Almost all of the tracks on the years-in-the-making, all-star tribute album Where the Soul Never Dies: Celebrating 80 Years of The Stanley Brothers, due Oct. 16, were recorded live in the studio, but the album’s producers made an exception for Dolly Parton. During a Covid surge circa 2022, Parton was taking no chances, so she recorded her vocal for the traditional song “Bound to Ride” (which the Stanley Brothers helped popularize with a 1964 recording) alone at her own studio. The virtuoso musicians known as the First Ladies of Bluegrass earlier laid down a backing track for her on their own, though you’d never know it by the playful vibrancy of her performance.
Now, two weeks after Parton’s death at age 80, the song is her first posthumous release, taking her back to her deepest mountain roots. (Click here to preorder and presave the album, and check out the single below.)
Where the Soul Never Dies was produced by banjoist Alison Brown and bassist Garry West, the husband-and-wife team behind Compass Records, and timed to the Stanley Brothers’ long-delayed induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Beginning in the mid-1940s, Carter and Ralph Stanley, along with their band, the Clinch Mountain Boys, combined the string-band music of Bill Monroe with the mountain ballads and church singing they learned in southwestern Virginia, plus Carter Family-inspired harmonies.
The album also includes Willie Nelson and Sierra Ferrell on “I’ll Fly Away,” Jamey Johnson and singer-songwriter Shawn Camp on a stark “Rank Strangers to Me,” Dierks Bentley with Della Mae on “How Mountain Girls Can Love,” Jim Lauderdale with the Travelin’ McCourys on “Riding That Midnight Train,” the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band on “Think of What You’ve Done,” Rhiannon Giddens and Dirk Powell on “Little Birdie,” Ralph Stanley II with Tim O’Brien on “Mother No Longer Awaits Me at Home,” and the group I’m With Her performing the hymn-like “Going Up Home to Live in Green Pastures.” Rounding out the album is Steve Martin and Ed Helms’ take on a Stanley Brothers comedy routine.
The producers hope to remind listeners’ of how much country, bluegrass, and Americana owe the Stanley Brothers, who also influenced artists from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen. “I feel like a lot of their stuff is just in the ether,” West says. “It’s just there, and it’s taken for granted. Some of these things are such classics that a lot of people that play these tunes now — because they’re so commonly played in pickup bands — I would bet a lot of the musicians don’t even know the origins of them as Stanley Brothers songs, or at least from their recordings.”
For the Parton track, the First Ladies of Bluegrass — co-producer Brown (banjo), Becky Buller (fiddle), Sierra Hull (mandolin), Missy Raines (bass), and Molly Tuttle (guitar) — rearranged “Bound to Ride,” complete with a newly written eight-bar bridge drawn from an obscure verse. The band worked up the new version while masked around a studio coffee table, and Buller sang a scratch vocal in the band’s best guess at Parton’s key.
“I call it the full Dolly,” West says. “We didn’t know what we would get back, and she really did over-deliver. We were shocked. We couldn’t have gotten anything better.” Parton ended up calling out each of the First Ladies by name during the song, which left the musicians deeply moved.
The idea for the album originated with another label before corporate reshuffling stalled it, and industry veteran J. Tayloe Emery brought the project to Brown and West, whose Compass Records straddles bluegrass and the broader Americana world. The couple produced every track themselves, cutting tracks live at their Nashville headquarters, the former Glaser Brothers studio, where outlaw country got its name. Brown’s own banjo turns up on most of the album. “I’m the best in my price range,” she jokes.
Willie Nelson’s contribution also came together remotely. The country legend initially sent back a track where he simply harmonized with the guide vocal, but when they asked his longtime producer, Buddy Cannon, to take another shot at it, Nelson recorded a strong lead vocal and even a guitar solo. West then decided “there was room for another voice, a different generational take on it,” and recruited Sierra Ferrell to turn the song into a duet.
Then there’s “Pardon Me, Stranger,” in which Steve Martin, Ed Helms, and Brown reinvent “How Far to Little Rock,” the comedy routine the Stanleys performed for years onstage. Brown and Martin each wrote part of the new song, while Martin and Helms came up with new jokes to replace the old-timey ones from the Stanleys’ bit. The finished track features three banjos, with Helms picking alongside Brown and Martin.
The celebration continues Oct. 28, when Brown and West will convene many of the record’s artists — they’re not ready to announce which ones — for a live tribute at Nashville’s CMA Theater. The producers hope the album, the concert, and the induction are just the beginning. “Our hope is that younger players just pick up on the music again and keep it moving forward and keep it alive and keep reinventing it,” West says. “Not being afraid of reinventing it, not being afraid of freshening it up.”
Sharon at Back to the Beginning Oliver Halfin
