Man of Constant Sorrow: My Life and Times
Dr. Ralph Stanley with Eddie Dean
New York, New York: Gotham Books, 2009
453 pp, $25.00 paperback
Very few days have passed over the last year or so when I have not listened to Ralph Stanley (1927-2016) or the Stanley Brothers play that “high lonesome” music that they were known for and helped define. It touches me deeply. As Ralph Stanley tells readers many times in his autobiography, this is not bluegrass or country music. It is something different than those forms. It can be lived, but it cannot be imitated. It can be played, heard, and felt, but it is still difficult to describe. Dr. Stanley tried to describe the sound several times in his autobiography but was never quite able to do that, and if he couldn't do it than no one can. It is not that he was deficient, but that the music is rooted in particular conditions and places and is full of heart and soul.
I was fortunate to visit the Ralph Stanley Museum in Clintwood, Virginia recently. The Museum is interactive and educational, and a person who is interested in the music and the contexts in which that music developed can spend many hours there. A very friendly and helpful staffperson at the Museum made the visit especially enjoyable. I picked up the book and some recordings of Ralph Stanley and the Stanley Brothers that were new to me at the Museum, along with some other items, and I read Man of Constant Sorrow: My Life and Times as I travelled through the region. I did not want to finish this book. It is written in a conversational style and I sometimes felt that Ralph Stanley and Eddie Dean had written the book with teaching in mind. They did a great job of it.
I was reading the book one evening in a busy restaurant and bar in Norton, Virginia and got deeply buried in it between eating my barbecue and fried pickles and drinking sweet tea that would put most people in a diabetic coma. As I was leaving, I nearly ran into a guy who wanted to know what book I was reading. He knew the music. "That must be a real good book," he said. It wasn't your typical barroom interaction.
The high lonesome sound that the Stanley Brothers and Dr. Stanley made popular is the music of an exploited people who were finding their voices. It was the music of small farmers, logging camps, and coal camps in Central Appalachia and, later, it spoke to and spoke for migrants who moved on to factory towns and cities. It connected lived traditions with changing environments and with the changing fortunes of the people who most identified with the music, who felt it. The music can be despairing and painful because the people who listened and lived it suffered and because they knew what depression was even if they didn't have the clinical names for it. The songs often talk about moving on because for several generations people were forced to leave their homes or because within their cultures there were people who “were bound to ride,” as one popular song said. Some of the music is intensely religious or spiritual and came from the centuries-old Old Regular Baptist and Primitive Baptist traditions and can be quite hopeful and forward-looking.
The instrumental piece “Hard Times” does something remarkable by matching gears shifting in a truck as it climbs those mountain roads in Central Appalachia and takes those hairpin curves just a little too fast. You can imagine the feelings of a family taking to Route 23 and leaving their place and people behind with the hopes of finding something better. The version of “Gold Watch and Chain” done by Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys (and made popular by the Carter Family) connects us back to the nineteenth century but carries a longing with it that remains current. “Two Coats” helped bring Primitive Baptist and Regular Baptist hymnology to people who were not familiar with it, but in the hands of Dr. Stanley it became universalist. Ralph Stanley often included hymns when he performed, and even did so in bars. The audience expected this, but bar owners were not always so open-minded. Dr. Stanley and Eddie Dean describe a violent confrontation between the band and a bar owner over this matter. “Pretty Polly” and songs like it will be taken as misogynistic today, but these songs also describe violence that continues in parts of Central Appalachia (and everywhere else) in frank terms. There is a point in the book where Dr. Stanley describes a terrible murder that took place in Breathitt County, Kentucky years ago in painful detail and provides an explanation for such violence that readers will learn from. The song “I’ll Remember You Love In My Prayers” connects us not only to another time, but to Ireland and to the experience of emigration.
Dr. Stanley acknowledges in parts of the book that he was influenced by Black musicians, and the area of Virginia he came from produced many outstanding Black and white musicians. He was an unapologetic Democrat and pro-labor, and he campaigned for John Edwards and Barack Obama in Southwestern Virginia. Dr. Stanley did not say so in his book, but his music required a break with the past in order to find its own place. Near the end of the book Dr. Stanley describes how Uncle Dave Macon was shocked to hear Earl Scruggs play banjo and could not quite abide with it. As Dr. Stanley pointed out, Uncle Dave Macon knew American music that had been popular in the mid-nineteenth century and was an old-time and rowdy showman of his times, but he was also a very odd man with personal quirks that makes the reader uncomfortable and may have troubled Dr. Stanley. In addition to all of Uncle Dave Macon’s oddities that Dr. Stanley mentions, he was also a racist who had been influenced in his youth by a Black musician. Earl Sruggs and Dr. Stanley may not have been free from racism, but they represented departures from the past and ways forward. The Stanley Brothers’ version of “John Henry” carries these contradictions.
The high lonesome sound hit the airwaves and became most popular as the music industry was becoming more profit-based and exploitative and as music and musicians were being drawn into competition with one another. Much of Man of Constant Sorrow: My Life and Times is taken up with Dr. Stanley talking frankly about what music and performing meant to him and what his professional standards were. He held fast to his tough standards, but they were sometimes at odds with what record labels, bar owners, and other musicians expected. There was a contradiction between Dr. Stanley’s respect for skill and his professionalism, on the hand, and the demands of the recording industry and venue operators on the other hand, and these differences are taken up in the. book
Much of the book is taken up with the Stanley Brothers’ efforts to succeed and the bumps in the road and the failures they experienced. The loss of brother Carter Stanley in 1966 and the loss of other great musicians along the way, violence, backbiting, and the kinds of dramas that afflict working-class Appalachians hurt. Elvis Presley and rock-and-roll nearly sidelined bluegrass, country, and traditional music, but the New Grass and “progressive” bluegrass movements of the late 1960s and 1970s also hurt. The book reminded me of these later movements, and the fact is that I cannot appreciate that music as I once did because the original high lonesome sound has spoiled me. On the other hand, Dr. Stanley had much good to say about the early folk revival and Bob Dylan and said that he and Dylan understood one another because they were of similar mindsets.
Dr. Stanley had a later-in-life baptism that he talks honestly about in book. I was impressed by how he understood how complex people can be and how forgiving he was, and I wondered as I read if his abilities to understand and forgive people were tied directly to his spirituality. He often mentions how certain people crossed him or fell short of the mark, sometimes including his brother, but he forgave and put the past aside and found paths to reconciliation. His theology carried what theologians call “a preferential option for the poor” and this shows up in his recording of “The Orphan Girl” and some other songs.
Ralph Stanley became Dr. Ralph Stanley in 1976, when Lincoln Memorial University awarded him an honorary doctorate. The University established the Dr. Ralph Stanley Endowed Music Scholarship in 2002 with help from country musician Ricky Skaggs. Dr. Stanley was understandably quite proud of having received the honorary doctorate, but the Endowment probably meant as much or more to him because it supports music students from Dickenson or Wise County, Virginia. Dr. Stanley had come from a hard scrabble background and had never completed his formal education, but he remained in the region where he had been born and had grown up. He said in his book---and said many times while performing---that whenever he performed "Shout Little Luly"---he thought of his mother and where he had come from.
The recognition that Dr. Stanley gained in his later years validated his hard work but was long overdue. He won multiple awards, including a 2002 Grammy Award for his rendition of “O Death” in the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? and induction into the Grand Ole Opry, between 1992 and 2014. Much of the recognition that Dr. Stanley received in these years has also validated the lived experience of the region. But by the end of the book Dr. Stanley is wistful and analytical and is coming to terms with the passing of time and changing tastes. He understood that changes were underway that might undermine his music and what it represented, but he seems to have not fully understood the contexts for these changes.
This book is a history book, a kind of oral history, that takes almost one hundred years of our history as its subject. It is also a story of faith and success. You will do well to read the book and visit the Museum. I gained much by reading William H. Turner’s The Harlan Renaissance right after finishing Man of Constant Sorrow. Taken together, these books give readers a broad view of Central Appalachia’s diversity and cultural forms.
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