Cancer claimed Ralph Stanley's life last week, marking the end of an astounding 70-year career that gained strength as he introduced new fans to bluegrass and Appalachian music. Stanley skillfully incorporated folk traditions into those genres, earning an unassailable musical reputation defined in part by his unique voice and a talented band, the Clinch Mountain Boys.
Music historians marveled at how that voice undergirded his group's success. It was called the "high lonesome" mountain sound, and defined in part by John Wright, who noted that the sound emerged as he often sang in a minor key against the band's "happy-sounding" major key. In his biography of Stanley ("Traveling the High Way Home"), Wright said the major-minor competition distinguished what he called the singer's "unearthly smokey vocal tone." The voice, he said, "sounds like it's coming out of the past, like a ghost. "
Stanley told a National Public Radio station in 2002 his voice was a "special gift I think that God's given me and he means me to use that." Producer Jim Lauderdale told an interviewer, "I call him 'the king of mountain soul'; there was something so moving about his voice. It was ancient and mysterious very joyful and uplifting."
That voice undergirded the impact of Stanley's talent as a singer, guitarist and songwriter over roughly seven decades. That put him squarely in the company of two other influential bands whose specialty was bluegrass: Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, and Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys. Monroe and his band are widely acknowledged as the inventors of the bluegrass genre.
Stanley was inducted into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame in 1992, about eight years before he joined the Grand Ole Opry - the cathedral of country music. But Stanley gained new fans when at 73 he won an Emmy for singing "O Death" for the movie "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"
Friends said Stanley closed road tour performances with "O Death," a ballad asking God for a longer life to do good: "Oh Death please consider my age/Please don't take me at this stage. Won't you spare me over 'til another year?" Fortunately for his fans, God gave him 16 years.