The Heart of Rock and Soul by Dave Marsh
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The Heart of Rock and Soul by Dave Marsh 99 RANK STRANGERS, The Stanley Brothers Producer not credited; written by Albert Brumley Starday 506 1960 Did not make pop chart A man is forced by circumstance to leave his home and family to seek his fortune. Years later, he returns to find the places and faces that have visited him hourly in his longings and dreams are gone, simply disappeared. The scene is to him a desperate and despairing one. It's not just that a whole world he once knew no longer exists; it's that what has replaced it seems so completely alien. One of these rank strangers attempts to console him, telling him that the things he loves still exist in another dimension, but he is not to be solaced. "Everybody I met, seemed to be a rank stranger," he sings. "No mother or dad, not a friend could I see / They knew not my name, and I knew not their faces / I found they were all rank strangers to me." Schematically, "Rank Strangers" is a folk tale, with an air of legend and miracle, the ashes and dust from which the Ur-myth of rock and country and soul wanderlust is fashioned. It's the template, as it were, from which Bobby Bare's "Detroit City," Gladys Knight's "Midnight Train to Georgia," Chuck Berry's "The Promised Land" and dozens of other songs were created. Or so it feels. It's almost impossible to believe that the Stanley Brothers debuted such a classic piece of American folklore as late as 1960. Maybe the Stanleys' record of Brumley's great hymn has such continuing power because it was the last of its kind. After about 1960, folk music became what it is today: a marketing category, divorced from whatever reality it ever had as a description of how people in some communities went about making culture. The returning native in "Rank Strangers" represents many things - a Christian adrift in the temporal world, a sinner trying to storm the gates of heaven, "The Man Without A Country" of Edward Everett Hale's short story, the workingman become cosmopolitan in the course of traveling to ply his trade, perhaps above all, the southerner forced into Yankee territory and returning to find his homeland forever altered. But these words, this music, in my imagination at least, also represent the reaction of such forebears as Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson to what rock and roll had made of the basic elements of American folk music. Ralph and Carter Stanley came from the mountainous region on the border of Virginia and Tennessee where Ralph Peer first recorded country music (through the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers) so they would have understood this subtext very well. They began recording in the late forties, getting their first notice on the bluegrass circuit when they heard Bill Monroe's "Little Maggie" at a concert and stole into the studio and made a version that beat his record mto the stores. Soon enough, performing on their own with various supporting musicians always known as the Clinch Mountain Boys, they became bluegrass legends on their own merits, which were, in something like an order of importance, Carter Stanley's beautiful lead voice, which many consider the emotive equal of Hank Williams's; the most sonorous harmonies in the genre, highlighted by Ralph's tenor; a remarkable command of traditional material (particularly hymns); and an emphasis on guitar as a lead instrument, as opposed to the usual bluegrass banjo and mandolin. They cut more than 450 masters for a variety of labels, including reworkings of traditional songs like "Man of Constant Sorrow" and "Hills of Roan County," bluegrass hymns like "Gathering Flowers for the Master's Bouquet " and love songs like "How Mountain Girls Can Love" and "Love Me Darling Just Tonight." They were capable of making stuff as hoary as "Rock of Ages" and "Mountain Dew" absolutely thrilling. "Rank Strangers " is the essence of all that made them great, Recorded in a small studio in Jacksonville, Created: September 30, 2021 at 4.16 pm at http://www.lexjansen.com with FPDF 1.81 Page 1 The Heart of Rock and Soul by Dave Marsh Florida, it opens with a stately guitar-mandolin duet, Carter's voice entering to gentle the sound and then stir it up again through the mandolin trills that respond at the end of each mournful line. The harmonies - a gaggle of voices including Ralph Stanley, mandolin player Curley Lambert, and guitarist Ralph Mayo - are as ethereal as the words. Though the approach is folky, this is a true record, including a sort of false ending after the second chorus, in which the guitar picks up the melody just as it's about to die out. But "Rank Strangers " was the end of the line. It was the biggest hit the Stanleys ever had for Starday, and it was their last session for the label. The folk revival came and went, and when it was over, there was little room for music that seemed so ancient in the face of a world of aerospace and psychedelics. When Bob Dylan or former Clinch Mountain Boy Ricky Skaggs pay the Carters tribute today, they're honoring a tradition that has been scattered to the winds as surely as the Rank Stranger himself. Yet "Rank Strangers" is an irreducible part of the sound of its era, a gorgeous example of how the most elementary kinds of American music came to life in recording studios in those postwar years, an elegantly composed metaphor for the psychic stress that people not only endured but used to craft into something approaching art in those days of cultural turmoil. Created: September 30, 2021 at 4.16 pm at http://www.lexjansen.com with FPDF 1.81 Page 2.