Ralph Stanley: Ralph Stanley : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

You have to admit, he cuts a mighty strange figure on the pop charts: Dr. Ralph E. Stanley, America's greatest living bluegrass musician, a seventy-five-year-old Appalachian bard who kicks out the jams onstage harder and longer than most musicians a fourth his age. After decades on the road with his Clinch Mountain Boys, Stanley hit the mainstream last year singing "O Death," on the best-selling O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, feeding America's sadly neglected jones for ancient mountain songs of blood and sorrow. He's been making classic records since 1947, but all the media hoopla and corporate attention don't change his style on Ralph Stanley -- it's old-time mountain music, cut with an acoustic band of famous bluegrass pickers and unobtrusively produced by T Bone Burnett. Dr. Ralph delivers eleven traditional songs he could probably sing in his sleep, many of them older than he is, all given a flesh-and-blood chill by his amazingly intense high-lonesome voice. Anyone who loved O Brother should find even headier musical pleasures on Ralph Stanley. And if you've never had the pleasure of hearing the man play live, do it now -- Dr. Ralph can't keep it up more than another forty years or so.

ROB SHEFFIELD
(RS 899/900 - July 4, 2002)