Crown of Bright Glory—The Legendary Carter Stanley
Reprinted from Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine
February 1996, Volume 30, Number 8
There are an extraordinary number of bluegrass and country music performers who achieved stardom by simply emulating Carter Stanley’s hauntingly emotional vocal style or by recording one of his many remarkable hit songs. The songs he wrote have been recorded and/or performed by nearly every bluegrass musician throughout the history of this music, and OTHER stars such as Ricky Skaggs, George Jones, Patty Loveless, Keith Whitley, John Denver, and Boh Dylan, have recorded his music. Carter Stanley’s music was written from the heart, sang from the soul, and the Stanley Brothers have historically proven, undeniably, to be a profound influence on all bluegrass music as we know it today.
According to Carter Lee and Bill, Carter Stanley’s sons, of Perry, Fla., approximately 2,500 people attended Carter Stanley’s funeral held on a bleak, cold, early December afternoon in 1966. It took hours for all the grieving fans, family and friends to file past his coffin, where Bill Monroe stood and touched it with a hand, singing unaccompanied, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” weeping throughout. Son Bill was named for Bill Monroe, whom Carter always said had “a pearl in his voice.”
“I think Carter Stanley was put on this earth for a purpose,” Bill Monroe later consoled Carter’s devastated family enroute to the cemetery, “…he was the finest natural lead singer there ever was, and I believe the good Lord needed a good lead singer and he wanted the best, so he called him home…” Carter was called home December 1, 1966, when the main artery to his liver ruptured around three a.m., and there was no more hope.
The night Carter Stanley performed his last show, he became ill and was led offstage where he refused to be taken to a hospital. “Take me home to Mama’s,” he insisted, and he was taken to the old Stanley home place in Virginia. He seemed better when they arrived, and sat on the porch for a time, asking, “sit up with me a while boys and let’s talk,” but his condition worsened and soon he was riding in an ambulance to the hospital with George Shuffler and his brother Ralph at his side.
“Light me a cigarette, Aunt George,” Carter urged Shuffler, calling him by an old nickname, “… I reckon it don’t matter now.” He made reference to his recent efforts to break the smoking habit, and Shuffler states those are the last words Carter ever spoke to him, though he called for Ralph near the end. They did not expect he would die. He had experienced terrible bouts before and lived through it, but those who knew him agree—he was not a man to talk about his problems, health or otherwise.
Born in McClure, Va., August 27, 1925, Carter Stanley was a tall, handsome, imposing and charismatic man. “I’ll never forget driving to the airport in Jacksonville to pick up my Daddy when he came home for mine and Bill’s high school graduation. He turned heads all over the airport just because of the way he held himself. Anybody who saw him could tell he was a star of some kind. He had on a shiny suit and sawtooth hat. He carried a leather briefcase, and I mean, he really was something to see..Carter Lee laughs as an aside. Bill adds, “and he gave each of us some money for graduation. But he also gathered all our friends up and gave them the same amount of money each, telling them, ‘Boys, I just want you to know how proud I am of all of you,’ and you could tell he was sincere.”
Carter Lee goes on to describe a father any child would be blessed to call his own. Carter and wife Mary had five children, Carter Lee, Bill, Bob, Jeannie (who has launched a bluegrass career of her own), and Doris, for whom the song “Baby Girl” was written. Those who knew him said he was deeply bothered by not being able to spend more time with his wife and children, and his happiest days were said to be the Jim Walter Home show days in Live Oak, Fla., because it was then that he was able to spend more time with his family than he had at any other time in his career. His sons recall having a day off from school when Carter was home, and that their father would take them coon hunting or fishing instead. He never brought his work home. Carter Lee and Bill have little recollection of ever seeing their fadier even bring his guitar inside the house when he was home.
Carter was the band spokesman, he did all the emcee work, and sang lead, though he and brother Ralph always made joint decisions regarding business matters and leadership of the band. Ralph admits he was only too happy to let Carter do all the talking, because he was so “bashful” at the time. Carter was a great practical joker, a man who enjoyed “loading up” the unsuspecting with Feenamint laxative and then enjoying the fun as fellow bluegrass stars would have to flee from the stage in the middle of a performance and head for the outhouse.
He was also a man who abhorred and found intolerable any mistreatment of the disadvantaged. “Like you are, he once was—and like he is, you once may be” was one of Carter’s favorite sayings in regard to the afflicted. There is one story, according to son Carter Lee, that tells of the Stanley Brothers passing through a city in the dead of winter, and upon seeing a little boy standing on the street corner with no shoes, Carter immediately made the driver pull over and took the child into a store and bought shoes for him to wear. All who knew him best say he had a great love of children in general, and was a devoted father and family man who was torn between home and the road which took him to play a music that he loved so well.
When Carter was a boy he sent off for a three dollar mail order guitar, and while Ralph sat at his mother’s knee learning to play the banjo, Carter would walk out to the main road and await the postman, a man who played guitar, and who was only too happy to teach a young Carter Stanley another chord to play. From there he and Ralph began playing in church, and then graduated to schoolhouses and gatherings, bars and dinner houses, and then finally, the road, where the Stanley Brothers became one of the more popular bands of the era.
Of the approximate 112 songs copyrighted as written by Carter Stanley, a huge number were not only bluegrass “hits” but bluegrass classics. At any festival in any given jam session, the old favorites are there, written by Carter, or songs not written by Carter but old standards deemed “Stanley Brothers” songs. Ralph states that he imagines Carter wrote as many as two or three hundred songs overall, though verifying this is impossible. Ralph, George Shuffler and Melvin Goins describe Carter as a “deep thinker,” a smart man who had a “memory like an elephant.” He would write one verse to a song and lay it aside for weeks and then come back to it only to write one more line. He constantly wrote songs while traveling on the road.
Carter would often write songs late at night on the road with the car’s dome light on, often asking Ralph to help him add a word here, a line there. It helped the lonesome miles pass, and Ralph recalls the night Carter wrote “White Dove” this way.
Gene “Red” Duty tells of a typically close brotherly relationship between a young Carter and Ralph, who sometimes seemed to enjoy aggravating one another. “They would play a game called ‘horse’ on the road, where if one saw a horse he’d get a point, and they would play up to twenty points. A spotted horse was worth two points, and one day Carter said ‘horse with a spot, two points,’ and Ralph said he didn’t see a spot on that horse. Well they argued for three miles until George Shuffler finally turned the car around and went back, but by then the horse had gone way over into another pasture. But Carter said, ‘come on Gene, let’s go see if the horse has a spot,’ and you know, we walked a long way, all the way across that field, and Carter crawled all under that horse looking everywhere for a spot, but he couldn’t find one. He finally said, ‘look, we’re gonna go back and tell Ralph there’s a spot on this horse whether there is or not, and you’re gonna help me swear to it!,’ and I did swear to Ralph there was a spot ‘cause I generally did anything Carter told me to.” He laughs.
Carter had a great appeal wherever they performed, Melvin Goins says. “When he would sing ‘Single Girl, Married Girl,’ people loved it.” When asked why Carter Stanley would choose a song like that as one of his favorites to perform, Goins states that Carter Stanley had a way of singing a song that made whoever listened fall into trance of absorption. “When he sang ‘Single Girl, Married Girl,’ you could actually see the married girl sitting there in front of him rocking a baby in a chair, and he sang it like he was actually seeing it. He made a song come alive because he sang it with such feeling he painted a picture right in front of you.”
“He sang from his heart, I know that,” Del McCoury states “I watched him singing on stage one time when the tears rolled from his eyes and spilled onto his guitar.”
Even son Carter Lee is amazed at the emotion his father’s music provokes. “Sometimes I wonder how my Daddy could have stood on stage and sung ‘White Dove.’ When I went to Uncle Ralph’s festival just recently, and I saw Joe Isaacs and Uncle Ralph on stage singing ‘White Dove,’ it made chills stand up on my back when I heard it and looked around ‘…at the green rolling hills I love so well…’,” he says. “It was easy to imagine that Joe, with the haunting sound to his voice, could have been my Daddy standing there on stage with Uncle Ralph.” There is a cry in Carter Stanley’s voice that, along with his brooder’s legendary tenor singing, can be heard as a thread in the very fiber of nearly all bluegrass singing today.
Don Rigsby, tenor and lead singer for the Lonesome River Band, states emphatically that. “Carter Stanley had more soul in his singing in the tip of his little finger than everybody else has in their whole body.” He elaborates, pointing out those, including himself, who started out emulating the Carter Stanley sound. “No man is an island,” he says. “We all have to start somewhere. Take Ronnie Bowman. (Lead singer for the Lonesome River Band). His singing has been influenced by Carter Stanley and he doesn’t even know it. He started out listening to Boone Creek, and Ricky Skaggs, the lead singer of Boone Creek, started out listening to the Stanleys and forming his musical style.” Rigsby added that when comparing a bluegrass artist’s music today as a house, that Carter Stanley’s voice and songs would be the foundation. “Oh, you might have one wall be Ricky Skaggs, or another wall be somebody else, but the foundation will be Carter Stanley, most every time.”
Those basing their bluegrass foundations on the Stanley Brothers music have often grown to the very heights of stardom—Ricky Skaggs, Keith Whitley, Marty Raybon of the group Shenandoah, Vince Gill, and Roy Lee Centers to name a few. Ralph Stanley’s voice is more of a pure mountain sound, an ancient and haunting vocal style that cannot really be learned by anyone not born and raised in the hills of Virginia. Carter’s voice, however, was simplistic, a more “contemporary” mountain sound for his era.
“Though many came close to singing like Carter, and were great lead singers, none even beat him or even matched him. He had a way of singing, a natural style that was all his own, and nobody else was even good enough to shine his shoes,” Ralph once stated to Carter Lee. Like a grieving loved one might leave a bedroom of the departed as a shrine, Ralph Stanley has spent his life since Carter’s death as a living memorial to his beloved brother.
Carter left this world only a heartbeat in time before bluegrass music became a popular vehicle for outdoor festivals. He performed at only two festivals before he went on to his reward. Ralph states that the popularity of Carter’s music bloomed throughout the decades since his brother’s death due to festival exposure to the music. And it is Ralph Stanley who deserves the credit for
Carter Stanley’s popularity today. Without Ralph keeping the sound of the Stanley Brothers alive, Carter’s songwriting and the popularity of numbers he sang which have become audience favorites, may have fallen by the wayside without festival exposure.
“He was 20 years ahead of his time,” George Shuffler says of Carter Stanley’s music. “His songs not only stood the test of time, they get more and more popular as the years go by,” he adds. When asked how he derived the nickname “Aunt George,” he chuckles, telling of a time when the Stanley Brothers were booked at a show along with Mother Maybelle and the Carter sisters. Mother Maybelle and the Carter sisters were there, but Aunt Sarah was ill and couldn’t attend. George played bass and sang along with the girls and Carter dubbed him “Aunt George” from that day forward. Carter, himself nicknamed “Chase” for his coon hunting ability, had nicknames for everyone, calling Gene Duty “Festus,” “Goat” for Curly Lambert, “Hoss” for Art Stamper (because Carter said he was the “hoss” of the fiddle players), “Mr. Ol’ Hickory for Ralph Mayo, and referred to Ralph as “Fluffo,” a name Curly Lambert bestowed because, as Shuffler explains, “Ralph was a little chubby at the time.” Another indignity Ralph will never live down is that Carter Stanley once beat him in a banjo picking contest. “It was rigged, though, a joke sorta thing,” Ralph recalls!
Life on the road with four musicians cramped into a car, clothes and instruments squeezed into the trunk and a bass strapped on the roof, Shuffler tells of a nightmare trip he once endured where a “300 pound Chubby Anthony was along, and a 250 pound Curly Lambert. Carter weighed about 220, and me and Ralph was the only almost normal sized people in the car. We rode three in the front sometimes. We drove 800 miles to play a show in the northwest and when we walked out on stage people just pointed and said ‘what’s that’…they’d never even seen a banjo before. It was hard, I tell you. You had to waller around just trying to find a soft spot to lay your head. Sometimes it liked to have killed us. But there were good times too,” he muses aloud. “Carter could be the funniest person in the world at times. I was his clown. I could say something that would just tickle him to death. He said he had always wanted a gold tooth and a tattoo before he died, even as a young man. Well, he had ’em both, and if I was driving I’d look in the rear view mirror at Carter in the back seat, and if I saw that gold tooth a’shinin’, I knew Carter was happy. He had a memory like an elephant, and me and Ralph would have to read his lips because if you didn’t have a song memorized you was in big trouble. He said you could put more feeling in a song if you didn’t have to read the words. Carter and Ralph always just sang their parts and I filled in where they wasn’t. A lot of baritones sing right along with the lead or tenor, but if you sing the part right it’s a hard part to sing. We sang so well together because we knew each other so well we knew when to breathe, when to pause, when to dwell…and you know, bluegrass is the hardest music in the world to play. You have to think ahead just to play it. You have to stay on your toes, and Carter made sure that we did.
“Carter kept a song on his mind all the time. You know, Carter Stanley was just an awful good fellow. He was like a brother to me and Ralph both. It hurt awful bad when I had to help carry him to his grave. It set awful deep with me.”
Carter loved to coon hunt, and he loved horses, Shuffler explains. Carter’s favorite horse was a tall black mare, and friends say Carter Stanley cut an imposing figure riding the mountain trails on the mare’s back.
Melvin Goins, who spent the last year of Carter Stanley’s life “waiting on him simply because I worshipped him and would have done anything I could just to be by his side,” describes a haunting scene the morning he awoke at “Aunt Lucy’s” farmhouse. Goins said the first thing that came to mind as soon as he awoke, was that Carter Stanley lay dead in a coffin in the sitting room, and Goins rose from the bed to gaze sadly out the window. It was just sunup, he said, and he looked down on a wintry scene. A light snow had fallen during the night. Goins said Carter Stanley’s coon hounds suddenly began to howl for no reason at all in an eerie, tormented way, and the tall black mare began to pace up and down the fence like something wild, snorting, nickering, and tossing her head.
“It was like they knew,” Goins says. At breakfast that morning he sat at the table with George Shuffler while Aunt Lucy gazed off in the direction where her fallen son lay awaiting the funeral and said “What a pity and shame my boy is gone in his prime. How I wish it was me instead of him.” Goins also describes a painful scene as others tried to convince Ralph to go on, that Carter would want it that way. Ralph states that he received thousands of letters asking him to continue on without Carter, and that actually, he believed he had no other choice.
“Carter would just be singing a song and during the middle break he’d just walk away.” Goins continues. “He’d walk offstage and sling his guitar over his back and just start shaking hands and talking to people. When it was time for the singing to start again there was nothing Ralph could do but step up to the microphone.” Goins goes on to say that he wished people could write a song today and put the feeling in it that Carter put into a song. “No one else could ever put that touch that would really get your attention, whether it was funny or sad. It was the same way with Hank Williams. It was a God’s gift of talent he had, that will go down in history as a legend…”
“Carter Stanley and Ralph, as the Stanley Brothers, captured and made popular the early mountain sound,” Charlie Waller explains, adding that one of the first songs he ever recorded, “Going To The Races” was a song Carter and Ralph had popularized. “I looked up to him very much, especially as a song writer.”
James King, who once recorded an album, “Reunion” with Ralph and George Shuffler, singing Carter’s part, named his son after Carter Stanley. King states that he believes Carter Stanley to be the “Hank Williams” of bluegrass music.
“Think of the songs Hank wrote for country music, and then think of the songs Carter wrote, they were the same. Look back at Hank’s songs, they were the same type of feeling in a song.” “Carter’s health was just the Lord’s will,” Ralph states sadly. “I can’t ever question the Almighty.” He states it was a hard decision to go on without his brother. “He had a better personality than me. He’d talk to anybody. He’d call the president or whoever by his first name. He could suit whatever crowd he happened to be in. It was awful hard to make a decision to go ahead. Carter lived and breathed this music. I believe when you have God’s will to do something, it just comes out natural, and that’s the way it was with Carter and his music. It came easy to him. He never put any effort in it at all. A lot of people learn to sing mechanically, and you can do it that way, but you can tell it in those people. Carter never tried to add anything fancy to his voice. And you know, I found a lot of real good lead singers, such as Roy Lee Centers, and I’ve sometimes wondered if something had happened the other way, if he would have ever found a tenor singer to sound like me.”
Ralph stresses that the song “The Hills Of Home” is exactly how he feels about Carter word for word, and he means every thought and feeling expressed in it. If Carter Stanley could look down from heaven over the scene on this earth below, what does Ralph think he would say?
“I’m proud of you little brother.” Ralph speaks poignantly, with a solemn nod of his head.
At the Doyle Lawson Festival in Denton, N.C., July 8, 1995, a young boy named Ralph steps up to the microphone and in a heartfelt mountain voice sings for the first time a song written by the legendary Carter Stanley—“The Lonesome River.” His father, Ralph Stanley steps up to sing tenor on the chorus, and the crowd roars its approval. The circle is completed—and through his music, Carter Stanley lives on.
Janice Brown McDonald is from one of Florida’s oldest bluegrass families. An award-winning writer and fiction novelist, she has been a contributor to Bluegrass Unlimited since 1984.
