Man of Constant Sorrow: My Life and Times by Ralph Stanley, Eddie Dean

From the Publisher

A giant of American music opens the book on his wrenching professional and personal journeys, paying tribute to the vanishing Appalachian culture that gave him his voice.

He was there at the beginning of bluegrass. Yet his music, forged in the remote hills and hollows of Southwest Virginia, has even deeper roots. In Man of Constant Sorrow, Dr. Ralph Stanley gives a surprisingly candid look back on his long and incredible career as the patriarch of old-time mountain music.

Marked by Dr. Ralph Stanley's banjo picking, his brother Carter's guitar playing, and their haunting and distinctive harmonies, the Stanley Brothers began their career in 1946 and blessed the world of bluegrass with hundreds of classic songs, including "White Dove," "Rank Stranger," and what has become Dr. Ralph's signature song, "Man of Constant Sorrow." Carter died in 1966 after years of alcohol abuse, but Dr. Ralph Stanley carried on and is still at the top of his game, playing to audiences across the country today at age eighty-one. Rarely giving interviews, he now grants fans the book they have been waiting for, filled with frank recollections, from his boyhood of dire poverty in the Appalachian coalfields to his early musical success with his brother, to years of hard traveling on the road with the Clinch Mountain Boys, to the recent, jubilant revival of a sound he helped create.

The story of how a musical art now popular around the world was crafted by two brothers from a dying mountain culture, Man of Constant Sorrow captures a life harmonized with equal measures of tragedy and triumph.

Publishers Weekly

Stanley's life spans the history of recorded bluegrass and country music, but his high, lonesome voice encompasses human suffering throughout time. Born in 1927, Stanley and his brother and first singing partner, Carter, grew up in the mountains of southwestern Virginia where Stanley learned old-time music in a Primitive Baptist church and from his mother, who picked the banjo clawhammer style. As a young man he often doubted his future as a musician, farming and working briefly in a sawmill, before committing himself to the music business. He stuck with it after Carter's alcohol-accelerated death in 1966 even though his career did not prove lucrative until very late in life when he was featured on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack. He won the 2001 Grammy for best male country vocal performance, besting the likes of young commercial country star Tim McGraw, of whom Stanley writes, “[W]ouldn't know a real country song if it kicked him in the ass.” Stanley's plainspoken narrative is told in a rural diction as though he were sitting in the front seat of an old Ford headed down the mountain for his next show. His story is a comprehensive and endearing cornucopia of authentic mountain music, place, family, friends, rivals, faith, love, life, death and the road. (Oct.)

Kirkus Reviews

A usually taciturn folk icon takes an engaging ramble through his six-decade career. A founding father of the string-band style most call bluegrass, Stanley-who prefers the terms "old-time mountain music" or "the Stanley Sound" to define his work-has never been fond of talking about himself. So this autobiography, penned with the knowledgeable music journalist Dean, is a delightful, outspoken surprise. The 82-year-old singer and banjo player reflects on his Primitive Baptist upbringing in the mountains of southwestern Virginia, where real life sometimes imitated the Gothic themes of the region's music-his uncle shot and killed his wife and himself. With older sibling Carter, Stanley founded the Stanley Brothers and the Clinch Mountain Boys, one of the first and greatest bluegrass groups, in 1946. He recounts the development of their "high lonesome" sound, their early rivalry and later friendship with Bill Monroe and their harsh life on the road in the '50s, when rock 'n' roll threatened to kill off country music. Following Carter's alcoholism-related death in 1966, Stanley struck out on his own, and he offers fond recollections of such sidemen as his young proteges Ricky Skaggs and Keith Whitley and antic fiddler Curly Ray Cline. It wasn't until his 2002 Grammy triumph on the soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou? that Stanley finally transcended his status as a genre hero to attain his rightful place in the American music pantheon. Unashamedly old-fashioned, opinionated and prickly, Stanley sometimes lashes out at rivals like the late John Duffey of Washington's Seldom Scene. He's at his best recalling his backwoods upbringing, the vicissitudes of the bluegrass road, the murder of oneof his lead singers, regional Democratic politics, the power of gospel music and old-time religion and the fast-vanishing South of his boyhood. An often tart yet affecting music memoir.

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