Ralph Stanley

Warming up a crowd for John Edwards yesterday in Lancaster, S.C., the bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley, a slight man with a shock of white hair, stood alone at a microphone on a flag-bedecked auditorium stage. “I’m death I come to take the soul,” he sang, in a husky a capella warble. “Leave the body and leave it cold … O, Death / O, Death / Won’t you spare me over ‘til another year.”

As campaign anthems go, Stanley’s Appalachian dirge—made famous by the “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” soundtrack—wasn’t exactly “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow.” But in these last-gasp days, Edwards is striving to convey an authentic cultural connection to his audiences in South Carolina, and sometimes southerners can get pretty gloomy. Especially these days, as the candidate is telling audiences in a bus tour across the upstate that he’s dubbed his “Back Home, Back Roads Barnstorm.”  read more »