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Ralph Stanley - 50th Anniversary Collection

(Rebel REB-1996) 1995

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This compilation was issued to commemorate Ralph's 50th anniverary in 1996 as a professional musician. Ralph had first played on the radio with Carter in Roy Sykes' band in October 1946, after having been discharged from the Army the same month.

The CD features 25 tracks from 1971-1990 and has a playing time of 62:22 minutes. There is some duplication with the earlier retrospectives, Classic Bluegrass and Bound To Ride, but most of the tracks, appear on CD here for the first time.

Ten of the 25 tracks are drawn from the Roy Lee Centers era, with seven from Keith Whitley's tenure as lead vocalist, seven with Charlie Sizemore and just one with Ernie Thacker. Whereas the previous two compilations lean more on Ralph's very productive period before Roy Lee was murdered in 1974, this CD gives more of an overall view of the post-Stanley Brothers sound, Ralph developed.

The CD is no longer in print, but second hand copies are still fairly cheap.

The liner notes are by John Wright, author of the 'Traveling The High Way Home' book on Ralph, and include details of a typical recording session, contrasting with the major label extravagances of the '70s.

From the liner notes: "It was all very unspectacular," said former lead singer Charlie Sizemore, reminiscing recently about his own period of recording with Stanley in the late seventies and early eighties. "Ralph would have a work tape of a song. It might be some old preachers singing it or it might be some band singing it or it might be, you know, just a tape that the song was on. And I would type up the lyrics to it and bring them to the rehearsal, so we'd have something to go by. And Ralph did that a fair amount, too. He would type the lyrics or hand write them. He can hand write them so you can read them, since he actually comes from a time when people knew how to write.
"Then at some point he would say, it might be a week or two weks in advance or sometimes it was real close, he would say, 'Boys, we're going to record Wednesday. You guys come up to the house Tuesday night and we'd be there at the dining room table with a little cassette recorder sitting there on top of the table and we'd fiddle around with a song till we thought we had it right. Ralph would generally not do a lot of playing. I think he did this more for the singing. He wanted to hear the singing back, you know?
"So we would just sing and play into that recorder. And then we would listen to it back and if something was out of whack we would know it. Otherwise we would just go on to the next song and we'd go through twelve songs. And then the next morning we'd go in and record."

The artwork makes uses of gold-ink which looks impressive but doesn't scan too well on the computer...