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  15. THE WELL-KNOWN STANLEY BROTHERS In the late 1950s, the band member whose job it was to introduce Carter and Ralph on stage would announce them as “the well-known Stanley Brothers.” After a dozen years on the road, the brothers earned the right to claim that modest level of distinction. “Famous” would have been better , but that would have stretched the truth. Flatt and Scruggs were famous . They traveled from city to city in a bus with their name painted on it and starred in their own television show that was syndicated throughout the south. After a similar number of years, the Stanley Brothers still piled into a four-door Cadillac or Packard that hauled a trailer filled with musical instruments. Without the leg room and creature comforts provided by a bus, driving the distances between performances could be brutal , as one weekend in the middle of May 1960 demonstrated. The village of Yellow Springs, Ohio, is located twenty miles northeast of Dayton in the western part of the state; the town of Rising Sun, Maryland, is fifty miles northeast of Baltimore near the Pennsylvania border . The driving distance from Yellow Springs to Rising Sun is about five hundred miles. In 1960 motorists could cover a third of the distance in the high-speed lanes of the western section of the Pennsylvania Turnpike; they had to negotiate the remaining two thirds on the narrow state roads of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. The straight west-to-east route was not particularly challenging—unless the travelers were a group of musicians booked to play a concert at a college near Dayton on Saturday night and first of three sets at a music park north of Baltimore Sunday at noon. Musicians who spend time on the road sometimes say that they are not so much paid to play as to drive. For the Stanley Brothers, the backto -back performances in Ohio and Maryland underscored the truth of the saying. The appearances at Antioch College and the New River Ranch earned the band six or seven hundred dollars—about a dollar and a half  The Well-Known Stanley Brothers a mile for the distance between the two gigs. This did not count the 800-mile drive from Live Oak to Yellow Springs, and 880 miles back to Florida. On the positive side, the Antioch booking provided another opportunity to play in front of the audience of northern college students whom the band had encountered at Newport. The bluegrass scene at Antioch revolved around partners in life and music Jeremy Foster and Alice Gerrard. Gerrard later formed a pioneering female old-time music duo with Appalachian singer Hazel Dickens. Foster had gone to high school with Mike Seeger. When the Antioch student government approved Foster’s request for three hundred dollars to hire Dayton-based musicians Bob and Sonny Osborne to perform at the college, it funded the first appearance by a professional bluegrass band in front of a college audience.1 On March 5, 1960, the Osborne Brothers received a mixed response from students unfamiliar with the rambling introductions and homespun humor of a hillbilly show. The concert was successful enough for the student government to approve additional funds to hire the Stanley Brothers for Saturday, May 14. Mike Seeger taped both performances, as did Jeremy Foster. A tworelease record label doing business as the Vintage Collectors Club issued a bootleg version of the Stanley Brothers concert tapes in 1961, calling it Live at Antioch College, 1960. The label’s first release was a Flatt and Scruggs compilation. The Stanley Brothers recording included seventeen songs and tunes totaling 44 minutes of music, with abbreviated introductions by Carter. The unedited recording of the performance lasts well over an hour, augmented by additional songs, a sales pitch for the latest songbook, and bass player Lindy Clear’s imitations of sounds heard in the country, such as three dogs fighting underneath a porch, a hot rod racing on a bad tire, and a Model T Ford trying to start on a very cold day. Clear performed his impressions in the character of Tennessee Mort. “The only thing more fun than watching Mort onstage was watching Carter’s expressions ,” Ralph recalled.2 “He enjoyed it more than anybody.” From their early days, the Stanley Brothers drew from traditions other than musical to put together a performance. They incorporated slapstick and country humor into their program along with vestiges of the minstrel show. Carter coordinated the proceedings...

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