Pop Music Reviews : Ralph Stanley Pulls Bluegrass Down to Its Roots : Banjo player and his band keep songs in their place--and time--during a satisfying concert at the Coach House.

The sky was clear but the stars were nowhere in sight Monday night when seminal bluegrass musician Ralph Stanley played the Coach House. But even those in the house who only discovered Stanley last year via his star-studded “Saturday Night, Sunday Morning” album didn’t appear to register any disappointment.

Most likely that’s because Stanley and his band played their old-time mountain music the way it’s been played for most of his 41-year career: unadulterated.

The presence of George Jones, Emmylou Harris, Bill Monroe, Dwight Yoakam, Ricky Skaggs, Vince Gill and other high-profile guests certainly contributed much to the scope and popularity of, and undoubtedly the three Grammy nominations for, “Saturday Night, Sunday Morning.” But befitting the humble origins of this music--much of it born centuries ago and passed from generation to generation--the songs, not personalities, remain center stage.

And that was the case on Monday. Ralph and Carter Stanley’s “Wonderful World Outside” didn’t get the achingly soulful reading that George Jones gave opposite Ralph in the studio, but the newest Clinch Mountain Boy, singer-guitarist Kenneth Davis, delivered a forlorn rendition of the prison-cell lament as successful in its own way as the album’s.

Had Stanley not told the audience that Davis has been with the group just seven weeks, one might have thought that he had been an integral part of this almost casually precise ensemble for a decade or more.

At the opposite end of the longevity spectrum, bassist Jack Cooke has been with Stanley for three-plus decades now. The youngest group member, Ralph Stanley II, actually has been touring with his father on and off since he was a toddler. Now a teen-ager, he is appearing with the group more frequently, but he put his age in perspective by announcing he had “taken three weeks off school to come on this tour.”

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Ralph II’s flat, slightly nasal, vibrato-less lead vocals on three songs were far from the most elegant in bluegrass, but they well may be the closest thing to a substitute for Stanley’s brother and longtime partner Carter, who died in 1966.

At 67, Stanley pere’s voice is still robust and sandpaper-raspy as ever. Indeed, he sounded more secure throughout the two-hour, 28-song show than he occasionally does on “Saturday Night.”

Meanwhile, his banjo-playing sounded as fleet as it does on his recordings from 30 years or more ago. If anything has changed, it is his unusual (for the genre) vocal melisma, which he used to great effect, twisting syllables and subtly shifting vocal timbre two and three times in a single note.

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With so many songs as old as the hills, it seemed entirely fitting that Stanley & Son took time to dust off “How Far to Little Rock,” a vaudeville-via-Appalachia string of corny jokes the Stanley Brothers used to tell. If the Stanleys didn’t get royalties from the folks who subsequently invented “Hee Haw,” maybe there’s still time to file a claim.

Fortunately (especially since most of the jokes didn’t have a prayer), the number led directly into one of a small handful of gospel medleys. The “Saturday Night” album is evenly split between secular and spiritual tunes, but Monday’s set emphasized the former. Judging by the reaction, the crowd would have welcomed more gospel numbers like “He Died Upon the Cross.”

With its constantly undulating three-part harmonies from Stanley, Davis and bassist Cooke, it musically underscored the message that nothing in this life remains static for very long. If there is a running theme to Stanley’s brand of bluegrass, it’s the true struggle that these “Mountain Folks,” as one song title describes them, experience every day, and that for all too many, the only prospect for a better life is in the next one.