Ralph Stanley: A singular voice in bluegrass

Ralph Stanley has already won three Grammys, and tonight he goes for his fourth. But there are a lot of other great talents bidding for best bluegrass album - Alison Krauss, Jim Lauderdale, Steve Martin, Del McCoury and Chris Thile.

"I guess I don't have a chance," Stanley says with his customary stoicism, "but I'd really like to win this one. I've got some stiff competition, but I've beat some of those country singers before on the Grammy Awards."

Indeed, in 2002 he beat out Tim McGraw, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Lyle Lovett and Ryan Adams for best male country vocal performance for his version of "O Death" on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? movie soundtrack. But even if Stanley's A Mother's Prayer doesn't win, his influence will be heard in whatever album does, because the 84-year-old singer and banjo picker helped create the template for the genre.

"Three groups really shaped bluegrass music," Ricky Skaggs told me in 1999. "Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys, the Stanley Brothers, and Flatt and Scruggs. Everyone who came after them was just following in their footsteps. . . . Ralph's still out there 150 dates a year; he's the last of the giants still in action."

Thirteen years later, Stanley does fewer than 100 shows a year, but he's still performing, and he was at Hylton Performing Arts Center in Virginia the night before the Grammys. He played songs from the nominated album as well as songs he recorded with his older brother Carter as the Stanley Brothers from 1947 to 1966 and songs from his years as leader of Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys, who will be onstage with him at Hylton.

The newest songs will not sound all that different from the oldest. A Mother's Prayer is devoted to the kind of gospel hymns Stanley sang as a boy at the foot of Clinch Mountain in the southwestern corner of Virginia. His family attended the McClure Church, a Primitive Baptist church nearby.

"It was just an old wooden building painted white," Stanley said by phone from Clinch Mountain, where he still lives. "Maybe 20 to 30 people would come on Sunday; there weren't too many Primitive Baptists around here. They didn't allow any instruments in the church; you could sing, just no instruments. If you've heard my a cappella singing, that's what it sounded like."

"In those Primitive Baptist churches, they might not have enough hymnals for everyone, so they'd 'line' out the songs," adds guitarist James Alan Shelton, the longest-serving member of the Clinch Mountain Boys. "The preacher sings a line of the song, and the congregation repeats it after him. We do that onstage sometimes, with Ralph lining out the songs."

Three of the tracks on A Mother's Prayer are a cappella, and two are nearly so - only Shelton's guitar accompanies Stanley's voice on "Lift Him Up, That's All" and only Dewey Brown's fiddle on "Come All Ye Tenderhearted." This extreme minimalism puts most of the weight on Stanley's octogenarian tenor. If it's not as supple as it once was, it's more expressive than ever in all its cracked, raspy glory.

"I think one of the most powerful performances on the record is 'Lift Him Up, That's All,' " Shelton said. "You can hear little subtle things that let you know he was feeling it. There's a line where his voice almost breaks from the emotion. It doesn't mess up or anything, but there's a twinge where he's really feeling it."

"I don't put nothing on the song," Stanley explains. "I just sing it the way I feel it. I just open my mouth and however it sounds, that's the way it comes out. I try to do it the best I can, but I just try to feel it. It's got a lonesome sound, and it affects a lot of people when they get hurt over a death."

There's a lot of death on the album. Jesus visits Lazarus in his grave on "It's Time to Wake Up"; babies die in a fire on "Come All Ye Tenderhearted"; Jesus dies on the cross on "He Suffered for My Reward"; and a dead mother is remembered on the title track. (next page »)