***1/2 Ralph Stanley

SHORT LIFE OF TROUBLE

(Rebel)

"Short Life of Trouble" could well be the motto of fatalistic early bluegrass, the doom-drenched, staunchly acoustic style Stanley has clung to through six decades. At age 70, he now shares banjo work with Steve Sparkman, but Steve's primitive clawhammer approach closely resembles Ralph's own, which he learned from his mother in the southwestern Virginia mountains that also spawned the Carter Family.

With a haunting tenor that sounds hewn from the rocks, lonesome Ralph mourns, "I'm nobody's darling on Earth," foreshadowing his young disciple Gillian Welch's recent "Orphan Girl." As fiddle and mandolin dash through "Nine Pound Hammer" the way Leadbelly's blues variant never did, this dramatic CD confirms bluegrass's reputation as folk music in overdrive. Meanwhile, in "Rose Conley" the eternal perdition of bluegrass's fundamentalist Protestant roots chills to the bone -- the same feeling that courses through Rose's condemned lover-turned-slayer as he stares toward Hell.

-- Bruce Sylvester

(Ralph Stanley and his Clinch Mountain Boys play the Museum of Our National Heritage, 33 Marrett Road [Route 2A], Lexington, this Sunday, March 2, at 3 p.m. Call 782-2251.)