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DOWN FROM THE MOUNTAIN
OLD-TIME COUNTRY MUSIC


On toward 11 p.m. last Saturday night under the high, ornate Wang Theatre ceiling, Ralph Stanley stood on stage at the head of a congregation several thousand strong, with a couple dozen performers behind him, and led the flock in "Amazing Grace." Stanley was perhaps the best-dressed man in the building; with his dark two-piece suit and tie, his reading glasses on, his curly white hair neatly pressed, hands clasped in front of him, he looked a bit like a television evangelist. He announced the verse in a quick, parched, sharp-cheddar melody, and then the voices behind and in front of him swelled to repeat it as one. And a deep hum rose up as high as the rafters, and you couldn’t tell where it began and where it stopped.

The Down from the Mountain tour, with musicians drawn mostly from the four-times-platinum soundtrack to the Coen Brothers’ film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, offered an initiation into the sacred rites of old-time country music. There were no drums and no amplified instruments. A half-dozen boom mikes were placed at the stage’s center, and the musicians ambled out with their guitars and banjos and mandolins and stood at a respectful distance from the microphones and played and sang. When someone took a solo, he or she got a little bit closer, and the sound ran as clear as a mountain spring. The show clicked along as efficiently as an Opry broadcast: egos checked at the door, the stars, such as they were, sang brief two-song sets. The ensembles mixed and matched, with partners exchanged as easily as at a square dance.

The true stars of the show weren’t the performers but the songs. It’s only fair: the songs — most of them, anyway — have been around a little longer. Introducing O Brother’s unofficial themesong, "A Man of Constant Sorrow," Stanley, the oldest of anyone on stage, noted, "I been singing it for 55 years, and it was old when I learned it." When old Buck White and his daughters Sharon and Cheryl stepped in to play the ’50s-vintage, Kitty Wells–popularized "Making Believe" — punks know it from Social Distortion’s 1991 version — they apologized for playing anything so recent. "Big Rock Candy Mountain" was entrusted to Norman Blake, who looked as if he’d just stepped from behind the ticket counter at some 1920s railroad station; he reappeared later with wife Nancy to sing "I Am Weary," with its stark vision of "a deep and lonely grave."

Death kept knocking at the door, and sunshine kept spilling through the cracks. The Nashville Bluegrass Band began with the post-mortem gloom of Jimmie Rodgers’s "Those Gambler’s Blues" and worked their way up to prison time via Rodgers’s "In the Jailhouse Now," accompanied by Tim Blake Nelson (the film’s Delmar). Emmylou Harris was introduced as "America’s biggest baseball fan," and she had kind words for Fenway, as well as for the small but vibrant pocket of bluegrass and country enthusiasm that has hidden out in these corners since the 1960s. It was here in 1973, she remembered, that she was introduced to Gram Parsons. James Taylor was sitting two rows in front of me, and as Harris played Parsons’s "Hickory Wind," I kept expecting him to burst into flame, like a demon doused with holy water.

Patty Loveless sang of how her coal-mining grandfather slowly carved out his own grave, then smiled as she helped Ralph Stanley sing about beating her to death in a duet of "Pretty Polly." "How you feeling?", Loveless asked Stanley. "Oh, like a cross-cut saw," the older man grinned, looking her up and down. "I reckon it take about two to handle me."

BY CARLY CARIOLI

Issue Date: February 7 - 14, 2002
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