A giant of American music opens the book on his wrenching
professional and personal journeys, paying tribute to the
vanishing Appalachian culture that gave him his
voice.
He was there at the beginning of
bluegrass. Yet his music, forged in the remote hills and
hollows of Southwest Virginia, has even deeper roots. In
Man of Constant Sorrow, Dr. Ralph Stanley gives a
surprisingly candid look back on his long and incredible
career as the patriarch of old-time mountain music.
Marked by Dr. Ralph Stanley’s banjo picking, his brother
Carter’s guitar playing, and their haunting and distinctive
harmonies, the Stanley Brothers began their career in 1946
and blessed the world of bluegrass with hundreds of classic
songs, including “White Dove,” “Rank Stranger,” and what has
become Dr. Ralph’s signature song, “Man of Constant Sorrow.”
Carter died in 1966 after years of alcohol abuse, but Dr.
Ralph Stanley carried on and is still at the top of his
game, playing to audiences across the country today at age
eighty-one. Rarely giving interviews, he now grants fans the
book they have been waiting for, filled with frank
recollections, from his boyhood of dire poverty in the
Appalachian coalfields to his early musical success with his
brother, to years of hard traveling on the road with the
Clinch Mountain Boys, to the recent, jubilant revival of a
sound he helped create.
The story of how a musical
art now popular around the world was crafted by two brothers
from a dying mountain culture, Man of Constant Sorrow
captures a life harmonized with equal measures of tragedy
and triumph.
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