Dr. Ralph Stanley passed away on June 23 due to skin cancer at age 89. We honor his memory as we look back three years to this feature which originally ran in the pages of Relix.

He’s played for kings and queens, presidents and first ladies, and on stages all over the world. But when I ask 86-year-old bluegrass legend Dr. Ralph Stanley what stage he’s been the most proud to stand on shortly before the start of his last tour, he doesn’t hesitate to tell me about his Hills Of Home Festival. “We have it where my brother Carter and me grew up, right here in Virginia. I’m real proud to be singing my songs where I was raised.”

The Stanley boys grew up with music in their rural Virginia home, he says. “My dad sang in church all the time. And my mother played the five-string banjo. I got that clawhammer style of playing from her—but I wanted a sound of my o

Ralph went directly from high school into the Army in 1945. When he returned from Germany over a year later, he turned his attention to playing music with his guitar-picking older brother. “Carter was a good songwriter,” says Stanley. “I wrote a few [songs] back then, but not anywhere near what he did.” The brothers built their Clinch Mountain Boys band looking to play “our own style of music.”

During the next 20 years, The Stanley Brothers and The Clinch Mountain Boys played their music and paid their dues, moving from spots on local radio shows to contracts with Columbia Records and, later, to the King label.

Carter died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1966, leaving a shaken Ralph to carry on. When I asked him if he sought advice from anyone in particular, Ralph says, “I knew I wanted to stay with the music and the good Lord let me do it. That’s the man who helped me through.

“I was always lucky in finding good musicians and good singers,” he continues. “And we just kept on going—you either do it or you don’t.”

In the course of his career, Stanley has been bestowed with honors ranging from being named a “Living Legend” by the Library of Congress and earning a National Medal of Arts to being inducted into the Grand Ole Opry and receiving an honorary doctorate of music degree (thus his title) from Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee.

A number of times during our conversation, Stanley turns away from the phone to ask his wife Jimmi, his companion of half of a century, for a specific date or a song name. “I remember doing a lot of things,” says Stanley. “I just can’t recall when I did them. She does, though.”

“That there is proof that a good man needs a good woman at his side, doesn’t he?” I ask.

Stanley laughs, “Ain’t that the truth?”

If it was the loss of his brother that forced Ralph to take on the role of sole bandleader, then it was another “brother” that gave his career a boost in recent years: his involvement in the soundtrack for 2000’s O Brother, Where Art Thou? Stanley’s spur-of-the-moment request to “let me sing it the way I want to sing it” resulted in “O Death”—a chilling and powerful a cappella performance that earned him a Grammy Award in 2002. “That movie introduced me to a different audience and a lot more people that had never paid attention to our music before,” he says. “I got a lot of new fans from that.”

These days, Stanley and his Clinch Mountain Boys still tour, offering crowds heaping helpings of traditional country and bluegrass, infused with that same one-of-a-kind sound that Ralph and Carter Stanley created all those years ago. Though Stanley’s tenor is still amazingly strong, he has turned over most of the banjo duties to someone else—a concession to “this old arthuritis.” Forty-three- year-old Mitchell Van Dyke (who first met Stanley at the age of 10, banjo in hand) mans the five-string, and “plays exactly like me,” says Stanley. The Clinch Mountain Boys lineup also includes Ralph’s grandson Nathan Stanley on rhythm guitar and vocals, James Alan Shelton on lead guitar, Dewey Brown on fiddle and vocals, and Randall Hibbitts on upright bass and vocals.

Toward the end of our conversation, I ask about his final outing, “Man of Constant Sorrow Tour: The Dr.’s Farewell,” which is set to run through December of next year.

“Mr. Stanley, you can’t retire now,” I say. “That’s for the older folks. What would you do?”

“Yeah, well…,” he says, chuckling. “I just figured by that time, I might be a’gettin’ old and ready to quit. But…if somebody would sorta gouge me a little bit, you know, I might extend it.”

He pauses, then speaks again, his voice just a touch softer. “I doubt if I’ll completely quit until I have to. Someday I will—that’s just the way it goes.”