Lonesome Melodies: The Lives and Music of the Stanley Brothers

3. Brothers in Arms

  3. BROTHERS IN ARMS During the Civil War, residents of far southwestern Virginia found themselves pressured to declare their loyalty to either the Union or the Confederacy. Though connected in 1856 by a 204-mile railroad extension from Bristol, Tennessee, to Lynchburg, Virginia, that proceeded east to the future Confederate capital of Richmond,1 a sizeable segment of the population would have preferred to remain independent from either side. By character and geography, they were self-sufficient people whose primary loyalty was to the survival of the family in a subsistence environment . But the warring armies forced the mountain folk to choose sides. On November 4, 1864, the war struck close to the southwestern Virginia home of the Stanley family when a clash with trained Confederate soldiers took the life of a family member, Charles Hibbitts. A Stanley who bore his mother’s name, Hibbitts had may have been part of a paramilitary unit called the home guards, composed of men who had been recruited to protect Union sympathizers and their property from outlaws and supporters of the Confederate army.2 Accounts of the circumstances of his death differ; one was that an informer revealed the location of a home guards camp to Confederate soldiers. The accounts agree on one point: Confederate soldiers killed Hibbitts and other Union sympathizers in a pre-dawn encounter that became known as the Battle of Cranesnest.3 In the late 1930s, the approach of war in Europe may not have darkened daily life in Appalachia much more than the Great Depression had done through most of the decade, yet its ominous clouds soon cast shadows of uncertainty on a young person’s prospects for the future. Growing up in these times, Carter and Ralph Stanley learned at an early age that society expected certain things of a male child, just as it had strict expectations of female children. If a boy’s family lived on a farm, as the Stanley family did, he had to contribute to the enterprise by  Brothers in Arms performing a variety of routine tasks. “We called it doing up the work,” recalled Carter to Mike Seeger in 1966.4 Carter and Ralph “would get up about 5 o’clock in the morning to feed the cows and chickens, then walk two miles up Pilot Knob to the one-room school there, then walk back to more chores and bed.”5 When school was in session, Ralph recalled, “We’d leave before dark and get home after dark, sometimes climbing up and down through those dark woods in 18 inches or more of snow.” The question remains whether life was oppressively hard for Carter and Ralph, or typical of farm life in most rural areas during the 1930s. In a documentary film made on around the time of his fiftieth anniversary as a performer in 1996, Ralph’s description of a boyhood spent rising before dawn to milk cows before walking to school sounded as bucolic as it was demanding, though this pleasant image could be a difficult past viewed through the filter of time.6 In the 1930s another expectation of a boy growing up in a region that once had been the frontier was the ability to hunt. A boy’s mother might teach him to play banjo—as Lucy taught Ralph—but chances were that his father or grandfather or uncle would show him how to use the family rifle. Though animal populations had decreased from the effects of human settlement and despoiling of the land by logging and mining, deer, raccoons, opossum, and the occasional moose were plentiful in southwestern Virginia during Carter and Ralph’s youth. Of the two boys, Carter had the greater interest in hunting. A few years after he returned from the army, he was known well enough as an avid sportsman and hound breeder to be introduced on the radio as “that big coon hunter from Dickenson County.”7 Ralph was more interested in taking care of animals than hunting them. While in high school, he expressed an interest in becoming a veterinarian—though he later qualified the statement by saying that he was “full of notions” at the time.8 He and Carter’s best friend, Carl Hammons, were in the same year at Ervinton High School. Hammons recalled high school agriculture teacher Orville Deel introducing the two young men to veterinary medicine as part of his farming classes. Deel was a demanding teacher...