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If you ran into Rick Stanley riding down the blacktop on his vintage '52 Ford 8N tractor, you would probably imagine all the stereotypical salt-of-the-earth, pioneer-stock sort of stuff that most of us project on farmers and rural folks as a whole.
Disguised as a mild-mannered farmer, this Boston folky from the sixties was transplanted to rural Iowa 20 years ago. He loves the land and chasing his ponies around on his tractor with his faithful dog, Sharpie, or roaming the creek for fallen trees to use for his harps or his stove. To his neighbors, he's quite a curiosity.
Since 1992, Rick Stanley, singer/songwriter/guitarist/harper and custom folk harpmaker, has been working and playing on his farm in the rolling woodland hills of Van Buren County. Rick has a rather colorful past and present, and with the recent release of his new CD, The Ballad of Bothwell and Marie, it looks like his future might eclipse both.
The new album is absolutely beautiful. Rick's voice has aged like fine wine--rich, deep, and subtle, with a power of emotional expression that comes from an intimate place of natural innocence beyond ego and showmanship. I say this with sincerity: at a recent performance, more than one of his songs brought tears to my eyes, and a glance around the audience found that I wasn't alone. In concert he's communicating with the audience. Eyes closed or fixed on his harp, he virtually tunes in to your heart and "softly sings" from the depths of his soul.
I visited his farm, listened to all his CDs, and even made the pilgrimage to Wisconsin to see him in action. Rick's two concerts at Milwaukee's Irishfest, the largest Celtic music festival in the world, were a revelation. The ballads and aires are the most beautiful and most ancient of the Celtic music, and not surprisingly, Rick filled the hall with a very appreciative audience.
A few weeks later, Rick appeared as the main attraction at the annual "All Things Scottish--Celticfest" in Cedar Rapids. It had been pouring rain the entire day, and when Rick took the stage, the rain stopped. Fine, I thought, now we can stand out in front and watch the performance instead of cowering underneath the vendor's tents.
Rick sang and played in the cold wind with that subtle smile he sometimes gets when he's really feeling at home and locked into a song, where every nuance of the harp and voice seem to be playing him. Barb Horak, who had arranged for Rick to perform, came up and said, "What was that? Did you see everyone as if transfixed? He started singing and the rain stopped, he stopped singing and it started again, the sun even came out during his most moving song!" She laughed and joined the crowd around Rick's wife, Claudine, busy selling his CDs.
It's hard to believe that his relatively new instrument of choice, the Celtic harp, isn't part of his body; in performance he looks more comfortable wrapped around it than he does playing his guitar after a lifetime of devotion to the instrument. In just a few short years Rick has created his own style of harping to accompany his original and traditional ballads; it's not the usual classical harp style of playing chords with glissandos and piano chords and ornamentation that almost every harp teacher in the world seems to pass on to every student.
Having studied with some of the best Irish and Scottish folk harpers, Rick has combined the traditional Celtic picking styles with his 40 years of folk guitar, blues, flamenco, travis, and innumerable other influences. The end result is a very rhythmic style that moves and weaves with constantly changing harmonies and subtle, pulsing syncopation that dances in the spaces around his voice.
The Ballad of Bothwell and Marie, Rick's most recent CD and his first with harp, was recorded this year in the studio just like a live concert. Rick explained, "It's easier to record the guitar or harp part and then overdub the voice on a separate track so that you have more room to play with the EQ and Reverb as well as concentrate more intensely on the part you're playing or singing."
But he couldn't seem to separate the two instruments. The voice depended so much on the subtle rhythms of the harp for its cues, and what he played on the harp depended entirely on the vocal spaces in and around the rhythm. It was something that he hadn't anticipated, since most of his previous recordings were done the way his producers, Terry Melcher, at Columbia Records, had recorded The Byrds and Henry Louie, at A&M Records, had recorded Joni Mitchell.
"They pretty much made the rules," Rick said. Of course, he added Irish whistle, harmonium, guitar, and bodhran drum later but only if he felt they would add something special to the song. Master cellist Daniel Sperry added his genius to several of the songs, and recording engineer and computer master Steven Jefferies, of Get Your Music Out.com., labored tirelessly behind the scenes.
The title concept of the new CD, The Ballad of Bothwell and Marie, is based on the historical Marie Queen of Scots and her third husband, Lord Bothwell. Several songs on the album were written by Rick after he and his wife Claudine traveled to Scotland and visited every castle and haunt of the ill-fated couple, taking time to visit the places where history was made and to research primary documents and ancient texts to get to the truth.
The title song is really an exclamation of the truth of what happened to these two hopeless romantics in a time when everyone around them was on the payroll of the enemy. -- Ian MacGregor
