Ralph Stanley – Self-Titled

His legacy well-established by the end of the 1960s, Ralph Stanley has resolutely gone about the business of making the kind of living available to a first-generation bluegrass star. Which is to say, working: touring, cutting albums, largely for specialty labels, and training younger musicians.

Only in that secluded world has he been a star, for he and brother Carter dented the country charts but once, in 1960 when “How Far To Little Rock” went to #17. Until, at 74, his eerie, resolute a cappella reading of the traditional “O Death” on what seemed an obscure soundtrack to a semi-commercial art film made him a celebrity.

So of course he has kept working, bought a few nice things, made a few more records. The self-titled album at hand, the first from O Brother producer T Bone Burnett’s new label, is the third Ralph Stanley release of the moment (including a live set from McCabe’s and a duet album with Jim Lauderdale), not including however many of the 170 albums to his name may or may not be in print.

What, then, will Stanley and Burnett (and co-producers Bob Neuwirth and Larry Ehrlich) make of the moment? An album of folk songs, it turns out: nine traditional numbers, one Hank Williams gospel chestnut, and one from Stanley’s pen. Stanley is accompanied not by the latest iteration of the Clinch Mountain Boys, but by Norman Blake, Stuart Duncan, Mike Compton and Dennis Crouch, heavy hitters all, and more than sympathetic to the material.

It is a curious, revealing choice, and a canny one, whether or not O Brother really does presage another 1960s-style folk boom. The 75-year-old Ralph Stanley cannot hope to compete with the younger, more limber voice of his bluegrass catalogue; instead, he offers a well-chosen reminder of the folk tradition from which his music emerged.

In so doing, he wisely plays to the present strengths of his voice. Yes, he sounds like a man of mature years. In fact, he embraces those particular tones, firmly if gingerly. Stanley sings with care, never rushes, and is full of gravity. The opening gospel song, “Lift Him Up, That’s All”, carries the same recognition of dusk that makes “O Death” so poignant. In fact, one way or another the entire album has the smell of death, largely because the folk canon is inescapably bloody.

But the songs resonate differently here. Some versions of “Little Mathie Grove”, for example, take the side of the passionate lovers, not the cuckolded husband. Stanley gives the song his full, measured fury, and when he sings of Lord Arnold kicking his wife’s newly severed head against the wall, he does so with the finality of Old Testament justice.

And if nothing else, Ralph Stanley is proof that there is, occasionally, justice in the music world. If one waits long enough.