Ralph Stanley, now 82, has been singing and playing professionally since the '40s, but the music he performs now is not radically different from what he grew up playing and singing with his brother, Carter, in the Stanley Brothers band. He doesn't label it bluegrass, although there are similarities. Stanley's sound—he calls it mountain music or old-time—predates bluegrass. There's nothing corn pone about this hard, starkly beautiful music, nothing manufactured. Some of it is gospel, and there are strains of the old murder ballads that came over from England centuries ago, and all of it is grafted onto a style as lean and hard as a winter wind in a graveyard. In his wonderfully absorbing autobiography, Man of Constant Sorrow(written with the help of Eddie Dean), he recalls the day Carter, just a teenager, got his first guitar, a mail-order instrument from Montgomery Ward: "An instruction manual came with the guitar, but Carter threw it away. Books and formal training wouldn't do it any good; it just don't apply to the style of music in the mountains. Old-time music and old-time singing ain't something somebody teaches you in a class. It's bred into you; it comes out of the way you live." (Article continued below...)
The world that Stanley evokes is fast fading. It's neither an insult nor a joke to call him the Last Hillbilly. He doesn't mind the word, he says, although now he's proud to be called Dr. Stanley, in acknowledgement of the honorary degree he received from Lincoln Memorial University in 1976. In his singing, songwriting, and playing, you hear the sounds of a world gone by, and you hear it plainly in the wistful tone of this account. "We were the last generation from these mountains to live from the earth," he says. "It was a hard life and there was a lot of suffering. But the music we made couldn't have come from any other place or time. The suffering was part of what made the music strong, and I reckon that's why it's lasted … What's real doesn't die."
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