The Real Man of Constant Sorrow

By Josh Tyrangiel Sunday, June 02, 2002
    • Ralph Stanley has been performing the music he calls old-time mountain soul since 1946, but only recently has he started attracting audiences beyond folk and bluegrass festivals. "I've got 4-year-olds wandering up to me now and singing O Death," Stanley says of his star turn on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? sound track. "It's pretty funny."

    While his new audience may be a tad precious, Stanley is anything but. Growing up in the Clinch Mountains of Virginia in the 1930s, he learned the banjo from his mother while his brother Carter took guitar lessons from the mailman. The Stanley Brothers were naturals, and soon they were performing live out of a Bristol, Va., radio station and recording for Columbia. At one point, they were the biggest act in Appalachia not named Bill Monroe.

    Their popularity belied the fact that the Stanley Brothers were a couple of dark-minded dudes. "I'm the real man of constant sorrow," says Ralph quietly, referring to the O Brother track sung by Dan Tyminski. "Truly, I've been singing that song for almost 60 years." In a typical Stanley Brothers song, good battles evil, loses and sometimes gets to heaven. Carter died of cancer in 1966, but Ralph still sings his version of the American Gothic. On Ralph Stanley, his first album for T Bone Burnett's DMZ Records, Ralph sings a tune called Mathie Grove, the tale of a husband who took his cheating wife and "cut off her head and kicked it against the wall." The magic is that Ralph has a voice that makes the grotesque sound matter-of-fact. When he sings, he's like a train whistle out of the past. At one point, Burnett asked him to sing a bit more like a rock 'n' roller. "He didn't really get it," says Burnett. "He can only sound like Ralph Stanley." For that we should be thankful.