Lonesome Melodies: The Lives and Music of the Stanley Brothers

326 Pages·2013·4.731 MB·English

by  David W. Johnson

(cid:2)
Lonesome Melodies
American Made
Music Series
American Made Music Series
Advisory Board
David Evans, General Editor
Barry Jean Ancelet
Edward A. Berlin
Joyce J. Bolden
Rob Bowman
Susan C. Cook
Curtis Ellison
William Ferris
John Edward Hasse
Kip Lornell
Bill Malone
Eddie S. Meadows
Manuel H. Peña
Wayne D. Shirley
Robert Walser
University Press of Mississippi (cid:3) Jackson
www.upress.state.ms.us
Designed by Peter D. Halverson
Cover photograph by John Cohen
The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of
American University Presses.

“The White Dove” by Carter Stanley
Copyright © 1949 by Peer International Corporation
Used by Permission

“The Lonesome River” by Carter Stanley
Copyright © 1953 by Peer International Corporation
Used by Permission

“The Fields Have Turned Brown” by Carter Stanley
Copyright © 1953 by Peer International Corporation
Used by Permission
Copyright © 2013 by University Press of Mississippi
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2013
©
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Johnson, David W. (David William), 1946–
Lonesome melodies : the lives and music of the Stanley Brothers /
David W. Johnson.
p. cm. — (American made music series)
Includes bibliographical references, index, and discography.
ISBN 978-1-61703-646-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61703-647-7
(ebook) 1. Stanley Brothers. 2. Bluegrass musicians—United States—
Biography. I. Title.
ML421.S73J66 2013
781.642092’2—dc23 2012029580
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
(cid:2)
To Mike Seeger
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
1. The Hills of Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Many Days of My Childhood . . . . . . . . . . 18
3. Brothers in Arms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
4. A Band on the Run . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
5. Radio, Records, and Copyrights . . . . . . . . . 49
6. “Come on Along, Join in the Song” . . . . . . . . 57
7. Making Record Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
8. In Search of a Sound . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
9. Lonesome Melodies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
10. The Road Turns Rocky . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
11. Hard Times . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
12. Mercury Falling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
13. Suwannee to Cincinnati . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
14. Folk Tales . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
15. The Well-Known Stanley Brothers . . . . . . . . 174
16. Coast to Coast . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
17. Starving Out . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
18. What the Doctor Said . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222
19. Smith Ridge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273
Discography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It takes a community to write a biography. That much I learned during
my ten-year effort to revisit the lives and music of two brothers from
southwestern Virginia whose legacy will last many times longer than their
twenty professional years together.
I am grateful to editor and folklorist Judith McCulloh for her early en-
couragement of this project. I owe much to Ralph Stanley, who granted
me two interviews in 2003 and a third in 2005. Ralph’s nephews Carter
and Bill Stanley spoke with me about their father, Carter Stanley. Their
sisters, Doris Stanley Bradley and Jeanie Stanley Allinder, shared memo-
ries of their father and mother, as did their cousin Roy Sykes Jr.
Fred Stanley of Abingdon, Virginia, spoke with me about his father, Lee
Stanley. The late Mike Seeger gave me permission to use interviews he
conducted with Carter and Ralph Stanley in 1966. For recordings of these
and Mike’s interview with fiddle player Leslie Keith, I am grateful to the
staff of the University of North Carolina’s Southern Folklife Collection.
The special collections room of the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Public
Library proved the perfect place to revise a manuscript.
After the project began as an article on Ralph in the Mars Hill Review,
a conversation with Nolan Porterfield, biographer of Jimmie Rodgers and
John Lomax, led to my decision to focus on the two decades Carter and
Ralph performed together. Professor William R. Ferris of the University
of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, has been supportive of my writing
since 1991. Stanley Brothers historian Gary B. Reid provided guidance
when I was uncertain how to proceed, as did bluegrass historian Fred
Bartenstein. Both shared unofficial recordings from their collections that
would have been difficult to obtain elsewhere.
Former Clinch Mountain Boys Lester Woodie, George Shuffler,
Melvin Goins, and Larry Sparks took time to answer my many questions
and share recollections of performing with Carter and Ralph from the
ix