, and singing didn’t cost a cent. Not many things you can say that about.

Back in our little part of the world, singing was part of everyday living, one of the natural sounds all around us: the water running through the rocks on Big Spraddle Creek and the coon dogs barking down the hollow and the train whistle blowing as the freight cars hauled coal on the Clinchfield Railroad. Course, we didn’t pay no mind it. When you’re so used to something, you don’t go around making a fuss over it.

But some voices stood out from all the rest. The way some birds stand out: them hoot owls and whip-poor-wills you’d hear when the sun went down and it got dark in the hollow. I always enjoyed a whip-poor-will come to sit on our yard gate and sing of an evening. Some people get spooked by night birds. The old superstition says when you hear a whip-poor-will, somebody’s going to die. But I was always taken with the mournful song of a whip-poor-will. It made me feel like I wasn’t the only one feeling lonesome.

And that’s the way it was with my voice. It was lonesome and mournful and it wasn’t like nobody else’s. I don’t say this to brag on myself but because it’s true. Even today, people from all over the world tell me my voice is different—completely different—from any voice they’ve heard.

I tell them I’ve sung that way since I was a boy. I think God gives everybody a gift, and He wants them to use it. I’ve always done my best to honor what God gave me. I’ve never tried to put any airs on it. I sing it the way I feel it, just the way it comes out.

When I say I sang like this since I was just a knee-high, I mean just what I say. I’m well past eighty now, but as far back as I can remember, everyone always told me I had an old-time mountain voice: what they call weathered and lived-in, like something you’d hear moaning in the woods late of a night and not from the mouth of a young’un. They called me the boy with the hundred-year-old voice. I reckon if I make it another twenty years, maybe then I’ll finally get to sound like my real age.

There’s a lot of people would tell me not to even bother trying to catch up. They hear something much older than a hundred years in my singing. They say it puts them in mind of the sacred chanting at a Navajo ceremony, or the gospel singing from ancient times, way back to the olden days before the written word, when people first sung out their troubles. I don’t claim to know much about chanting, but the part about gospel music, well, my singing comes right out of the church.

The first time I ever sang in public was in a little country church way out in the sticks. It was a one-room building with plank benches and an old woodstove for heat. No special occasion, just another Sunday morning. You might think there wasn’t much to be nervous about, but I was scared to death because my dad put me on the spot.

It was in 1935 at the Point Truth Primitive Baptist Church in Scott County, Virginia. You just about needed a search party to find it, tucked back in Long Hollow, miles from the nearest town of Nickelsville. In our type of church, the Primitive Baptists, they don’t allow musical instruments whatsoever, not a piano or even a tambourine. They sing the old Baptist hymns the old-time way, a cappella–style, just the voices alone.

You may have seen in the Bible where it says “make a joyful noise unto the Lord,” and that’s what a lot of Pentecostals and Holiness churches do around these mountains, and they play guitars and anything else handy and they get pretty rowdy. It’s got a good beat to it, it makes you happy, and it makes you want to move.

But the Primitive Baptists are different. They’re strictly business when it comes to their hymns. It’s more sad and it’s more mournful and it fits my voice like nothing else. Usually the preacher or one of the elders will line out the songs for the congregation, which means the leader sings a verse and everybody joins in and sings it right back.

On this Sunday morning, my family was sitting all bunched together on the pew-bench like usual: my dad, Lee, and my mother, Lucy, and my older brother, Carter, and me. There was a song my dad wanted to lead on. It was from the old Goble hymnbook: “Salvation, O! The Name I Love.” It was one of his favorites, but he never could remember how the song started out. So he laid his hand on my shoulder and he called on me to start the song, to line it out for the congregation.

Here we were, the church-house packed and everybody waiting on me. I couldn’t even look up I was so scared, just a-trembling from head to toe. I like to stare a hole in the floor and crawl inside and hide. These people were friendly enough, but this was a new church from the one I was used to, the McClure Primitive Baptist Church, close by the hollow I was from back in Dickenson County. We’d moved for a while to the neighboring county, where we lived in an old log house in Long Hollow while my dad worked a sawmill job in the area.

When you traveled mostly by foot or by horse or mule, another county—even the next county over—might as well have been another world. To give you an idea of the distances back then: About twenty-five miles from our home place, in the coal town of West Norton in Wise County, lived the singer and banjo player Dock Boggs, who worked in the mines and made some phonograph records in the 1920s, real old-time ballads like “Pretty Polly.” Well, I didn’t know a thing about Dock Boggs until I met him at the Newport Folk Festival in the 1960s. Nothing against Dock, it just shows you how the world was a whole lot bigger place back then, especially in the mountains of southwest Virginia.

So it felt strange and different to me, this little church in a new county filled with folks I didn’t rightly know. Even if they were Primitive Baptists like us, they were more like strangers. Here I was, barely eight years old, sitting there in the pew, worried and shaking like a leaf, after my dad called me to lead that hymn. Trapped.

I turned to my mother, but she paid me no mind. She was silent and somber, her head bowed down. Much as she wanted, she couldn’t help me. In our church, it had to be a man lining out the songs, the preacher or an elder like my dad. I never did hear of a woman leading on a song. And it was unheard of for a child. So Carter couldn’t rescue me neither, not even with a funny face he’d usually pull to cheer me up.

Ever since I was born, I was in the shadow of my big brother. Carter was just eighteen months older, but that was like dog years for me, because he was my idol. I was a real shy, bashful boy—“backwards” is what they called it in the mountains. I just never could mix well with people. And what was so hard for me came easy as pie to Carter, the Stanley brother everybody loved. He took after our dad, tall and handsome with a million-dollar smile and a joke for any occasion. Carter was game for anything. Me, I was a mama’s boy, and there wasn’t much I wasn’t scared of.

But it wasn’t Carter my dad called on to line out that song. He called on me. Early on, he noticed I had something God-given and unique. He reckoned my voice could carry a hymn as well as any man’s in the church-house. And now he was going to let everybody get a good listen. It’s the sort of thing fathers do. Besides, he was in a bind, forgetting how to start that song.

Scared as I was, I knew how the song went and that was what probably saved me. The melody stuck with me from the first time I’d heard it. I was always taken by the sad old Baptist hymns we sang at our home church down by the river in McClure. I can remember singing those hymns to myself around the house when I was four or five years old. I don’t know why. I just had a feeling for those songs and I still do today. So I took a deep breath and sung out the opening line the best I could:

Salvation, O! The name I love, which came by Christ the Lord above

The words come out of me and hung in the air and then faded to nothing. The silence was only for a second, but it seemed to last forever. I thought maybe I’d messed up somehow and failed my dad. Then the whole congregation joined in and sang the verse back, tracing the melody just the way I done it, and the church filled up wi...

About this edition

• Publisher: Gotham
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1592404251
• ISBN 13: 9781592404254
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 464