Stanley’s Not Resting on His Laurels : Pop music: The acclaimed artist never goes on autopilot, electing instead to play it ‘the way I feel.’ He’ll be the first bluegrass headliner in Coach House history.

Capturing a mass audience with a bluegrass song may be only slightly less difficult than getting a Hatfield to say something nice about a McCoy. But it is not impossible.

Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs did it in 1962 with their TV theme from “The Beverly Hillbillies,” and Eric Weissberg and Steve Mandell scored in 1972 with “Dueling Banjos,” from the film “Deliverance.”

Ralph Stanley endorses those hits and says they helped recruit a new audience for what he calls “the old-time songs . . . the older things.”

But Stanley says he has never been tempted to recast his own style in a way that might cater to mass tastes. A leading figure in bluegrass music since 1946, when he and his older brother, Carter, began singing and playing on the radio for a 1,000-watt station on the Tennessee-Virginia border, Stanley prefers the older things.

“I never wanted to branch out into anything else,” the 67-year-old banjo player and bandleader said over the phone recently. “I’d just rather do it the way I feel it, and keep it that way.”

Stanley’s music is as raw and unvarnished in its way as anything a grunge band could come up with. As a reflection of a poverty-stricken place--the mountainous coal-mining country of southwestern Virginia--it is as tied to its slice of turf as any of the ghetto narratives of today’s rap music.

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As an instrumentalist, Stanley is simple and direct. His singing, high-pitched and gnarled, sounds like some eerie echo from the past that refused to decay and kept on resonating into the present.

Stanley spoke from Nashville as he prepared to fly West for a two-week tour that brings him and his band, the Clinch Mountain Boys, to McCabe’s in Santa Monica on Sunday and to the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano on Monday (Stanley will be the first bluegrass headliner in the Coach House’s eight-year history).

Country music’s hub isn’t really Stanley country. He still lives outside Coeburn, Va., in the same county where he grew up listening to the radio and absorbing the string-band music of the Carter Family and Bill Monroe.

While Stanley sees no need to modify his music to capture the ear of a mass public, his most recent album, the 1993 double-CD collection, “Saturday Night & Sunday Morning,” accomplishes a crossover in reverse. It finds such mass-audience country stars as Dwight Yoakam, Vince Gill, Patty Loveless, Emmylou Harris and George Jones joining with Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys to play music the old way.

The album draws heavily on Stanley’s past for its equal balance of secular and religious songs. One disc, “Saturday Night,” is full of romance, heartbreak and murderous passion.

The other, “Sunday Morning,” contains some of the least-blithe spiritual music you’ll ever hear. Stanley doesn’t sing of comfortable people basking joyfully in the thought of heaven-to-come, but of folks for whom the here-and-now brings such hard trials and such severe temptations that perhaps only the prospect of a heavenly reward can keep them slogging on.

Stanley says that “Saturday Night & Sunday Morning,” which received three Grammy Award nominations, is the most popular release of his career.

“Ordinarily, a big record in bluegrass would (sell) 30,000 pieces,” said Dick Freeland, the record producer and label owner who worked with Stanley for 20 years in the ‘60s and ‘70s, then came out of retirement to put out the two most recent Stanley albums on his West Virginia-based Freeland Recording Co. label.

“Saturday Night & Sunday Morning” has sold more than 100,000 copies, Freeland said.

Stanley says he feels honored that some of country’s biggest names would show such esteem for his music and the tradition it exemplifies. But he sounds most pleased that his 16-year-old son, Ralph II, is upholding the Stanley bluegrass tradition.

“During the summer, he’s been going on tour with me since he was 7 or 8 years old,” Stanley said. For the past three years, Ralph II has stepped up to sing and play guitar on a few songs during his father’s sets.

“He likes the old-time bluegrass; it’s what he listens to and what he’s got on his mind,” Stanley said. “He wants to continue on in it, so I want to get him all the exposure I can.”

Ralph II hasn’t followed his father in every respect.

“No, he doesn’t play the banjo,” Stanley said. “When he was 6 or 7 years old, he started to play the guitar. He said the banjo was too heavy for him. He thought he might do it later, but he never has. I’d like him to play the banjo, but if he likes the guitar, that’s OK with me.”

Stanley got his early banjo lessons from his mother. According to an oft-told tale, when he was about 12 years old, his mother offered him a choice: She had $5 to spend for a gift, and he could have a banjo or a pig. Stanley loved animals and was enthusiastic about the agricultural programs he was enrolled in at school. But he took the banjo.

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He began to play it professionally in 1946, when he was discharged from the Army after a two-year hitch. Immediately upon returning home, he and Carter formed a group and began looking for playing opportunities. They landed a gig on WCYB radio in Bristol, Va.

Their noon-hour show, “Farm and Fun Time,” lasted 12 years. It served as a launching pad for live performances within the station’s five-state reach and led to a recording deal with Columbia Records.

Bill Monroe, the mandolin player who is acknowledged as the founder of bluegrass music, was also on Columbia Records, but he evidently was not pleased that the label would sign a second bluegrass act.

“The Columbia people told us if they signed the Stanley Brothers he would leave the label, and he did,” Stanley recalled. “Way back in the early days there was a bit of jealousy, but it didn’t amount to too much. Everybody got over it and patched it up.”

Monroe, now 82, is among Stanley’s guests on “Saturday Night & Sunday Morning,” and the banjo player says they are “the best of friends. I visited him a week ago (at Monroe’s home outside of Nashville). He had an accident and broke his hip. He’s walking on a walker, and he told me he’d be able to get out again and play in May.”

Carter Stanley was the Stanley Brothers’ primary singer and songwriter. After his death in 1966, Ralph began a tradition of breaking in young singer-guitarists who would later go on to significant careers of their own in country or bluegrass. Ricky Skaggs and the late Keith Whitley were among those who served hitches as Clinch Mountain Boys.

The latest version of the band features veteran bassist Jack Cooke, fiddler Art Stamper, who first played with Stanley in the 1950s, and two younger players: lead guitarist James Shelton and singer-guitarist Kenneth Davis. Stanley said that Davis, 32, had been trying to land a spot in his band for 10 years before a slot recently opened.

Stanley says he seldom has been at a loss when it comes to finding musicians.

“Most of the time people know when I need somebody, and most of the time there’s always somebody a-waiting,” he said. “The first thing I look at is character. I want to know if he drinks or whatever. I don’t care how good he might be . . . if he has bad faults, I don’t want him.”

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Next month, Stanley plans to record another album, this one a reunion with alumni of the Clinch Mountain Boys. Meanwhile, there is more demand for his services than he can supply: “I’ve turned down over 20 bluegrass festivals for ’94. There aren’t enough weekends to play them.”

One festival he never misses is the Memorial Day weekend event he has staged for the past 24 years on the site where he was raised. Stanley established the festival as a memorial to his brother, Carter. The past two years, Jeanie Stanley, Carter’s 30-year-old daughter and an aspiring bluegrass performer, has been on the bill.

Stanley says he has cut back his performing schedule a bit, but retirement isn’t in the offing.

“I want to go on as long as I can do it justice and stand the pressure,” he said. “The most pressure is traveling from place to place. I don’t mind it after I get there. It’s a pleasure to think you’re pleasing people.”

* Ralph Stanley & the Clinch Mountain Boys play Monday at 8 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. $15. (714) 496-8930.