Lonesome Melodies: The Lives and Music of the Stanley Brothers

8. In Search of a Sound

  8. IN SEARCH OF A SOUND In the language of baseball, the Stanley Brothers and the Clinch Mountain Boys hit a home run in their first time at bat. Farm and Fun Time created an immediate demand for personal appearances, and their records sold well in the hardscrabble environs of southwestern Virginia and eastern Kentucky. Soon after cutting “Little Glass of Wine,” the group made a much-publicized appearance at Honaker Harness and Saddlery, the Farm and Fun Time sponsor. The owner gave each band member a new pair of black boots to complement sport coats and homburg hats the musicians had bought in Bristol. “Outside the store and all the way down the street was the biggest crowd we’d ever seen,” Ralph said. “People came from out of the mountains and all over. . . . Hobe drove up with a thousand copies of the record and by noon he’d sold out. He could have sold another thousand.”1 The hillbilly band in homburgs were on their way to becoming regional stars; yet the Stanley Brothers of 1947 and 1948 were very much a group in search of its own sound, with little time to develop one. Driven by radio popularity, personal appearances proceeded at a hectic pace with little time for introspection. The path to success in the music business dictated that the band travel constantly, most often performing its segments of the radio show in the morning and early afternoon before driving to and from an engagement the same night. The pressures and temptations of life on the road became the brothers’ reality for most of the next two decades, though their earliest ventures were day trips that allowed them to return to their own beds at night or in the early hours of the morning. The distance to the appearance determined their departure time from Bristol: “sometimes as soon as we got off the program” and other times as late as 6:00 p.m. “We’d usually get home anywhere from 10 to 1, 2, 3 o’clock.”2 Their travels took them along the winding two-lane roads that traversed familiar mountainous terrain.3 Their vehicle was a 1937 black  In Search of a Sound four-door Chevrolet sedan purchased from a brother-in-law. Most often, Ralph would sit behind the wheel. At 5 feet, 6 inches tall, he was physically and temperamentally a better fit in the driver’s seat than lanky Carter, who stretched out in the front passenger seat while Pee Wee Lambert and Leslie Keith hunkered in the back. The musicians packed all their instruments and a small public address system into the trunk until Ray Lambert joined them in 1947. When the bassist traveled with the band, he strapped his bass fiddle onto the roof of the car. Anticipating a transportation upgrade , the group did not paint its name on the first car, but even in those days the Stanley Brothers and the Clinch Mountain Boys in transit were easy to spot. “You knew it was us when you saw a packed sedan with the bass tied to the top,” said Ralph.4 There were frequent sightings. Ralph Stanley and Leslie Keith both described their personal appearances after the first two or three weeks of Farm and Fun Time as a series of full houses and turn-away crowds. The immediate success of the radio program helped the band build an audience overnight, Ralph recalled, “and we would advertise for shows at high schools and theaters. We got so many invitations to come to a school at a certain place or theater or something that we would just pick through ’em and pick the best. So we played six nights a week. We were booked all the time.”5 Most early performances took place in schoolhouses and the occasional theater, with flatbed trailers and the roofs of drive-in movie refreshment stands serving as stages in the summer months. Kerry Hay, who was born on Backbone Ridge, about fifteen miles as the crow flies from the brothers’ home place on Smith Ridge, heard Carter and Ralph when they played noontime at the Turner School in Martha Gap on a Saturday around 1947.6 “With all due respect to Ralph, Carter was the real talent of this duo,” he said, expressing an opinion common among those who heard the Stanley Brothers at this stage in their career. “I can’t even remember whether they had sidemen with them.” Accompanied by...