Following the death of Bill Monroe in 1996, Ralph Stanley became the leading name in bluegrass, embodying in both his music and his bearing the values of this most traditional form of country music. Stanley, who has died aged 89, was rooted in the Appalachian terrain in which bluegrass grew, and from which his vast store of ballads, songs, banjo tunes and sacred music was harvested. “As far back as I can remember,” he said in his 2009 autobiography, Man of Constant Sorrow, “I had an old-time mountain voice, weathered and lived-in, like something you’d hear moaning in the woods late of a night.”
After years of being celebrated by the bluegrass community, in the 1990s he found unlooked-for new audiences. Some were drawn by the collaborative albums Saturday Night & Sunday Morning (1992), where he was joined by Monroe, Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss and other admirers, and Clinch Mountain Country (1997), where the circle of friends expanded to embrace Bob Dylan. But more doors, and ears, were opened by his cameo in the Coen brothers’ 2000 movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?, where his voice is heard in the chilling a cappella threnody O Death, issuing from the shadowed hood of a Ku Klux Klansman.
The Coens and their musical adviser T-Bone Burnett made further connections with Stanley by using his arrangement of Man of Constant Sorrow, a song threaded through the movie, and by closing on a Stanley recording of Angel Band. O Death won Stanley a Grammy in 2002, and in the wake of the film, the Down from the Mountain touring troupe was enormously successful. “The harvest came when O Brother hit,” he said. “It took 25 years, but it was worth the wait.”
Unaccompanied hymns had been a part of his background, in Dickenson County in south-west Virginia, close to the Kentucky line: hard mountain country, where music served the serious purposes of redemption and release. His mother, Lucy, played banjo, and his father, Lee, sang old-time songs around the house and in church. Stanley himself first sang in public at the age of eight, when his father called on him, in church one Sunday, to lead the congregation in a Primitive Baptist hymn.
Ralph and his brother, Carter, a year and a half older, would sit around the radio “listening,” as Ralph later recalled, “to the Grand Ole Opry stars and thinking how we would like to be people like that”. They began making music together, Carter playing guitar and singing lead, Ralph playing banjo and singing tenor harmony. In 1946 they formed their first band and joined the radio show Farm and Fun Time in Bristol, Tennessee; in 1947 they made their first recordings, for the small Rich-R-Tone label. These were promising, but their next, for Columbia, were mesmerising; pieces such as White Dove, A Vision of Mother and The Lonesome River told stark stories of lost love and hard-won faith.
Monroe, who also recorded for Columbia, resented the company signing a rival act and left for another label. In time, the Stanleys too moved on, first to Mercury and then to King, where they made albums that would be studied by the next generation of bluegrass musicians, such as Ricky Skaggs, who played mandolin with the Stanleys as a teenager. In 1965 they played at the first ever multi-day bluegrass festival, in Fincastle, Virginia. The following year they toured Europe in a festival of American folk and country music.
Carter’s death in 1966 left his less outgoing brother uncertain whether, or how, to carry on; but thanks to a succession of fine lead singers and guitarists such as Larry Sparks, Roy Lee Centers and Charlie Sizemore, Ralph’s Clinch Mountain Boys maintained their standing as one of bluegrass’s founding bands, touring continuously, appearing at bluegrass festivals in the south and folk music concerts in the north, and recording several albums a year for Rebel, beginning with the landmark 1971 gospel LP Cry from the Cross and ending with Side By Side, made with his son Ralph II, 43 years later.
Stanley’s immense legacy to bluegrass reposes not only in his own work, but in the careers of younger musicians who have played with him, from Sparks and Skaggs to more recent sidemen such as Don Rigsby and Stanley’s grandson Nathan. In 1976 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in music by Lincoln Memorial University and thereafter enjoyed being addressed as “Dr Ralph”. He also received awards from the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Stanley was twice divorced. He is survived by his third wife Jimmi, whom he married in 1968, by two sons, Ralph II and Tim, two daughters, Lisa and Tonya, and seven grandchildren.
• Ralph Edmond Stanley, bluegrass musician, born 25 February 1927; died 23 June 2016
