The Complete Columbia Stanley Brothers

The Stanley Brothers, along with The Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, and The Blue Sky Boys, were amongst a handful of seminal performers whose recordings would come to define Country music in the twentieth century. They hailed from McClure Virginia, nestled amongst the gorgeous Clinch Mountains whose inhospitable ridges and valleys served as home to countless early country performers. Though the Stanley Brothers cut their first records in the mid ‘40s for the tiny Rich-R-Tone records, the material they would cut for Columbia in the late forties and early fifties, collected here on the exhaustive Complete Columbia Stanley Brothers would introduce them to a wider audience, and these tracks are now remembered as their crowning achievement. Tunes like “Pretty Polly,” “We’ll Be Sweethearts In Heaven,” and “Man Of Constant Sorrow” feature sweet harmonies, claw hammer picked Banjos, and keening country figures, and are amongst the most beloved and most often covered tunes in the classic Country songbook. These recordings are an essential part of any serious collection of Country music.