Mountain Music museum joins Crooked Road trail
CLINTWOOD, Va. -- The crowd surrounded the old man in the white Stetson hat. They came with strips of paper for autographs, and gray-haired women blushed like schoolgirls at the singer who's brought so much attention to this quiet mountain town.
Ralph Stanley, 77, has spent a lifetime telling the world in a sorrowful whisper about the hardscrabble community where he was born. In Dickenson County, where he still lives, Stanley is no less than a folk hero.
These days, the community needs him now more than ever. With the region's economy faltering, community leaders have pinned their hopes for prosperity to a $1.4 million museum dedicated to Stanley, scheduled to open this fall.
The Ralph Stanley Museum and Traditional Mountain Music Center will be added to the Crooked Road Heritage Trail, which showcases Virginia's Appalachian culture by linking bluegrass music venues.
The Crooked Road sites include the town of Floyd, with its Friday-night bluegrass jamborees; the Old Fiddler's Convention in Galax; the Blue Ridge Music Center in Grayson County; and the Birthplace of Country Music Alliance Museum in Bristol, a city that boasts the first professional recordings of country music.
The heritage trail then passes through the Carter Family Fold in Hiltons, home of the first family of country music. Its planned end will be at Stanley's museum in Clintwood, housed in a stately columned mansion.
Stanley, still a country gentleman who communicates under a heap of courtesy and self-deprecation, gives a quick smile at the idea of building a monument to himself.
"Most museums I know of are for people who are already gone," he says. "I'm just glad I can build this when I can still see it."
His museum will include old banjos and suits and other memorabilia donated by Stanley and members of his band. Designers are planning listening stations built into the wall that are made to look like a fretboard on a banjo.
Stanley has been in the music business for 58 years and he's won dozens of awards, including three Grammys. But he's a rarity in bluegrass because he never left for Nashville when his career started to take off.
Bluegrass music is experiencing a revival of sorts, and Stanley and others credit the 2001 Coen Brothers movie "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?"
Geneva O'Quinn, who heads the regional tourism agency, says attendance at the region's outdoors and cultural sites has increased, and hotel stays are up 25 percent from 2000 to 2003.
Organizers of the museum hope it will attract some of those tourists -- and their dollars.
"This is the biggest thing that's ever happened in Clintwood," Mayor Donald Baker says of the planned museum. "Maybe now we can get people to come and invest here. We'd like one of the chain motels and maybe a nice restaurant."
The mountain communities along the Kentucky-Virginia state line have long been among the state's most poverty-stricken. Dickenson County has had a double-digit unemployment rate every year except one since 1993.
Its economy took another hit in February when online travel agency Travelocity announced it would cut 250 jobs at a call center and send the work to India.
On a recent night in his hometown, a few hours before he was to play for his friends and neighbors, Stanley stands among the old banjos and boxes of memorabilia he is donating to the museum, picking through black-and-white photos of younger men with darker hair.
"I used to be fair-looking," Stanley says, pausing to stare at an old photograph of himself and Jack Cooke, his one-time bass player. "I think it's time for me, with my age and everything, it's time to look back and remember all of this."
A small man with sharp blue eyes and wavy white hair that cascades to the back of his head, Stanley grew up in the hills around Clintwood in a community one would expect for a bluegrass legend.
He learned to sing in a little white Baptist church with homemade benches. The pastor discouraged instruments in church, but Ralph and his older brother Carter took up the banjo and guitar anyway, playing some of their first songs at the high school in town.
"When I was in high school, I sort of got the idea that I wanted to make a veterinarian," Stanley remembers. "But my aunt -- she lived about a mile from where I was raised -- she had a sow and she also had an old-time banjo. She gave me a choice, now. She wanted five dollars for the banjo, and she wanted five dollars for the sow pig, so I could raise hogs. I couldn't afford but one of them.
"I says I believe I'll take that banjo."
Stanley has recorded hundreds of albums since then, receiving most of his recent acclaim by singing acapella, the way he once did in church.
"He's the embodiment of things that we hold dear," says Herb E. Smith, a Kentucky filmmaker who produced a video biography of Stanley in 2001. "He stayed in the community and the same time presented our cultural in a positive way externally. That's a rare combination."
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If You Go: Crooked Road Heritage Trail
