Word: stanleys
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...robotic--Cruise likes to laugh, and he laughs a lot--but he does seem to be remarkably free of the kind of negative emotions that tend to plague mere mortals. And it is playing mere mortals that seems to give him the hardest time. In Eyes Wide Shut, where Stanley Kubrick put a camera on his face to capture inner turmoil, Cruise appears uneasy rather than tormented. He seems most comfortable, onscreen and off, when he is taking action. He describes himself as a pragmatist. He is, above all, organized. "I've always admired the guys who schedule their lives...
...plans to ignore every bit of conventional record-industry sales wisdom. DMZ's first two releases, both Burnett productions, are the Louisiana-laden sound track to Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and a new album--the 186th--from mountain-soul legend and O Brother featured player Ralph Stanley. There will be no large promotional budgets, no appeals to commercial radio. Burnett is convinced these records will sell: "People are much more sophisticated and cultured than they've ever been. I believe that if something's good, people will like...
...Ralph Stanley has been performing the music he calls old-time mountain soul since 1946, but only recently has he started attracting audiences beyond folk and bluegrass festivals. "I've got 4-year-olds wandering up to me now and singing O Death," Stanley says of his star turn on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? sound track. "It's pretty funny...
While his new audience may be a tad precious, Stanley is anything but. Growing up in the Clinch Mountains of Virginia in the 1930s, he learned the banjo from his mother while his brother Carter took guitar lessons from the mailman. The Stanley Brothers were naturals, and soon they were performing live out of a Bristol, Va., radio station and recording for Columbia. At one point, they were the biggest act in Appalachia not named Bill Monroe...
Their popularity belied the fact that the Stanley Brothers were a couple of dark-minded dudes. "I'm the real man of constant sorrow," says Ralph quietly, referring to the O Brother track sung by Dan Tyminski. "Truly, I've been singing that song for almost 60 years." In a typical Stanley Brothers song, good battles evil, loses and sometimes gets to heaven. Carter died of cancer in 1966, but Ralph still sings his version of the American Gothic. On Ralph Stanley, his first album for T Bone Burnett's DMZ Records, Ralph sings a tune called Mathie Grove...