Tag: Induction

The Stanley Brothers Clinch Country’s Top Honor

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

They started playing music as farm-bred young boys growing up amid the Appalachian mountains of Southwestern Virginia, sometimes using sticks of firewood to mime picking banjo and guitar.

A few years later, Ralph and Carter Stanley embarked on a 20-year professional journey as the Stanley Brothers. The music they created starting in 1946 lives on, bringing them widespread fame. It survives in their hundreds of live and studio recordings, and as a deep influence heard in cover performances by artists from Bob Dylan to Billy Strings, Vince Gill to Patty Loveless, Emmylou Harris to Ricky Skaggs, Elvis Costello to Dierks Bentley.

Carter, the older brother, lead singer, and guitarist, was born in 1925 and died tragically young in 1966, ending the brothers’ career as a duo. Banjoist and tenor singer Ralph, born in 1927, lived until 2016, building a legendary career of his own.

In March 2026, the Stanley Brothers achieved the highest honor available in this field, membership in the Country Music Hall of Fame. Their formal induction in October recognizes not only their distinctive body of creative, deep-roots music, but also the strong impact they have had on performers within and outside of bluegrass.

For years, Carter Stanley’s daughter Jeanie had led legions of family and fans to press acceptance of the brothers by the Country Music Association voter pool that picks new Hall of Fame inductees. In regular social media posts, Jeanie described previous bypasses of the act as ridiculous and called upon followers to write and implore CMA insiders to honor her father and uncle.

From a bluegrass point of view, it didn’t make sense to overlook an act recognized as one of a few foundational artists of the style, along with Bill Monroe and Flatt & Scruggs, who were inducted in 1970 and 1985, respectively. But voters in the Veterans category of membership choose among acts eligible 45 years after each emerged in country music. This formula meant that the Stanley Brothers had been eligible since 1991, but also allowed more recent “veteran” stars such as Tanya Tucker to be honored in increasing numbers, with each year that passed.

For all the Stanley Brothers’ authenticity and artistic merit, they only enjoyed one Billboard chart hit, a jokey number called “How Far to Little Rock.” It says something that the Music-City-based CMA honored the brothers even though they never moved to Nashville and never joined the Grand Ole Opry during their years together. (Ralph became a member of the historic show in 2000.)

All of that aside, the Stanley Brothers’ Hall of Fame induction illustrates their increasing recognition as a cornerstone act, each year growing new legions of followers, both in America and far beyond. String-band-music phenomenon Billy Strings, who regularly performs for houses of more than 10,000 fans, features songs at each show that were first composed or brought to wide attention by Ralph and Carter Stanley. There’s no way to measure how much that exposure means.

Overall, the richness of the Stanleys’ sound and legacy means it pops up over and over again, not just in bluegrass or country settings, but also among pop acts. A story circulates that the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards once mouthed “Stanley Brothers!” to a bandmate to illustrate the mournful backup sound he wanted for a performance.

In more formal recognition, the Library of Congress added the brothers’ rendition of the Albert Brumley composition “Rank Stranger” in 2008 to the prestigious National Recording Registry, an annual listing that “highlights the richness of the nation’s audio legacy.”

Elsewhere, “The brothers rose to fame performing traditional religious songs in an Appalachian bluegrass style marked by tight, high-pitched harmonies and strongly influenced by Bill Monroe,” their Encyclopedia Britannica entry reads in part.

Why include this Britannica language, even though it overemphasizes their gospel orientation? The Stanley Brothers’ acknowledgement in a top-rank information source shows the distance the brothers covered during their million-mile journey from a tough childhood, through countless challenges, to creative triumphs that have kept creating new fans in recent years.

Down Home

Born in rural Dickenson County, Virginia, the boys were raised by banjo-picking mother Lucy and ballad-singing father Lee Stanley among mountainside farms and busy lumber camps, living in an atmosphere of homegrown food, spring-drawn water, and lamplit rooms through their early years. Church music, sung unaccompanied in the traditional style, became a mainstay of the brothers’ own music, along with Celtic-derived story songs, neighbors’ country-string music, and eventually the commercial country music heard on a battery-powered radio. The music they learned emerged as what’s now called “pre-bluegrass” until Ralph and Carter first heard the riveting sounds of Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs on WSM’s Grand Ole Opry.

Starting out on country radio stations such as Bristol’s legendary WCYB, the Stanley Brothers recorded their early sounds for the busy regional label Rich-R-Tone, then graduated to major labels Columbia and Mercury before winding up on Starday and King, as well as a handful of smaller outlets.

Many standards of bluegrass and country music, such as “I’m a Man of Constant Sorrow,” “The White Dove,” “Rank Stranger,” “How Mountain Girls Can Love,” “Pretty Polly,” “Harbor of Love,” “Angel Band,” and “Could You Love Me One More Time,” were written or adapted by Carter and Ralph Stanley.

Both brothers wrote songs, but it is Carter who has been recognized as perhaps the most gifted songwriter in the style. It wasn’t until the folk revival and the later country traditionalist movement that Stanley Brothers songs commonly reappeared in versions by other artists.

Covers by the Hundreds

Carter Stanley had co-written songs with bluegrass founder Monroe, and pitched his song “Going to the Races” in 1957 to the recently formed Washington, D.C.-based act the Country Gentlemen. The Gents’ recording of this song, released by the Stanleys in 1958 as “Gonna Paint the Town,” represented an early example of what would become hundreds of the brothers’ songs reflected in other artists’ recordings.

Bob Dylan’s 1962 release of “I’m a Man of Constant Sorrow” hasn’t been definitively linked to the Stanley Brothers, but decades of the folk legend’s work have reflected their influence. He’s performed a batch of Stanley-connected tunes – including “Hallelujah I’m Ready” and “Searching for a Soldier’s Grave” during his endless touring years. Dylan recorded “Rank Strangers” and “Driftin’ Too Far From the Shore” as solos, and “The Lonesome River” in a 1998 duet with Ralph.

Brotherly innovation, including the skyscraping “high-baritone” harmony, influenced members of the West Coast bluegrass scene going back to the 1960s, Byrds founding member Chris Hillman once said in an interview. The striking harmonies produced by Carter and Ralph likely played a role in the two-part sound the Byrds came up with when recording their first hit, Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” he said.

The influential Johnson Mountain Boys from the Washington, D.C., area helped move bluegrass back to its roots from a newgrassy direction in the early 1980s, serving up such Stanleys classics as “I Don’t Want Your Rambling Letters,” “Harbor of Love,” and “Our Last Goodbye.”

Elvis Costello, an artist who shook pop music in the 1970s, has been best known for hard-hitting, sometimes abrasive New Wave pop and rock. In a 2015 interview with New York Times writer A.O. Scott, Costello remembered early days embracing all sorts of country music: “From the ’70s through the mid-’80s, I absorbed all the American music, not just country music like Nashville country music or Bakersfield country music, but older, more traditional styles, even the Stanley Brothers and that stuff.”

Jammin’ Stanley-style

Before Billy Strings arose, a swath of bluegrass artists brought awareness of the Stanley Brothers to new generations of fans through cover renditions. The Grateful Dead, especially co-founder Jerry Garcia, cited the Stanleys as an inspirational source, adding fuel to the jam-band movement that in recent years has brought giant crowds to bluegrass.

Del McCoury, also a Stanleys believer, draws mighty crowds to his festival, DelFest, where mashups of straight bluegrass and Dead-driven improvisational bands are common. Bluesy Larry Sparks, a onetime member of the Stanleys’ Clinch Mountain Boys band, cooks up his own mix of gospel, country and ‘grass, also citing the brothers’ influence on any music he produces.

Fellow Country Music Hall of Fame members Emmylou Harris, Ricky Skaggs and Keith Whitley also served as key testifiers to the greatness of Ralph and Carter Stanley.

Disciples since their youth, Skaggs and Whitley were overheard by Ralph Stanley in 1970 singing note-for-note recreations of the duets of Ralph and Carter. Ralph was an hour late to his own gig, due to a flat tire; when he arrived, he initially thought the venue was playing a Stanley Brothers recording. Still in their teens, they would go on to tour, record and release music with Ralph Stanley as members of the Clinch Mountain Boys.

After a starry career as a bluegrass sideman, Skaggs had early hits as a solo country artist that included versions of the brothers’ “I’ll Take the Blame” and “Could You Love Me One More Time.” His 1997 roots-return CD, Bluegrass Rules, a Grammy winner, included a large helping of Stanleys numbers, including “Think of What You’ve Done” and “Midnight Train.” In concert appearances years before the Stanley Brothers’ Hall of Fame induction, Skaggs paid tribute to the act and talked about how richly they deserved the honor.

Emmylou Harris, Skaggs’s onetime employer in her Hot Band, also helped advance the Stanleys’ legend through her recording of their songs. Her dedication to country and bluegrass produced cuts of “The Darkest Hour is Just Before Dawn” and “Who Will Sing for Me.” Harris even took part in a gospel album and act called “Angel Band” along with Vince Gill, Emory Gordy Jr., and Carl Jackson. And Harris and Skaggs joined voices on the Stanleys’ “Could You Love Me (One More Time),” on Skaggs’s first solo album in 1979.

Why the Stanleys?

There’s more to the long reach of the Stanley Brothers even than the captivating sounds of the brothers’ voices, the hard-hitting stories of their songs, and the driving rhythm of their instrumentals. Fans sum it up as authenticity.

When country music veered into steel-driven honky-tonk and later the smoothness of the Nashville sound, the Stanley Brothers stuck mostly to the music they’d come up with in their early days. Oh, there was the steel guitar of “If That’s the Way You Feel,” the Elvis-esque sounds of “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” and the R&B side-trip of “Finger Poppin’ Time,” but Ralph and Carter stayed almost entirely acoustic, always leaning on their hardcore mountain sound, true to their rural roots.

This quality of authenticity touched countless musicians and fans on first hearing. Patty Loveless shared an IBMA Award with Ralph Stanley for their recording of “Pretty Polly” on the all-star Clinch Mountain Country album and even helped inducted him into the Grand Ole Opry at the Ryman Auditorium in January 2000. Released later that year, the inclusion of “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow” (newly recorded by the Foggy Bottom Boys) and the a cappella rendition of “O Death” by Ralph Stanley were highlights on the multi-million-selling soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou?, bringing new attention to their style of roots music.

For a California punk musician named Gillian Welch, one Stanley Brothers cassette was all it took for her to find “her music.” In 2018, Americana star Welch and partner David Rawlings were among the performers at an evening tribute to Ralph and the Stanley Brothers at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, with country star Dierks Bentley as host. The event was a celebration of a Ralph Stanley exhibition opening at the museum.

That night, Bentley brought on the Traveling McCourys, the act starring Del’s boys and other musicians, as well as the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach. Others on the show included Ralph Stanley’s son, known as Ralph II, bluegrass duo the Gibson Brothers, and the hot-picking Justin Moses and Sierra Hull.

The evening of music from a diverse group of performers shone with songs such as “I’ll Just Go Away,” “Could You Love Me One More Time,” “How Mountain Girls Can Love,” and the first Stanleys hit, “Little Glass of Wine.” It reflected a theme universal to myriads of musicians and fans, that the Stanley Brothers’ music hits so hard and so deep that it has served as a foundation for followers going back generations.

“Some of the first songs I ever saw played on a guitar were Stanley Brothers songs,” Auerbach said, according to Rolling Stone.

Closer to the present and into the future, Compass Records this year announced an all-star tribute album marking the 80th anniversary of the Stanley Brothers’ debut as a performing act in 1946. Last year, the label gave a hint of the disc’s content with a single release of “Ralph’s Banjo Special” featuring Kristin Scott Benson, Gena Britt, and Alison Brown.

Through the years, fans have treasured the forthright values of the Stanley Brothers and admired the ways they combined the traditional music they loved with creative new ways of addressing those sounds. Sad to say, the Stanley Brothers endured some hard times just to play the music they had fashioned, instead of changing their sound to follow the whims of music-business fashion. Carter once addressed their steadfast point of view with a note in a publication written to be mailed to their fans.

“For the past few years, we have tried to bring to you country people the kind of entertainment you enjoy,” Carter wrote. “In doing this we have been criticized by some for not being more modern. Since we were raised with this old-time music as part of our background, we have never had and still do not feel any desire to change our way of playing.”

Sticking to their guns remained the Stanley Brothers’ trademark through their two decades of touring, performing, and recording together. Some 60 years after Carter’s death ended those years, the Stanley Brothers’ legacy has paid off for them with membership in the Country Music Hall of Fame among country music’s most highly esteemed acts.

Photo courtesy of the Country Music Hall of Fame ® and Museum.

Wilma Lee Cooper: A Mountain Music Star Shining Through the Decades

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Wilma Lee Cooper, who died in 2011 at age 90, is being inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame this month. Many of her fans, friends and followers say it’s about time.

A snapshot of Wilma Lee. Wilma Leigh (later changed to “Lee”) Leary, was born in West Virginia in 1921. Her first performances were as a young girl in the family band. Her last performance as a band leader was in 2001 at the age of 80, when she had a stroke while singing at the Grand Ole Opry. Determined to finish the song, she was helped off stage to a standing ovation.

Between these times, this tiny woman dressed in home-made ruffled dresses and high heels impressed everyone she encountered in the music world.

She had a powerful voice and was an equally powerful guitar player. With her inherent smarts (she skipped several grades) and business degree, she successfully navigated the music industry and kept all the band’s books, first with her husband, Dale Troy “Stoney” Cooper, and then on her own after Stoney’s death.

She traveled with a sewing machine and a coffee maker. After every tour, she would wash all her stage clothes and spend 45 minutes ironing each dress.

She also drove the band bus and fixed her family’s television sets. She was a kind and generous boss, a nurturing mother, an ethical and caring woman and a force of nature on stage.

(Above, read an article on Wilma Lee Cooper published in 1977 in Sing Out! written by Alice Gerrard)

From church socials to radio. Reviewing Wilma Lee Cooper’s musical life is an immersion course in the evolution of country and bluegrass music. The Leary Family Band – Wilma Lee’s parents, plus Wilma Lee, her two sisters, and a fiddle-playing uncle – started as a local gospel group. The girls later incorporated secular music sets.

Their prize for winning a statewide contest was the chance to perform at the National Folk Festival in Washington, D.C. A stop at WSVA in Harrisonburg, Virginia, on the way home brought a job offer – and big changes. In one day, the Leary Family went from a local ensemble to professionals with a show of their own. And, when their fiddling uncle returned to his teaching job, the family recruited a young fiddler then called “Smiley” Cooper. (Radio listeners voted for the new name, “Stoney,” to avoid a conflict with a state yodeling champion called Smiley).

Soon, the beautiful oldest daughter and the movie-star handsome fiddler were singing duets with the band. They married in 1941.

Foregoing music to raise their daughter, Carol Lee, in one place was short-lived. Wilma Lee is quoted in Bear Family liner notes as saying, “I was goin’ nuts at home… Stoney wasn’t happy… and it was awful hard to settle down that way.”

On to the Grand Ole Opry. Plunging back into performing, Stoney and Wilma Lee followed the common path of moving from radio station to radio station. They hired back-up players, eventually settling on the band name, “Clinch Mountain Clan.”
In a 2023 Bluegrass Unlimited article, Jack Bernhardt referred to “Stoney’s old-time/bluegrass fiddle and Wilma Lee’s propulsive rhythm guitar and soul-stirring vocals.” Stoney also sang harmonies.

Their 1947 move to Wheeling, West Virginia, and the WWVA Jamboree, broadcast on a 50,000 watt station, propelled the Coopers into the national spotlight. By the mid-1950s, they were charting high on Billboard. Within a year of their 1956 hit record, “Cheated Too,” they joined the Grand Ole Opry. They had seven hit records by 1961, with some of Nashville’s top writers, like Don Gibson and Boudleaux Bryant, writing for them – as well as songs written by Wilma and Stoney, themselves. While the recording business was moving away from what had been called “hillbilly music,” the Grand Ole Opry continued to welcome the eclectic range of country music, from Grandpa Jones and Bill Monroe to “Nashville Sound” crooners.

Dan Rogers, Vice President and Executive Producer of the Grand Ole Opry, said, “It was this cavalcade of great artists, all doing something similar, but also all doing something with their own stamps and styles. It didn’t need characterization. It was just, ‘This is Wilma Lee and Stoney.’ It might have been one of those songs that took them to the Top 10 of the country charts, or it may have been an instrumental or a gospel piece.”

Over time, the Coopers found themselves in conflict with the Nashville labels. Wilma Lee said a producer denied her request to record “I Dreamed of a Hillbilly Heaven,” claiming no one would buy it. It later became a huge hit for Tex Ritter. And they wanted her to record songs she would never perform.

The welcoming bluegrass world. While country radio was pushing away mountain music, new audiences were inviting the Coopers in. Folk and bluegrass fans loved their traditional sounds, as well as their stellar musicianship.

The Clinch Mountain Clan attracted top sidemen. To name a few, Butch Robins, Vic Jordan and Tater Tate went on to play for Bill Monroe, and Jimmy D. Brock later joined the Osborne’s. Dobro master Gene Wooten was in Wilma Lee’s band, as was Woody Paul, shortly before forming Riders In the Sky, and Terry Smith, now of the Grascals.

Marty Lanham (musician, luthier and a founder of the Station Inn) had just moved to Nashville, where he was befriended by Wilma Lee’s sisters, Jeraldine (Jerry) Jonson and Peggy Gayle. They told him the Coopers were looking for a bass player. So, he borrowed a bass, took some lessons – and become part of the Clinch Mountain Clan three weeks later.

The Coopers always gave their audiences what they expected. Lanham said, “Bill Carter would play Dobro and electric guitar, and Mike Lattimore would play either banjo or drums. At a bluegrass festival, they would use the bluegrass instrumentation and then switch over to electric guitar and drums,” at a country booking.

In 1974, the Smithsonian Institution dubbed Wilma Lee, “The First Lady of Bluegrass.” In 1976, Rounder Records – dedicated to promoting roots music – invited Stoney and Wilma Lee to record. Marian Leighton Levy, a Rounder co-founder, remembered Stoney as “tall, dark and handsome,” with an Errol Flynn aura, while Wilma Lee “was outgoing and friendly, in a low-key and down home way. She looked and played the part of a real professional, and yet at the same time she was warm and made you feel welcome.” Wilma Lee also worked with Rounder to select material, and she seemed to be “the business person in the group and in the family,” Levy remembers.

Wilma Lee takes the lead. Wilma Lee was 56 when Stoney died in 1977. She wasn’t ready to sit back and put her feet up. She reassembled a band, which after some initial shuffling included Gene Wooten; Stan (Stanjo) Brown, who later played with Bill Monroe; Gary Bailey; and Woody Paul. (Wilma Lee continued her preference for an electric bass, even after getting pushback from bluegrass critics who hated it on recordings.)

Their first year, the band traveled 110,000 miles, playing about 140 gigs. On one 3,600 mile week-long trip, Wilma Lee drove about one-third of the time.

Brown remembers that Wilma Lee embraced the bluegrass world as it was embracing her. “She was doing the same material (as when Stoney was alive), but it was approached a whole different way. Her guitar really drove the rhythm and the energy in the band. And her voice… it set the timing… it was so precise. I had never played with anybody up to that point who had that much energy and drive.”

And she always connected at an emotional level. She would be sobbing by the end of the song “A Daisy a Day,” about a man who leaves flowers on his wife’s grave. “It was really sincere. There was nothing theatrical about her,” Brown said.

She told Alice Gerrard for Sing Out!, “…I see the story a-happening while I’m singing the song… I guess I’m one that likes what you call your heart and story songs. They tell a story – you’ve got to believe it.”

Rogers of the Opry said, “I always think of her music as pure, and I think that her heart was the same. I don’t think she could have been any other way if she’d tried.”

Wilma Lee continued to record, as well as perform, until her stroke in 2001. In 2010, she appeared on stage once more at the Opry to thank her fans for their years of support.

Wilma Lee and the world of bluegrass. Stoney and Wilma Lee were stars, no matter what genre they were playing. Their partnership was one of a kind. And Wilma – as a singer, as a guitar player, as a fireball on stage and a huge heart off stage – has left a powerful legacy.

In 1994, the International Bluegrass Music Association presented Wilma Lee with its Award of Merit. This year, she will receive its highest honor, induction into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame.

Rounder’s Levy said, “There are very few women of her generation in the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame.” (In fact,
only eight of the current 70 inductees are women or have women members.) And Levy believes Wilma Lee clearly belongs there.

“In terms of being on the Grand Ole Opry, making lots of records, having a substantial career… the uniqueness of her vocal style, playing guitar when most women in bands weren’t playing guitars or instruments… She was a bandleader and a featured voice, face and name, right up there in her own right,” Levy said.

Ken Irwin, another Rounder co-founder, said, “She was an energy source that people didn’t see very often… She would put it all out there. She brought not only the tunes, but the sensibility, of the old-time music that she grew up with, and that she didn’t change.”

Gerrard said the popular female folk revival singers at the time, like Joan Baez and Judy Collins, sounded high and sweet. But Wilma Lee’s voice – like Molly O’Day’s and Ola Belle Reed’s – had grit and strength. “They weren’t holding back. They were letting go – putting their voices out there.” That’s what Gerrard was striving for and what made her duets with Hazel Dickens so compelling.

Andrea Roberts, principal of the Andrea Roberts Agency, was an adolescent when she first saw Wilma Lee perform. “She carried herself so professionally, looked like a star – and backed it up with talent and business leadership. She was a dynamic vocalist – a big, booming voice – and she played the guitar like she meant it! She was not timid… and that left an indelible mark on me even when I didn’t realize it was happening.

“Not until I started my own band as a 21-year-old woman did I realize the significance of Wilma Lee’s role as band leader and front person. At that point in my own career, Wilma Lee’s accomplishments became very important to me, and I looked to her as a role model for persevering in a male-dominated business.”

A daughter’s thoughts. Carol Lee Cooper, Stoney and Wilma Lee’s daughter, who first sang on stage with her parents at age two, has carried on the family musical tradition. As an adult, she joined her parents’ show at the Opry. Eventually, she became a Nashville legend as the long-time leader of the Carol Lee Singers, the back-up vocalists at the Grand Ole Opry. A great vocalist, she was Conway Twitty’s favorite harmony partner.

Carol Lee is proud that her parents’ work is recorded in the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution. Of her mother’s induction into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame, Carol Lee said, “She would be so honored to know that.”

Author’s Note: Many excellent accounts of Wilma Lee’s life and career have been written. A great starting place for anything you want to know about women in bluegrass is Murphy Hicks Henry’s Pretty Good for a Girl. Some other good sources, in addition to the Gerrard interview mentioned above, are Bluegrass Unlimited and liner notes from a Bear Family compilation.

Editor’s Note: “You Can’t Talk About Women in Country Music Without Talking About… Wilma Lee Cooper” by Alice Gerrard (SING OUT! Volume 26 Issue 2, 1977) appears with permission; courtesy of Mark Moss and SING OUT!

Photo Credit: David Gahr, from SING OUT! Volume 26 Issue 2, 1977