Stanley Brothers – Earliest Recordings: The Complete Rich-R-Tone 78s (1947-1952)

Fifty years ago, the Stanley Brothers — Ralph, Carter and company — made their recording debut. One of the first tracks they committed to posterity was an as-of-then unreleased Bill Monroe composition called “Molly and Tenbrook”. Just a few bars into the song, someone — one of the Stanleys, presumably — lets out a loud, irrepressible yelp. It’s a startling sound, and struck genuine fear in this writer upon initial listening. I recall hearing a similar sound as a child when my mother accidentally ran over our wire-haired terrier, Lucy, while backing out of the driveway.

But the yelp on “Molly and Tenbrook” was borne of something deeper than pain; deeper, in fact, than any reflex can account for. As hindsight proves, it was a clarion call heralding the arrival of bluegrass as a definable, formidable art form. The seeds had been planted in 1940 by Monroe himself, but eight years on they could scarcely be contained any longer. With that one yelp, bluegrass blossomed.

As is the case with most musical forms, it wasn’t the innovators as much as the interpreters of those innovations who validated and popularized bluegrass. Bill Malone explains in his definitive book Country Music U.S.A. that “the bluegrass ‘sound’ did not become a ‘style’ until other musical organizations began copying the instrumental and vocal traits first featured in Bill Monroe’s performances. The Stanley Brothers’ recording of ‘Molly and Tenbrooks’ [sic] is the first direct evidence that musicians were copying the sound of [Monroe’s] original bluegrass band.”

The irony here is that while “Molly and Tenbrook” may be the Stanleys’ most historically significant recording, Ralph and Carter actually didn’t have much to do with it. Ralph shied away from taking the lead vocal at the session, owing to his inexperience at the time, and Carter’s deep baritone was deemed inappropriate for the song’s pitch and pace. Instead, vocals were delegated to Pee-Wee Lambert, who also provided his own mandolin accompaniment. The song was peppered with banjo and fiddle breaks (the former played by Ralph, the latter by Art Wooten), and that was It. And It was good.

“Molly and Tenbrook” is one of 14 tracks compiled on The Stanley Brothers’ Earliest Recordings: The Complete Rich-R-Tone 78s (1947-1952). Based in Johnson City, Tennessee, Rich-R-Tone was a label of great regional renown in the ’40s that counted not only the Stanleys but Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper, Carl Sauceman, the Bailey Brothers and Buffalo Johnson among its stable of artists. After a long hiatus, the label has recently been resurrected under the manufacturing and distribution auspices of John Fahey’s new Revenant imprint. Though not even a year old, Revenant already boasts one of the most aggressively eclectic rosters in recent memory. The label is dedicated to the preservation of “raw musics,” an intentionally vague term that has afforded Revenant the breadth to issue recordings by the Stanleys, Cecil Taylor, Derek Bailey and Jim O’Rourke with nary a hint of contradiction.

The Stanleys’ Rich-R-Tone sides were recorded over four sessions. The first three were at radio station WOPI in Bristol, Virginia, between 1947 and ’48; the last was at WLSI in Pikesville, Kentucky, in 1952. Because these sessions predated tape recording altogether, all sides were (literally) cut straight to disc.

These technological limitations, and the Stanleys’ own technical shortcomings (in 1947 Ralph and Carter were fresh out of the service and had been leading their own group for only six months), make their Rich-R-Tone sides sound archaic, even naive at times. The Stanleys would cultivate their songwriting talents while cutting for Columbia Records in the early ’50s and would reach an absolute creative peak during their tenure with Mercury Records in the middle and late ’50s.

But like the early works of the Beatles, the Stones and Bob Dylan (all of whom, to a certain degree, were descended from the Stanleys), these Rich-R-Tone sides do more than document a seminal group in its nascent stages. They raised the bar for all of the Stanleys’ peers and gave the first glimpse of a burgeoning new artform — one that, like the Stanleys themselves, was rapidly outgrowing its trad, old-timey roots and striking out in completely uncharted directions.

Historical import aside, Earliest Recordings boasts some seriously hot tracks, complemented by the Stanleys’ dizzying chops and their knack for heart-wrenching lyrical imagery. Death and drink, and the intersection of the two, are the predominating themes of the Stanleys’ early repertoire. “The Girl Behind the Bar” and “Little Maggie” both examine these themes, but neither as effectively as “The Little Glass Of Wine” (the released version and an alternate take are included on Earliest Recordings). A Shakespearean tale of drunken jealousy, murderous rage and suicidal reckoning, it’s macabre to the core. It was also the Stanleys’ first hit.

The content was a bummer, but the playing was sublime. Though vocally gun-shy, Ralph was already emulating the traditional two-finger and the Earl Scruggs-inspired three-finger styles of banjo playing with great authority. And Lambert and Wooten — both of whom were alums of Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys — contributed clean, swift mandolin and fiddle, respectively. In a few years, the group would be greater than the sum of its parts, but Earliest Recordings offers a fascinating glimpse at those parts coalescing. Upon hearing these Rich-R-Tone sides, Alan Lomax called them “folk music with overdrive.” He was right.