(MYRTLE BEACH, S.C.) - When Ralph Edmond Stanley performed Thanksgiving 2001 at the Myrtle Beach Convention Center, the audience remembered the music, but what they didn’t know is that the bluegrass legend attributes new-found celebrity is due to God.
Born Feb. 25, 1927 in Big Straddle Creek near Stratton, Va., Stanley turned the clock back two years when he dipped his feet into cool river waters in Tazewell County, Va. where a four-lane highway connects Interstates 81 and 77 in coal and iron country.
It is here where Stanley said he received a spiritual catharsis in the Clinch River, a river that has spawned an environmental restoration program to address the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Oak Ridge Reservation and potential risks to human health.
Stanley was about to play for a holiday crowd at the Convention Center in South Carolina Thanksgiving evening as he talked about the awakening.
This Virginia native logs more than 100,000 on a bus each year, but even though it is Thanksgiving, he works hard. The Clinch Mountain Boys are rehearsing backstage behind a dark curtain as blue, cloudy exhaust fumes from their entourage’s bus waft in the convention center’s back door.
The artist of more than 170 albums was asked about the bluegrass Renaissance?
“Well I think this old-time music like I play and like the movie and the soundtrack has done wonders,” said Stanley, a Shriner.
Like moonshine, “Oh Brother Where Art Thou?” has intoxicated a new generation of bluegrass fans to this Appalachian region’s crown jewel natural resource.
As Stanley signs autographs, a vendor is nearby selling CDs, including “The Pizza Tapes” by Jerry Garcia and David Grisman, and the two live recordings of “Old And In The Way.”
If you watched the four-part Public Broadcasting System American Roots, you saw Stanley picking and thankingGod for his opportunity to play at American bluegrass festivals.
“I certainly do,” said Stanley in Myrtle Beach. He is a former member of the Dickenson County (Va.) School Board in this county where Daniel Boone visited in 1767. (The county’s first bathtub was installed in Judge A.A. Skeen’s home in Clintwood in 1901.)
Did Stanley see the PBS special?
“No, I didn’t see it, but I know I’ve done a lot of interviewing and picture-taking with PBS,” Stanley said as a banjo picker practiced.
What about the younger musicians like Dan Tyminski of Alison Krauss & Union Station?
“Well, I really don’t know. He did a good job on ‘Man of Constant Sorrow,’” he said.
Have any funny things ever happened on stage or on the road?
“Well, you know I’ve been in it 55 years, and there have been so many things, I don’t remember,” he said.
Has his faith in God supported him on the road and through life?
“I think it’s responsible for a lot of these good things that are happening to me,” Stanley said. “I was baptized about two years ago, and everything started happening right after that. It was about two years ago in Richlands, Virginia. In the Clinch River.”
It’s near the Tazewell County’s Crab Orchard Museum and Pioneer Park in the Blue Ridge highlands and Burke’s Garden, called “God’s Thumbprint” by locals. Central Lutheran Church, with a cemetery full of Germans, is the county’s oldest church building.
Born in nearby Dickenson County where farmers raise beef cattle and grow hay and burley tobacco, Stanley still lives in this county, formed in 1880 and named for legislative delegate William J. Dickenson, when he is not on the road or performing at the Grand Ole Opry.
How did it feel to be baptized in the Clinch River in the same county as tributaries like Blue Spring, Snyder Branch and Wolf Creek?
“Good.”
Does he have hobbies?
“I’m sort of an outdoorsman. I like horses and things like that,” said the tenor.
Stanley talked about the terrorist attacks as a mandolin was strummed nearby.
“I’m very sorry about that. I think that’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to us,” said Stanley, who was in the Army 18 months in Germany.
On his brother the late Carter Glen Stanley (Aug. 27, 1925-Dec. 1, 1966): “We were brothers, and we felt like brothers, and we sang like brothers. It was just a great loss when I lost him,” he said.
On WJHL in Johnson City, Tenn. they used to perform, only 50 miles from Doc Watson’s home in Deep Gap, N.C.
If you have never seen his banjo, you may have never seen such an glimmering instrument
At a concert in Galax, Va. in 1985 he hawked the instruments from the stage, showing his off like it like a boy with a Christmas present. “I’m playing the Stanley Banjo now,” he said in Myrtle Beach before heading for the stage where he will hold a sheet of paper with lyrics for the mournful a capella solo.
“Oh Death!” he sings.
If you picked up the music CD in this year’s July 3 issue of Oxford American magazine and heard Bob Dylan with Stanley, you heard “The Lonesome River.”
Stanley sings a high lonesome “Man of Constant Sorrow” and 1955’s “Angel Band” by The Stanley Brothers.
“‘Rank Stranger’? My brother and me recorded that 45 years ago,” he said, taking a request.
Clinch Mountain Boy James Price, a West Virginia native, gives a red-hot fiddling exhibition during the group’s “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” before the band retires straight to the bus en route to Sweet Briar College in Amherst, Va. the next night and to Nashville the next evening for the Opry with September’s release, “Clinch Mountain Sweethearts” under his arm.