Ralph Stanley

Lucy Smith Stanley came from a family of eleven brothers and sisters who all played five-string banjo at neighborhood bean-stringings, and she is the reason her son ever picked one up. Asked in two separate interviews decades apart who taught him, Stanley gave the same answer both times: his mother, at home, on one specific tune. "She tuned it up for me and played this tune, 'Shout Little Luly,' and I tried to play it like she did," he said. "But I think I developed my own style of the banjo."

listen: upstream & hereshare

No known recordingLucy Smith Stanley

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1958

Clinch Mountain BackstepRalph Stanley

listen forNo recording of Lucy Smith Stanley's banjo survives, so her side of this is testimony only. What's audible is the distance her son put between that first lesson and his mature sound: "Clinch Mountain Backstep," the driving instrumental he built his solo identity on, replaces the clawhammer frailing she taught him with the three-finger picking he later learned from Earl Scruggs — the same hands, a wholly different technique.

Bill Monroe was "always my favorite" Opry act, Stanley said, and in the late 1940s the fledgling Stanley Brothers stood in Monroe's audiences copying his sound, splitting up the job of writing down his verses on scraps of paper to learn "Molly and Tenbrooks" by ear. They rushed their own recording onto the small Rich-R-Tone label in September 1948, a year before Monroe's own version reached record stores on Decca, and Monroe, in Stanley's telling, "thought we was ripping him off." They mended it: "I never had a better friend than Bill Monroe," Stanley said decades later.

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1947

Molly and TenbrooksBill Monroe

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1948

Molly and TenbrooksRalph Stanley

listen forMonroe's 1947 recording rides his own mandolin lead and a tenor vocal pitched for showing off, at a horse-race tempo. On the Stanley Brothers' version, singer Pee Wee Lambert takes his tenor even higher than Monroe's own singer did, and Ralph, on his first released three-finger banjo break, pushes the playing, in his own words, into overdrive. The mandolin's lead is gone; a banjo has taken its place as the showcase.

Ralph Stanley grew up "one county over" from the Carter Family's home in Scott County, Virginia, and eventually met all three original members — he even played a Sunday show for A.P. Carter at what's now the Carter Fold. In 2006, at 79, he paid the debt back with a full studio tribute, A Distant Land to Roam. "I went through a lot of the Carter Family songs," he said. "I picked out the ones that I liked ... that I thought I could do a fair job on, to do it right."

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1929

Little MosesThe Carter Family

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2006

Little MosesRalph Stanley

listen forThe Carter Family's 1929 "Little Moses" moves like spoken narration, Sara Carter's plain lead voice over Maybelle's fingerpicked guitar and A.P.'s low harmony. Stanley's 2006 remake keeps that storytelling pace but swaps in his own high mountain tenor and a banjo where the guitar carried the tune. As he put it, the goal was to "sound, as much as we could, like the Carter Family without changing my style" — the debt audible, the voice unmistakably his own.