Mick Hartley

We lost another music legend last week with the death of bluegrass pioneer Ralph Stanley, at the age of 89.

The obvious choice of music here, I suppose, would be his haunting a capella "O Death", which brought him some late fame in the film "O Brother Where Art Thou". But I love the earlier stuff, with brother Carter, when the Stanley Brothers were just behind Bill Monroe as early bluegrass pioneers. This from, I think, 1966 – which would make it shortly before Carter's death, at the age of 41, from cirrhosis of the liver:

An extraordinarily bleak song:

I wandered again
To my home in the mountains
Where in youth’s early dawn
I was happy and free.
I looked for my friends,
But I never could find ‘em.
I found they were all
Rank strangers to me.

Everybody I met
Seemed to be a rank stranger;
No mother or dad,
Not a friend could I see.
They knew not my name
And I knew not their faces
I found they were all
Rank strangers to me.

“They’ve all moved away,”
Said the voice of a stranger,
“To that beautiful shore
By the bright crystal sea.”
Some beautiful day
I’ll meet ‘em in Heaven
Where no one will be
A stranger to me. 

Carter on guitar, Ralph on banjo, with George Shuffler doing that lovely guitar intro and helping out with the harmonies. High and lonesome.

There's a strange parallel with the Louvin Brothers, where again the elder brother, this time Ira, was a heavy drinker who died, just like Carter, at the age of 41 – though a year earlier than Carter, in 1965. Both younger brothers went on well into this century, Charlie Louvin dying in 2011 at the age of 83.

Louvin Brothers here previously – I Can't Keep You in Love with Me; I Don't Believe You've Met My Baby. And this post, on "Knoxville Girl" – another bleak Country classic – links to the Louvin Brothers version.

The Stanley Brothers previously: the uptempo How Mountain Girls Can Love.