Ralph Stanley is one of the last, and surely the purest, of the traditional country musicians. He's such a stickler that he has no use for the dobro, let alone electrified instruments, and he's not overly fond of the term bluegrass. He prefers to call what he performs "that old-time mountain music." He plays the five-string banjo in the claw-hammer style he learned from his mother — or he used to, until arthritis caught up with him — and he sings in a raw, keening Appalachian tenor.
The songs tend to be about hard times, unfaithful lovers, deceased children, lonely graves. One of his most famous, "O Death," is a pleading dialogue with the Grim Reaper himself. It used to be said that when you heard a Ralph Stanley tune, you either wanted to get drunk or go to church and get saved.
Mr. Stanley is 82 and, except for a dry spell in the early 1950s when he worked as a spot welder in Detroit, he has been performing steadily since he was a teenager. He still plays more than 100 dates a year, though he travels now in a customized bus rather than in an old Chevy, the band crammed in the back seat and the bass strapped to the roof. He has even been to Japan several times, where fans learn his songs by rote.
Mr. Stanley, who has called himself Doctor ever since being awarded an honorary degree from Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee in 1976, has been so busy, traveling and collecting awards — three Grammys (one for an a capella version of "O Death" on the soundtrack of the film "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"), the National Medal of Arts, a "Living Legend" designation from the Library of Congress — that he only just got around to writing his autobiography, with the help of the journalist Eddie Dean.
His book, "Man of Constant Sorrow: My Life and Times" (Gotham Books), which comes out on Thursday, takes its title from another famous song and is a lot like the man himself: warm, folksy, down to earth, plainspoken, a little blunt and prickly at times. (It has nothing good to say about the Nashville star Tim McGraw, who, Mr. Stanley notes, hasn't "a lick of country" in him.)
Mr. Stanley talks of how death "brung together" his mother and father, and how he was "borned and raised way back in the hills." About musical talent, he writes: "It tends to run in families like a good line of dogs, and there ain't nothing you can do to change that."
Last week, Mr. Stanley was in New York with his band, the Clinch Mountain Boys, as part of a double bill at Carnegie Hall with Steve Martin, who had teamed up with the Steep Canyon Rangers, a North Carolina group, to play some of the songs on Mr. Martin's recent banjo album, "The Crow." At the end of the show the two groups got together for a crowd-pleasing version of "Orange Blossom Special" and for "Little Maggie," with Mr. Stanley singing the plaintive lyrics:
"Oh yonder stands little Maggie, a dram glass in her hand. She's drinkin' away her troubles. She's a-courtin' another man."
Mr. Martin said afterwards that appearing with Mr. Stanley, whom he had idolized for years, was "a scary dream come true," and added, "I'm already old, and look at him, still going.".. The complete article on Mr Stanley can be found on this NY Times site.