My mother’s gospel quartet named in the Library of Congress

Over the past year, I’ve been talking back and forth with a man named David Johnson, who has been doing research on the song “Rank Stranger” as performed by the Stanley Brothers. He was doing this research for an article he planned to submit to the Library of Congress. He was interested in understanding where the Stanley Brothers first heard the song and how they may have rearranged it to fit their own unique style. His research led him to me. Why? Because the Stanley brothers first heard the song performed on the radio in Bristol, Virginia by my mother, Wilda Dillon Combs and her gospel group, the Willow Branch Quartet.

As Ralph Stanley explained in his autobiography: “I remember back in the fifties, we heard a gospel group called the Willow Branch Quartet. They played around the Bristol area… We were driving to a show, listening to the radio, when we heard the Willow Branch Quartet doing a song called “Rank Stranger.” There was something there that grabbed Carter and me. We’d never heard that term “rank stranger” before. The song was all about feeling a stranger in this world, even with your own family and friends and neighbors, and how the next world would make all that right… I reckon it became the most popular song the Stanley Brothers ever sung” (Ralph Stanley, Man of Constant Sorrow: My Life and Times, Penguin Books, 2009, p. 384).

This photo of the sheet music above came out of the Willow Branch Quartet’s “song notebook.” My maternal grandmother, Ettie Dillon, who was the group’s alto singer, actually hole-punched their sheet music and put them in the group’s notebook. She even numbered them, so the songs were easily retrieved. She wrote the number “2” on the song “Rank Strangers to Me,” as writer, Albert Brumley, had originally titled the song.

Mr. Johnson has now completed his essay and it can be found on the Library of Congress website. The article says it was added in 2008, but that was when the Rank Stranger song was first added. Mr. Johnson actually added the article that mentions the Willow Branch Quartet in December 2020. He had never heard of the Willow Branch Quartet before, but after I sent him a CD that included their version of “Rank Strangers,” he has become an avid fan.

Here’s the link to his essay. You’ll notice how seriously he took the WBQ’s influence on the Stanley Brothers version: https://www.loc.gov/…/documents/Rank-Stranger_Johnson.pdf

If you’d like to read more about the Willow Branch Quartet and watch a video I’ve put together with the audio from their 78 recording of “Rank Strangers,” then follow this link to an earlier blog I wrote: https://www.garycombs.org/blog/2016/01/rank-strangers.html