Ralph Stanley & Friends – Clinch Mountain Sweethearts
As a successor to the most celebrated album of Ralph Stanley’s career, Clinch Mountain Country, and the less celebrated but equally wonderful Saturday Night And Sunday Morning, this set of sixteen mournful ballads and hymns, rendered as duets with female singers, pursues much more than a proven formula. In many ways, Clinch Mountain Sweethearts is the equal of, if not superior to, those earlier, star-powered duets.
Backed only by his rode-hard-put-away-tight band — bassist Jack Cooke, rhythm guitarist Ralph Stanley Jr., fiddler James Price, lead guitarist James Alan Shelton, mandolinist John Rigsby, and second banjo picker Steve Sparkman — Dr. Ralph’s voice breaks, bends, unfolds, and sizzles with the unrelenting austerity and wisdom that alone can confer age (he will turn 75 this February). Just as remarkably, Stanley still sings very much on key and can still harmonize with the attentiveness and clarity bluegrass requires. Even when singing beside Dolly Parton on “Loving You Too Well” (a Carter Stanley classic), he never backs away from Parton’s powerhouse soprano, never falls off the loveliest edges of the melody.
The album’s only miss is “The Memory Of Your Smile” (a Stanley Brothers tune form the early King years), on which Maria Muldaur sounds like a high lonesome impersonator rather than letting her natural voice soar, as it still can. Fellow folkie Joan Baez, however, fares stunningly well: her voice has turned deep and mellow, and her icy vibrato has given way to a subtle tremble. Although her vocal track is one of the few not recorded side-by-side with Ralph in the room, she clearly understands “Weeping Willow”, an old folk song that calls for just such a light, humble touch.
That quality of humility and respect for these songs — a varied lot, though most will be familiar to even the casual Stanley Brothers fan — unites them all. Whether it’s Iris DeMent cutting loose on “Trust Each Other”, or Gail Davies easing into “Rank Strangers”, or Lucinda Williams offering a searing take on a gospel song she selected, “Farther Along”, the voices that keep step with Ralph’s own inimitable movements, while asserting themselves with grace, always know that it’s the Dr., and these timeless songs, who lead.