Stanley Brothers – An Evening Long Ago

I was about to start this review by saying that it’s hard to imagine a kind of American music as far off the map as bluegrass was in 1956, when this album was taped, but then I remembered what time it was. It is, in fact, very easy to imagine if you’re any kind of music fan. You almost certainly feel passionate about some performer or genre that some other equally passionate fan you’ve never met has never heard of. The difference, of course, is that in 1956 there were no music magazines (except jazz magazines and the record reviews in the back of hi-fi mags), no file-sharing, no Amazons or mega-record stores, no websites, no specialist shows on college FM stations.

But there were radio stations in pockets of the south that included bluegrass, often live, in their programming, and WCYB in Bristol, Virginia, was probably one of them. Larry Ehrlich was a fan from Chicago who apparently worked there, and after hanging out with the Stanley Brothers all day on March 24, 1956, he took Ralph and Carter, along with fiddler Ralph Mayo and mandolinist Curly Lambert, to the studio around midnight, set up a single mike, and recorded the twenty songs we have here.

Either it was the wrong mike or the studio was acoustically dead (or perhaps both), but the overall sound was pretty dull. Nonetheless, the Stanleys took the tape, pressed it up, and sold it as a private pressing, labeled “a personal thank you from Ralph for friends only,” at shows.

It’s a difficult document, and not the place to start if you’re new to the Stanleys. The sound problem is one thing, but it’s also not a band record: It’s literally the Stanley Brothers, Ralph and Carter, for almost all of the disc. Pared down like this, however, it’s an unremittingly intimate gaze into their music, almost a chamber recital. The reduction even shows in the length of the songs, few of which last even two and a half minutes.

In fact, that terseness provides one of the album’s highlights, a version of “Orange Blossom Special”, that warhorse of onstage wankitude. Here, Ralph Mayo gets in, says everything that needs saying in a blazing fiddle solo, and gets out, and the whole damn thing clocks in at 1:49.

That’s also the only demonstration of instrumental pyrotechnics here, since the real focus is on the tangled mixture of traditional and composed songs at the core of the Stanleys’ repertoire. (I don’t necessarily take those “R. Stanley” songwriting credits seriously; it appears the only ones marked “Traditional” are the ones such as “Nine Pound Hammer” that are so obviously traditional nobody could get away with trying to claim them.)

Ralph and Carter are nearing the heights of their powers vocally and instrumentally, and have almost harnessed and tightly controlled the intensity that would be their legacy. It might take a couple of listens before you can hear what’s going on here, but once you arrive, you’ll be witness to the essence of one of America’s greatest musical acts.