“On Route 23 down in eastern Kentucky…”

So begins the mournful song written by Jack Adkins and Buddy Dee, and recorded by the Stanley Brothers in February 1958 at Radio WCYB in Bristol, VA. No School Bus In Heaven was the last official studio recording that Carter and Ralph would make for the Mercury label.

It relates the tragic story of a tragedy which took place 50 years ago in Floyd County, Kentucky, wherein 26 children and the driver of the bus in which they were traveling lost their lives when the bus plunged into the Big Sandy River

“These little school children have gone on to glory,” but they left behind heart-broken parents, families and friends. The children and the bereaved are remembered in a gut-wrenching article in the Lexington Herald-Leader.

Survivors and those who lost loved ones rarely mention what happened in 1958. They spend most days at home, passing one another at the post office or the grocery store. They sit together in church, bonded by their silent grief and heavy hearts.

But it is a story the whole town knows well. Pictures of those who drowned still hang in local restaurants, schoolhouses and funeral homes.

“People don’t talk about it much. It’s too painful to talk about,” said Orville Ousley, 85, who lost one of his three sons in the accident. “When the anniversary comes each year, we avoid each other and we hide in our homes.”

Read the full piece from the Herald-Leader online.

Rebel Records has recently announced news of the forthcoming release on March 25 of a various Artists collection entitled Best Loved Bluegrass: 20 All-Time Favorites (REB-8004).

The 20 song anthology embraces some of the classic songs in bluegrass music from some of the great acts in the business (track listing below).

So many of the songs here are inextricably linked with the Rebel catalogue; Bringing Mary Home, Fox On The Run and Atlanta Is Burning being three notable examples. These are signature songs as is Love Of The Mountains. There are the tour de force pieces like Rice’s Nine Pound Hammer and JD Crowe’s Train 45 also.

Most of the material is direct from the Rebel vaults, whereas some came to them indirectly, such as - and I speculate here - the Lilly Brothers track, which was originally recorded for Event Records in 1956 or 1957 and later appeared on a County LP. It was subsequently reissued on a Rebel CD (1688). Others in this category are Little Rosewood Casket - Don Reno & Red Smiley (from a Wango LP), Footprints In The Snow - Mac Wiseman (Vetco material, perhaps), Poor Ellen Smith - Ted Lundy & the Southern Mountain Boys (County), Pig In A Pen - Stanley Brothers (Wango) and Lonesome Road Blues - Larry Richardson & Happy Smith (County).

There’s lots of fine traditional material here, which is typical of this series, and which, apparently, has been doing very well for Rebel. Judging by the titles and the artists listed, the potential for this set to match its predecessors is great.

For those who have a long-time interest in bluegrass music the songs and the respective bands speak for themselves; for newcomers this album is a good place to start investigating the Rebel catalogue.

Thanks must be made to Gary Reid for sharing his thoughts on some aspects of this collection.

Complete track list… (more…)

Veteran fiddle and mandolin player Vernon Derrick passed away on Friday morning (1/4) at the age of 74.

He performed with both The Stanley Brothers and Jimmy Martin during the 1960s after gaining some exposure during a brief stint with Flatt & Scruggs. A memorable contribution to the bluegrass repertoire is his instrumental Arab Bounce, originally recorded by Martin and The Sunny Mountain Boys in 1970, and re-cut dozens of times by other artists since.

Country music came calling as well, and Vernon spent time with artists as varied as Lefty Frizzell, Merle Travis and George Morgan to Hank Williams, Jr. It was with Hank Jr. that Derrick saw his greatest prominence, playing fiddle on #1 hits All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down and Country Boy Can Survive.

Vernon had been in poor health this past few years, and suffered from both renal and congestive heart failure. He underwent surgery in December and though he came home briefly after Christmas, he was hospitalized again earlier in the week.

Funeral arrangements can be found on The Arab Tribune web site, which also published a comprehensive overview of Vernon Derrick’s career some time ago.

Another pioneer lost…

Our UK correspondent, Richard F Thompson, shares this news.

Forty years before the ‘O Brother/Down From The Mountain’ tour, an earlier group of like-minded musicians took some Appalachian music on the road. Thankfully, some of the music performed by the small band of minstrels that toured Europe under the title of the American Folk & Country Festival was recorded for posterity.

I believe that there have been taped copies of these shows in circulation, but now Bear Family Records has announced the release of a 2-CD set of recordings from those dates in March 1966. The collection, entitled American Folk & Country Music Festival [Bear Family BCD 16849 BK] comprises 41 tracks, packaged in an LP-size box, along with a 76-page hardcover book that features the usual treasure trove of photos and memorabilia.

Here’s what the Bear Family website has to say about their recent release …….

It was 1966, and the success of the American Folk & Blues festivals in Europe led to the Festival of American Country Music. But this wasn’t slick Nashville music, it was old time, Cajun, bluegrass, and folk music with deep roots in the mountains and swamps of America’s rural South. The artists included The Stanley Brothers (just a few months before Carter Stanley’s death), Roscoe Holcomb, The New Lost City Ramblers, Cyp Landreneau’s Cajun Band, and Cousin Emmy. Together, they offer a fascinating glimpse of early American music played with heart and soul. All the artists were still in peak form and gave European audiences their first taste of this side of American traditional music. It was a historic tour, and decades ahead of its time. In 2000-2002, the performers whose music was heard in ‘O Brother Where Art Thou’ staged a tour called ‘Down From The Mountain.’ The idea was the same as the Festival of American Country Music in 1966, except that the music heard in the Festival of American Country Music was truly down from the mountain (just one artist was on both tours: Ralph Stanley).

The collection is highlighted by detailed reminiscences by Mike Seeger, Tracy Schwarz, and John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers, all of whom could appreciate the music both as fans and performers.

One member, John Cohen shares this interesting observation ……

“For bluegrass listeners, the set shows how Carter Stanley sounded and looked at the end of his life, and also makes the firm connection between Roscoe Holcomb and Ralph Stanley. For me, Roscoe’s devotion to the Old Baptist unaccompanied singing reawakened something in Ralph, which emerged so many years later in ‘O Brother Where Art Thou’. Musically and stylistically it’s all there… predicting what eventually happened. Some of Roscoe’s performances are him at his best.”

The book also includes original photos from John Cohen, Klaus-Rüdiger Müller, Lillies Ohlsson, Reinhard Pietsch, and Reinald Schumann.

A full, detailed track listing can be found on the Bear Family web site.

Our friends at WorldwideBluegrass.com are promoting a pair of petition drives to get two of bluegrass music’s pioneers into the Country Music Hall Of Fame. Both Flatt & Scruggs and Bill Monroe have been inducted, but WWB is hoping to see The Stanley Brothers and The Osborne Brothers inducted as well.

You can add your name and address online, and the folks at WWB will send the petitions on to the Hall Of Fame once they receive 10,000 signatures on each.

The Osborne Brothers petition can be found here, and The Stanley Brothers here.

This post is a contribution from Richard Thompson, a founding member of the British Bluegrass Music Association, and a semi-regular correspondent and contributor for The Bluegrass Blog. He is also a longstanding contributor to British Bluegrass News, a quarterly print publication where he also briefly served as editor.

Time-Life will release a three-CD boxed set from the Stanley Brothers in April. The Definitive Collection: 1947-1966 marks the 60th anniversary of the first recordings that Carter and Ralph Stanley did together and includes three previously unreleased tracks and three songs never before available on a CD. Highlights include The White Dove, Rank Strangers, How Mountain Girls Can Love, Pretty Polly and O Death. The project includes a special introduction by Ricky Skaggs and a biographical essay written by historian Gary Reid of Copper Creek Records, and also features many rare photos.

The Definitive Collection: 1947-1966 comprises 60 tracks in all. The previously unreleased cuts are all live recordings: Will You Be Loving Another Man - ca. 1955 - is from a performance at Bean Blossom, Indiana, Sugar Coated Love was recorded on July 4, 1961, at Oak Leaf Park in Luray, Virginia, and is a Carter Stanley/Bill Monroe duet and Tell Me Why My Daddy Don’t Come Home is from an August 1962 personal appearance at the Ash Grove in Hollywood, California.

The recordings new to CD include Hide Ye In The Blood, from the Wango archives, and Dust on the Bible from the Cabin Creek LP (CC 203). The booklet comprises 39 pages, with lots of photographs, including several that have never been published before.

Gary Reid shared a few comments about this new box set, and how he came to be involved.

“I had done some previous work with Time-Life in helping to put together their Classic Bluegrass Collection, an 8-CD/120 song collection that is being sold on half-hour infomercials on various TV stations. While working on that project, my point man at Time-Life, Joe Sasfy, told me of the label’s desire to do a career retrospective on the music of the Stanley Brothers.

While there have been boxed set collections on the music of Carter and Ralph, they have tended to document a certain era of their career (ie, the Mercury years, or the Starday and King years). This is the first collection to feature a complete overview from start to finish. In picking the tunes, we obviously wanted to get the essential tracks (ie, The White Dove, The Fields Have Turned Brown, Angel Band, Man of Constant Sorrow, etc.) but we also wanted to get some obscure things that even the most die-hard Stanley collectors wouldn’t have.”

Gary also mentioned that Ralph Stanley is aware of this retrospective, but had no hand in selecting the songs or photos.

Time-Life shows April 3, 2007 as the release date, and it will be available on their web site, and surely from other bluegrass resellers as well.

Rebel Records has reissued two Ralph Stanley albums as download only releases on Apple’s iTunes Music Store. Both were originally released in the mid 1970s, during what is widely viewed as the hey day of Dr. Ralph’s post-Carter era, when the band included Keith Whitley, Curly Ray Cline and Jack Cooke.

The first of the two digital reissues is the all-Gospel, Let Me Rest On A Peaceful Mountain, which first came out in 1975, and which features some of the finest a cappella “mountain style” harmony you’ll ever find. The other, Old Home Place, was originally released the following year and includes Whitley singing the classic Sharecropper’s Son, and the cut of If That’s The Way You Feel, later covered (brilliantly) by Ricky Skaggs during his country period.

The album title links above will take you into the iTunes Music Store, but you must have a copy of iTunes software installed on your computer in order to hear the audio samples, or purchase these fine recordings. These two Rebel reissues are only available from iTunes.

We congratulate Rebel Records for making these wonderful albums available again, and hope to see this trend continue. There is a wealth of bluegrass music, out of print from an original LP release, which has never found its way onto CD. Sometimes individual tracks make it into box sets and collections, but we see this option of re-releasing them in toto, but for download only, as an excellent alternative - and one we hope to see repeated many times.