The Last Hillbilly

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Ralph Stanley, now 82, has been singing and playing professionally since the &apos;40s, but the music he performs now is not radically different from what he grew up playing and singing with his brother, Carter, in the Stanley Brothers band. He doesn’t label it bluegrass, although there are similarities. Stanley’s sound—he calls it mountain music or old-time—predates bluegrass. There&apos;s nothing corn pone about this hard, starkly beautiful music, nothing manufactured. Some of it is gospel, and there are strains of the old murder ballads that came over from England centuries ago, and all of it is grafted onto a style as lean and hard as a winter wind in a graveyard. In his wonderfully absorbing autobiography, Man of Constant Sorrow(written with the help of Eddie Dean), he recalls the day Carter, just a teenager, got his first guitar, a mail-order instrument from Montgomery Ward: “An instruction manual came with the guitar, but Carter threw it away. Books and formal training wouldn&apos;t do it any good; it just don’t apply to the style of music in the mountains. Old-time music and old-time singing ain&apos;t something somebody teaches you in a class. It’s bred into you; it comes out of the way you live.”

via Bluegrass and Old-time Music Legend Ralph Stanley: The Last Hillbilly | Newsweek Music | Newsweek.com.