The Stanley Brothers - Death Is Only A Dream / I Can Tell You The Time

(Rich-R-Tone RRT-446) c1949

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This Rich-R-Tone release seems to be extremely rare as I've only seen one copy come up for sale on ebay in the last 7 years or so. It was recorded at The Stanley Brothers first recording session, along with Mother No Longer Awaits Me At Home and The Girl Behind The Bar (RRT-420), but was held back from release for two years. As Ralph later recalled:- "We come out of the studio feeling sky-high. We'd made our first records. Carter was so excited he grabbed the acetate for 'Death Is Only A Dream' so we could listen to it at home. We wanted to hear for ourselves what we sounded like. We put it on the record player and just about wore it out. Sounded mighty fine to us, our voices coming off a record."

"When we brought the acetate record back to Hobe, he threw a fit. An acetate pressing was all you had to make a master disc to press your records, and now it had the surface noise from our record player's needle diggng into the wax. Hobe was irate; he didn't call his label Rich-R-Tone for nothing, and now he had an acetate with an awful hiss in the background. So Hobe held it from release for a good long while, a few years or so, I believe. You can still hear the surface noise on it today on compact disc."^[1]

From the noise and reduction in fidelity, it sounds like the acetates for both Death Is Only A Dream and I Can Tell You The Time were affected, as they are significantly poorer quality sound wise that the other two songs cut at the first session. It may be that Rich-R-Tone (Jim Hobart Stanton) only released the 78 after the Stanley's had switched from Rich-R-Tone to Columbia in late 1948.

In the liner notes to the Rounder Earliest Recordings CD Ralph recalled: "we got them two tunes 'I Can Tell You The Time' and 'Death Is Only A Dream', we got 'em from old songbooks that we found somewhere."^[2]

Death Is Only A Dream was first published in 1892 and had been recorded by the Reverend Edward W. Clayborn in 1927 & others.^[3] It was also popularised by the Carter Family who recorded it with an additional verse for Border Radio in 1939, and in a 1952 interview is said to have been Hank Williams' favourite song. ^[4] Ralph later cut a version on his seminal Cry From The Cross (with a rehearsal version appearing on the 2xCD set Classic Stanley).

Ralph's comments about learning the songs from a songbook is confirmed, with the Stanley's rendition of 'Death Is Only A Dream' making use of the first three out of four verses of the published version. ^[5]

I Can Tell You The Time was also later re-recorded by Ralph as the title track for his 1985 LP I Can Tell You The Time.

Please get in touch if you have a copy of this 78 & can provide photo's of the labels!

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.

Other artwork / related images:

[1] Ralph Stanley and Eddie Dean's 'Man Of Constant Sorrow' book (p.109).
[2] Liner notes to The Stanley Brothers - Earliest Recordings: The Complete Rich-R-Tone 78s (Rounder 11661-1110-2) 2004. (p.7)
[3] http://www.bluegrassmessengers.com/death-is-only-a-dream--edward-clayborn-1927.aspx
[4] https://gaslightrecords.com/reviews/tracks/reverend-edward-clayborn-death-is-only-a-dream
[5] https://hymnary.org/hymn/SIS1929/page/113