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Ralph Stanley - Songs My Mother Taught Me & More

"Clawhammer" Style Banjo

(Freeland Recording Co. FRC-CD-655) 1997

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This is a reissue of the (Claw Hammer) The Way My Mama Taught Me cassette which Ralph released in the late 80s/early 90s, but with several additional tracks.

Eight of the original ten tracks are instrumentals with Ralph and Curly taking turns to play the melody. Dixie Land and Little Birdie feature vocals by Ralph.

Blue Eyed Verdie is a re-working of 'Black Eyed Suzie', and had also been recorded in 1971 on Curly Ray's Chicken Reel LP.

Track 11, Me And My Buddy is a studio recording that was originally released on David Marshall's Song Of Poverty LP in 1977, with Ralph playing clawhammer. David was one of The Marshall Family, and had several of his songs recorded by Ralph.

Tracks 12 to 18 are live recordings. The CD liner notes just say "The performances on this album date from the early 1970s into the 1990s and include a wide range of musicians who played with Ralph over those years"...

Track 12, a medley starting with I Got A Mule To Ride sounds to me like it features Kenneth Davies, Art Stamper and James Alan Shelton, which would indicate it dates from 1994-95... but I could be wrong.

The energetic and enthusiastic audience on Tracks 13 & 14 suggest they are from the same source, and as Curly Ray's The Farmers Girl was on his 1971 They Cut Down The Old Pine Tree... I'd hazard a guess this might be from McClure 1972 or one of the other early 70s tapes that were used on the Classic Stanley release. The guitar break and harmony vocals on Farmer's Girl sound like the Whitley/Skaggs line-up.

The guitar break on Track 15, Old-Time Pickin' could be Ricky Lee or more likely Junior Blankenship...

Track 18 is from a workshop that took place in the afternoon of the 10th March 1974 show at the Smithsonian Institution. See the Live At The Smithsonian Institution CD entry.

If anyone can identify the other dates/line-ups, please get in touch via the Contact form.

• Ralph Stanley: banjo, vocals
• Curly Ray Cline: fiddle
• Jack Cooke: bass