Man of Constant Sorrow: My Life and Times

Book by Stanley Ralph Dean Eddie

Prologue
Hills of Home
“ I’d like to go back to the days of my childhood
And go to church in the village there
To meet my friends and old acquaintance
And sing again in the village choir”
—“Turn Back,” Ralph Stanley

When I was just a little boy growing up in the mountains of southwest Virginia, singing was as natural as breathing. I was borned and raised way back in the hills, and a lot of our forefathers, our grandpas and great-uncles and so forth, were of the old Baptist faith, and they all had lonesome voices to sing out those sad old hymns.

This was a long time ago, back in the 1930s, and a long way back in steep hills and deep hollows. Where I come from, people lived spread out from one another. There was no radio or telephone. Days would pass between you seeing anybody outside your family. Singing was a way to keep yourself company when you got to feeling lonesome.

You could hear singing everywhere from church to the back porch, from the high ridgetops to the head of the creek, wherever there were chores to do or miles to walk or fields to work. You’d hear people tell about a mule that wouldn’t budge unless the man behind the plow got to singing. Songs were handed down from father to son and mother to daughter. Singing gave you strength, and you needed plenty to get you through rough times. People from our mountains were used to going without, and singing didn’t cost a cent. Not many things you can say that about.

Back in our little part of the world, singing was part of everyday living, one of the natural sounds all around us: the water running through the rocks on Big Spraddle Creek and the coon dogs barking down the hollow and the train whistle blowing as the freight cars hauled coal on the Clinchfield Railroad. Course, we didn’t pay no mind it. When you’re so used to something, you don’t go around making a fuss over it.

But some voices stood out from all the rest. The way some birds stand out: them hoot owls and whip-poor-wills you’d hear when the sun went down and it got dark in the hollow. I always enjoyed a whip-poor-will come to sit on our yard gate and sing of an evening. Some people get spooked by night birds. The old superstition says when you hear a whip-poor-will, somebody’s going to die. But I was always taken with the mournful song of a whip-poor-will. It made me feel like I wasn’t the only one feeling lonesome.

And that’s the way it was with my voice. It was lonesome and mournful and it wasn’t like nobody else’s. I don’t say this to brag on myself but because it’s true. Even today, people from all over the world tell me my voice is different—completely different—from any voice they’ve heard.

I tell them I’ve sung that way since I was a boy. I think God gives everybody a gift, and He wants them to use it. I’ve always done my best to honor what God gave me. I’ve never tried to put any airs on it. I sing it the way I feel it, just the way it comes out.

When I say I sang like this since I was just a knee-high, I mean just what I say. I’m well past eighty now, but as far back as I can remember, everyone always told me I had an old-time mountain voice: what they call weathered and lived-in, like something you’d hear moaning in the woods late of a night and not from the mouth of a young’un. They called me the boy with the hundred-year-old voice. I reckon if I make it another twenty years, maybe then I’ll finally get to sound like my real age.

There’s a lot of people would tell me not to even bother trying to catch up. They hear something much older than a hundred years in my singing. They say it puts them in mind of the sacred chanting at a Navajo ceremony, or the gospel singing from ancient times, way back to the olden days before the written word, when people first sung out their troubles. I don’t claim to know much about chanting, but the part about gospel music, well, my singing comes right out of the church.

The first time I ever sang in public was in a little country church way out in the sticks. It was a one-room building with plank benches and an old woodstove for heat. No special occasion, just another Sunday morning. You might think there wasn’t much to be nervous about, but I was scared to death because my dad put me on the spot.

It was in 1935 at the Point Truth Primitive Baptist Church in Scott County, Virginia. You just about needed a search party to find it, tucked back in Long Hollow, miles from the nearest town of Nickelsville. In our type of church, the Primitive Baptists, they don’t allow musical instruments whatsoever, not a piano or even a tambourine. They sing the old Baptist hymns the old-time way, a cappella–style, just the voices alone.

You may have seen in the Bible where it says “make a joyful noise unto the Lord,” and that’s what a lot of Pentecostals and Holiness churches do around these mountains, and they play guitars and anything else handy and they get pretty rowdy. It’s got a good beat to it, it makes you happy, and it makes you want to move.

But the Primitive Baptists are different. They’re strictly business when it comes to their hymns. It’s more sad and it’s more mournful and it fits my voice like nothing else. Usually the preacher or one of the elders will line out the songs for the congregation, which means the leader sings a verse and everybody joins in and sings it right back.

On this Sunday morning, my family was sitting all bunched together on the pew-bench like usual: my dad, Lee, and my mother, Lucy, and my older brother, Carter, and me. There was a song my dad wanted to lead on. It was from the old Goble hymnbook: “Salvation, O! The Name I Love.” It was one of his favorites, but he never could remember how the song started out. So he laid his hand on my shoulder and he called on me to start the song, to line it out for the congregation.

Here we were, the church-house packed and everybody waiting on me. I couldn’t even look up I was so scared, just a-trembling from head to toe. I like to stare a hole in the floor and crawl inside and hide. These people were friendly enough, but this was a new church from the one I was used to, the McClure Primitive Baptist Church, close by the hollow I was from back in Dickenson County. We’d moved for a while to the neighboring county, where we lived in an old log house in Long Hollow while my dad worked a sawmill job in the area.

When you traveled mostly by foot or by horse or mule, another county—even the next county over—might as well have been another world. To give you an idea of the distances back then: About twenty-five miles from our home place, in the coal town of West Norton in Wise County, lived the singer and banjo player Dock Boggs, who worked in the mines and made some phonograph records in the 1920s, real old-time ballads like “Pretty Polly.” Well, I didn’t know a thing about Dock Boggs until I met him at the Newport Folk Festival in the 1960s. Nothing against Dock, it just shows you how the world was a whole lot bigger place back then, especially in the mountains of southwest Virginia.

So it felt strange and different to me, this little church in a new county filled with folks I didn’t rightly know. Even if they were Primitive Baptists like us, they were more like strangers. Here I was, barely eight years old, sitting there in the pew, worried and shaking like a leaf, after my dad called me to lead that hymn. Trapped.

I turned to my mother, but she paid me no mind. She was silent and somber, her head bowed down. Much as she wanted, she couldn’t help me. In our church, it had to be a man lining out the songs, the preacher or an elder like my dad. I never did hear of a woman leading on a song. And it was unheard of for a child. So Carter couldn’t rescue me neither, not even with a funny face he’d usually pull to cheer me up.

Ever since I was born, I was in the shadow of my big brother. Carter was just eighteen months older, but that was like dog years for me, because he was my idol. I was a real shy, bashful boy—“backwards” is what they called it in the mountains. I just never could mix well with people. And what was so hard for me came easy as pie to Carter, the Stanley brother everybody loved. He took after our dad, tall and handsome with a million-dollar smile and a joke for any occasion. Carter was game for anything. Me, I was a mama’s boy, and there wasn’t much I wasn’t scared of.

But it wasn’t Carter my dad called on to line out that song. He called on me. Early on, he noticed I had something God-given and unique. He reckoned my voice could carry a hymn as well as any man’s in the church-house. And now he was going to let everybody get a good listen. It’s the sort of thing fathers do. Besides, he was in a bind, forgetting how to start that song.

Scared as I was, I knew how the song went and that was what probably saved me. The melody stuck with me from the first time I’d heard it. I was always taken by the sad old Baptist hymns we sang at our home church down by the river in McClure. I can remember singing those hymns to myself around the house when I was four or five years old. I don’t know why. I just had a feeling for those songs and I still do today. So I took a deep breath and sung out the opening line the best I could:

Salvation, O! The name I love, which came by Christ the Lord above

The words come out of me and hung in the air and then faded to nothing. The silence was only for a second, but it seemed to last forever. I thought maybe I’d messed up somehow and failed my dad. Then the whole congregation joined in and sang the verse back, tracing the melody just the way I done it, and the church filled up with one big voice. I could feel my heart swell up like to bust. It was a feeling I never had before, and I jumped on the next verse before the feeling got away.

Surprising wisdom, matchless grace which regarded my low and helpless case

Just like before, everyone sang back that mournful melody in a booming voice so strong the walls of the little building like to shake down to the ground. I was too young to know what all the words really meant, but I can tell you now the hymn told my story, plain and simple. I looked up at my dad and his face was a-beaming. He finished out the hymn, and I stood there in wonder, listening to the song I had started all by myself.

Well, let me tell you, that was worth a lot to me. If it hadn’t gone well, I might have run off a big cliff somewhere. It lifted me up to a place I’d never been before. Here was my dad, calling on me to lead that song and knowing I could do it. I knew then I had something special nobody else had, not even Carter. I felt proud that my dad had faith and confidence in me, because I was the boy with the hundred-year-old voice.

Another thing, too. Leading on that hymn, I learned you could be afraid and still get the job done. Fear ain’t nothing to be afraid of; you just need to face it down. It’s helped me a lot in my life because I’ve been scared many a time since that Sunday morning and I’ve never let it stop me.

In my sixty-odd years as a professional musician, I’ve sang my music all around the world. I’ve played over in Germany and as far away as Japan. I’ve played for the Queen of England and at the President’s Inaugural in Washington, D.C. At all these fancy venues, I can perform with no stage fright at all, but I still get nervous when I have to line out a song in church. I feel more pressure in our Primitive Baptist church-house than I do in the spotlight at Carnegie Hall, because in church the congregation is depending on me to lead them and that’s where I really don’t want to foul up.

A friend of mine says he hears more grief in my singing down through the years, and I think he’s right. I mourn out my songs more than I did as a young man. Like anyone my age, I’ve had my share of sorrows, losing people closest to me, one by one, first my dad and then my brother, Carter, and then my mother. They were all with me at Point Truth Church on that Sunday morning so long ago, and they’re all gone now.

Brother Carter and I started our band, the Stanley Brothers and the Clinch Mountain Boys, in 1946, and we traveled together for twenty years. On December 1, 1966, Carter passed away and I’ve carried on the band ever since. Even though I’ve been on my own for twice as many years now, I still miss him when I get on stage. There have been so many other losses along the way. Two of my best lead singers who replaced Carter were cut down in their prime. Roy Lee Centers was shot and pistol-whipped and left to die in a creek in Breathitt County, Kentucky, where he was from. Roy Lee’s replacement was Keith Whitley, another eastern Kentucky boy. Keith was just a kid when he joined up with me, and he could sing like an angel. Just when he finally reached the top of the country charts, he overdosed on alcohol. Keith and Roy Lee were both good men and great singers—and just like Carter, taken away from us too soon.

I sung at so many funerals. I sung when we buried my fiddler, Curly Ray Cline, who worked with me for more years than I spent with Carter. When I lost one of my best friends, Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass music, I sung over Bill’s casket, the same way Bill sung over Carter’s casket in 1966.

So many funerals. So many friends and family gone. Through the years, you never stop missing them. And I wish they could hear me now, because, strange as it is and as old as I am, I believe I’m a better singer now than when I made my first records in the 1940s. I can put more into it now, not as much holding back as I used to. I’m not afraid to let all the feeling out, everything I’ve lived for eighty-two years. And not only the experiences I’ve been through, but my experience as a singer. I’ve worked at it more the last few years. Had to, really, because I can’t lean on the banjo anymore.

Now, I won’t lie to you. My voice ain’t what it used to be. My tenor has thinned out some. It’s got more cracks in it and it can get mighty rough around the edges and I can’t hit all the high notes anymore. But it ain’t all tore down just yet, and I know how to use my voice better. I can put a lot more feeling in now. I started adding some crooks and turns and I can worry those lines like I never could before.

It’s just me and my voice onstage these days, just like it was when I first started singing as a little boy, long before I got a banjo. Every show I still feature a clawhammer song the way my mother taught me, but I haven’t played three-finger banjo for years. As you get older, your fingers don’t work as good. Now I’ve got arthritis, too, so I don’t fool with the five-string much anymore. But it’s been a blessing in disguise. Instead of doing two things, I can focus on the one. Without the banjo, I don’t have a thing to think about but just to mourn out that song.

I’m always working to be a better singer, always learning new ways. Some nights my voice is not as strong as I’d like it to be, especially if I get choked up with a cold. Other nights, I’m singing the best I ever have. It’s something I can’t control, and that’s what gets me nervous sometimes. I ain’t afraid to die, but I am scared of what would happen if my voice was to fail me. That’s something I think about a lot. It’s right hard to face up...