Chapter 10: Bluegrass
As soon as Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys established the signature sound of bluegrass in the mid-1940s, musicians across the South began adopting and adapting the style. Monroe’s innovations, especially his soaring high tenor harmonies, percussive mandolin chop, and Earl Scruggs’s dynamic three-finger banjo rolls, had an immediate and lasting impact on the development of the genre.
Among the first and most successful of Monroe’s followers were Ralph and Carter Stanley, better known as The Stanley Brothers. Deeply inspired by Monroe’s recordings and live performances, the Stanleys often performed his songs and echoed his musical style with striking fidelity. In 1948, they released their version of “Molly and Tenbrooks,” a Monroe composition that Monroe himself had not yet recorded. The Stanley Brothers learned the song by attending Monroe’s concerts, and their version clearly reflects his influence: the high tenor vocals, vigorous mandolin work, and three-finger banjo style.
Ralph Stanley (1927–2016) the younger of the two brothers, was born in Dickenson County, Virginia, and raised in a musically rich environment. He learned the banjo from his mother and developed his own interpretation of the three-finger style around the same time Scruggs was gaining national attention. While Scruggs’s technique was smooth and syncopated, Ralph’s playing had a darker, more percussive edge and had a haunting, modal quality that matched the stark emotional tone of the Stanley Brothers’ vocal arrangements of Appalachian ballads and religious songs.
After Carter’s death in 1966, Ralph continued to perform and record with his band The Clinch Mountain Boys, eventually becoming one of the most revered elder statesmen of traditional bluegrass. His dedication to preserving the sounds of mountain music, particularly the religious and mournful ballads that shaped the region’s musical identity, earned him renewed acclaim during the folk revival of the 1960s and again in the early 2000s when his a cappella performance of “O Death” in the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) won him a Grammy Award and introduced his music to a new generation.
Ralph Stanley’s legacy extended far beyond his recordings. He mentored countless younger musicians, including his son Ralph Stanley II, and remained a tireless ambassador for the music of Southwest Virginia and Eastern Kentucky.