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Clinch Mountain Echo

The Stanley Brothers - Mother No Longer Awaits Me At Home / The Girl Behind The Bar

(Rich-R-Tone RRT-420) 1947


Mother No Longer Awaits Me At Home
The Girl Behind The Bar

The Stanley's debut 78 contains two of Carter's early compositions, and was recorded whilst Ralph was still playing banjo in the 2-finger style. Ralph:- "We did our first recording session for Rich-R-Tone in spring of 1947. It was only a few months after we'd become a working band, but we were ready because we played music just about every waking hour. It was at the studio of WOPI, the rival station of WCYB, right down the street but on the Tennessee side of town. Hobe used WOPI as his home base in Bristol. He had made buddies with the engineer there and the studio had nice acoustics and a disc cutter as good as any you could find."[1]

Ralph:- "Carter had something he'd just wrote. As far as I know, it was his first original song, the first one he done from scratch.[3] It was called 'Mother No Longer Awaits Me At Home'. Now, some songwriters get their ideas from life and things that happen to them, and they put those experiences in their songs. Hank Williams was the best at that, and his songs were all about the troubles in his life and you could hear it in his singing."

"Carter wrote a lot from his experience, too, as a young man out rambling the world to find his fortune, but his gift came more from his imagination. Our mother was alive and well and she always waited for us back home when we'd come in from playing shows to rest up at Smith Ridge. He wrote about what he dreaded the most; the thought of losing our mother was about the worst."

"Leaving the mountains and losing your loved ones; it was a theme he'd come back to again and again."

Mother No Longer Awaits Me At Home was later re-recorded in 1960 for their Sacred Songs From The Hills album. Curiously the original release credits the song writing to Carter, and according to Gary B. Reid his name is on the Dec 4th 1946 copyright application,[2] but on the Starday version it's credited to Ralph, and the BMI has two songwriting entries - one for each of the Brothers!

The flipside, The Girl Behind The Bar has the same melody as Little Glass Of Wine, which they would record for Rich-R-Tone at their next session for the label in late 1947/early 1948.

Ralph:- "The last song we cut that night was another original by Carter, 'The Girl Behind The Bar'. He took the story from an old ballad tradition, but he cut to the chase. The singer meets a girl at a roadside tavern, and they get together for a date outside, where her boyfriend's waiting on 'em and stabs her in the back; he escapes into the night, leaving the singer to take the rap."

Both sides of the 78 can be found on the Earliest Recordings: The Complete Rich-R-Tone 78s CD.

 

For a detailed breakdown and background to the Stanley's session, check Gary B. Reid's The Music Of The Stanley Brothers book, pages 7-9 and 17.

Track:
Title:
Time:
Date:
Original Release:
Guitar:
Banjo:
Fiddle:
Mandolin:
Bass:
A-1
Mother No Longer Awaits Me At Home
02:43
Early/mid 1947
Rich-R-Tone RRT-420 Carter Stanley
Ralph Stanley
Leslie Keith
Pee Wee Lambert
Ray Lambert

R. Stanley / C. Stanley
B-1
The Girl Behind The Bar
02:17
Early/mid 1947
Rich-R-Tone RRT-420 Carter Stanley
Ralph Stanley
Leslie Keith
Pee Wee Lambert
Ray Lambert

C. Stanley

Go To Top Of Page [1] Ralph Stanley and Eddie Dean's 'Man Of Constant Sorrow' book (p. 106, 108-109)
[2] Gary B. Reid's book 'The Music Of The Stanley Brothers' (p. 9)
[3] In the Mike Seeger 1966 interview, Carter mentions that the first song he wrote was whilst he was in the Army, but he couldn't recall the title. You can hear the interview on youtube: https://youtu.be/YikIUZandsA. I've also attempted to clean some of the noise and you can download an MP3 of the result here (it's saved as a 67Mb zip file). At around the 43:04 min mark Mike asks Carter when he wrote his first song. Carter replies:- "When I was in the Army in Fort Myers, Florida."