Off the Beaten Path

Have you ever been offered the perfect job in a new location that is slightly off the beaten path?

In 1995 during my surgical pathology fellowship at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, I considered taking a job in Appalachia. I was going to be paid a salary that nearly competed with the one the UT med school was offering, plus the Kentucky practice was tempting me with every other week off.

With that much time on my hands, I figured I’d finally learn how to play banjo. I’d been playing acoustic guitar and wanted some variety.

Certainly the job would’ve gotten me a little closer to my hometown of Louisville, where my dad and two grandmothers lived. Something worried me though: I figured in Appalachia folks would be knocking on my door to deliver babies night and day, cause, well, in the hollers, a doctor’s a doctor, right? Yeah, but this doctor doesn’t know nothing about no birthing and babies, and so I got scared away from the prospect of moving to the hills of eastern Kentucky.

Subsequently and sadly, I never learned to play the banjo. I stayed in Houston and picked up windsurfing. But happily, at night, when it was too dark to windsurf, I hung out in a place where fiddles, mandolins, and banjos made their rotation. That’s where I met a young musician from Appalachia named Troy Campbell.

His band, Loose Diamonds, covered a song “Stonewalls and Steel Bars.” The song is on their Freedom Records release Fresco Fiasco. “Stonewalls” is my second favorite song on the disc that Neil Strauss of the New York Times called one of “ten records from 1996 that haven't received much attention but are worth the extra time it takes to hunt for them, either through mail order or a local independent record store.” I’d never bothered looking at the liner notes to find out who wrote the song. Then this summer at Antone’s, Troy introduced the song as a Stanley Brothers tune.

I read yesterday in the Times that the only remaining Stanley of the Stanley Brothers, Ralph, has written his autobiography, which was due out today. Now even if he’s embellished history a tad, Appalachia's the kind of place where the truth is always going to be stranger than fiction, so this book is likely to be a hoot.

“Stonewalls and steel bars, a love on my mind/
I'm a three-time loser; I'm long gone this time."

C. Stanley, “Stonewalls and Steel Bars”

Like the Times reviewer said: Go find the Loose Diamonds CD. Better yet, catch Loose Diamonds live for the electric version that Ralph Stanley would consider sacrilege.