Kentucky Traveler

by Ricky Skaggs

  That’s how I first met Keith Whitley, and we got to be great friends. Me and Keith hit it off right from the start. It really clicked that quick. Some things happen that way. You feel it in your bones, and you just know. There was a bond between us. We stayed that way from then on, right up until the day he died.

  It turned out that Keith lived only thirty miles or so down Route 32, in Sandy Hook, a little crossroads just over the line in Elliott County. The more we talked, the more we realized how much we had in common. He was a child prodigy, too. He was only four when he started playing music in public. That’s when he won his first talent show, singing a Marty Robbins song in a cowboy outfit. By eight he was a guest on the Buddy Starcher TV show in Charleston, West Virginia, and now he had a band with his brother Dwight, the older boy I’d seen playing banjo.

  I guess it shows how closed off and isolated we were out in the country back then. Brushy Creek was only a half hour away by car from Keith’s place, door to door, but it could have been halfway around the world. I’d never met Keith, and I’d never heard of the East Kentucky Mountain Boys. He’d never heard of me or the Skaggs Family band, either. And here we were singing like long-lost brothers. He loved the fact that he now had a like-minded friend who knew the old songs. And when he found out I played mandolin, too, he got even more fired up.

  Well, we didn’t waste any time. I invited Keith and Dwight over to my house that weekend. We figured, hey, we sung pretty good together, so let’s get to know each other and see what happens. Mom fixed supper, and we had a great time picking and singing, with Dad adding his guitar to our little band.

  The next weekend, I went over to Keith’s house in Sandy Hook and had supper with the Whitleys. They were a lot like our family, even down to the home-cooked meals. I loved his mom, Faye, and his dad, Elmer. Miss Faye sure knew how to cook. We were sitting at the dinner table, and I was on my best behavior. When you are eating supper at someone else’s house for the first time, you don’t say much unless you’re spoken to first.

  Well, I took one bite of the green beans, and I just blurted out, “Oh, gosh, Miss Faye, you cook with lard just like my mama!” I didn’t mean nothing by it, really, it just came out. I was worried maybe I’d said something that could offend. Miss Faye didn’t mind a bit, and in fact she thought it was funny and started laughing. “I sure do, honey,” she said. “And I’m glad to hear you like it.” I was so relieved she took what I said in the right way, and it really made me feel welcome.

  Meeting Keith was a milestone for a lot of reasons. One of the most important was it sent me back to my first love, the mandolin. I’d kind of put it away and concentrated on fiddle for a few years, but the mandolin was key to the sound me and Keith wanted to create. It was the sound the Stanley Brothers had in the early days, when Pee Wee Lambert played mandolin in their band.

  With the singing, we had a blend that came natural. Keith sang lower than me in a baritone, and he took lead vocals and played rhythm guitar. I sung real high back then, as much as I’d grown, so I took tenor harmonies and played mandolin. When we did the high trio songs, Keith’s brother Dwight would join in, and I’d jump up to the high tenor.

  The Stanleys played with an old-time lonesome sound, more pure mountain style. Me and Keith were just drawn to that lonesomeness. The way Carter and Ralph sang was the highest expression of what was already inside us. We wanted to make music that was pure and beautiful, too. When you’re at an impressionable age like me and Keith were, you get fixated on a sound. That’s the way you learn music and hone your skills, by imitating the old masters and learning from them. And for us, it was Bill Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs, and, most of all, the Stanley Brothers.

  There was a lot of material for us to learn, ’cause I’d hit the jackpot with a stash of Stanley Brothers records. Not long before our family had left Columbus to come back to Kentucky, I’d gone to a record store with my dad. This store had a bunch of albums of reissued early Stanley Brothers records I didn’t even know existed. I went through the stack like I’d struck pirate’s gold, and I asked Dad if he’d let me get the ones I didn’t have. There must have been near a dozen, and back then records were about five bucks apiece.

  Dad didn’t say a word. He pulled from his wallet a folded-up hundred-dollar bill that he’d stuck down in there in case of an emergency. I don’t know if he really thought this was a bona fide emergency or not, but he took out that creased bill and gave it to the cashier. He got back some change, but I know he must have spent sixty dollars or more on Stanley Brothers records that day. He didn’t waste a dime, though, I can tell you that! That stack of records was a gold mine. This was vintage material that had been out of print for years. It was incredibly rare stuff I’d never heard before.

  With Keith, I had somebody my age to share this precious treasure with. We’d listen to the albums and play along for hours on end. We knew every vocal phrase and instrumental break, even the mistakes. Back then, it was straight to disc in the studio: These were live performances, no overdubs. Hearing those rare Columbia recordings was like falling in love with music all over again. I especially loved Pee Wee’s mandolin, which was straight from the heart and always on the mark. It was all feel, so delicate, so bittersweet. Kinda haunting, too, like moonlight in a hollow. Most important to me at the time, Pee Wee’s playing was simple, straightforward stuff, technique-wise. Now that’s a mandolin I can aspire to, I thought to myself. So I just practiced till I got it. Like Dad used to say, “One more.” I’d drop the needle again and again and wear out the vinyl. Fifty years on, I never get tired of hearing this music. I still get inspiration from it. I have it all on my iPhone and listen to it almost every day.

  Keith and I studied the album covers, pictures, and liner notes: We knew who played and sang what. Our favorite was the reissue of their earliest 78-rpm records made for the legendary Rich R Tone label, which had a photo of the band in 1946. This was probably the first group shot ever taken: Ralph and Carter and Pee Wee and the fiddler Leslie Keith. They’re in an old house in Bristol, Virginia, holding their instruments and striking a formal pose behind a microphone in this room with old-fashioned wallpaper. What stood out was their intensity. No airs, no attitude, no foolishness, just pure focus. Just mountain kids crazy about music, same as us. They looked so young and so serious, and we could totally identify with them.

  Music was everything to us. Keith came from a musical family, too. His mom Faye played piano and organ in church. His brother Dwight learned banjo from his grandpa. It was Miss Faye who got Keith started on guitar, and she said he didn’t need much help. She noticed he had the knack. He only had to hear a song but once and he could play it beautifully.

  When we met, all we wanted to do was play and sing. We didn’t have a fallback plan or notions of doing anything else. Now, the thing was, in little places like Blaine and Sandy Hook, singing with your family or by yourself could only get you so far.

  Once we got together, though, it sure speeded up things for us. Now we had something together that we didn’t have on our own: a duet. Those harmonies took two voices blending together to do it right. We were a brother team, not by blood but by the bond of the music. When we sang, it felt that strong.

  There was a kid named Jimmy Burchitt, cousin of our friend Elmer Burchitt who played with the Skaggs Family band. Jimmy would come up to the house and we’d all play together, me and Keith and Dad, too. We called Jimmy “The White Dove” because he was so pale. He had stark white hair and light pink complexion. He played in the old-time mountain style of Ralph Stanley, and Keith and I just loved that kind of picking. Give him Ralph’s “Clinch Mountain Backstep” and he could blister it!

  It wasn’t long before Keith and I formed a band, along with Dad on guitar and Dwight on banjo. We got a weekly show at a radio station, WGOH, in Grayson, Kentucky, not too far from home. We had to come up with some sort of a name for ourselves. Keith had the idea for the Lonesome Mountain Boys, and it stuck. You hear about all the garage
bands in the ’60s that sprung up after the British Invasion. Well, we were a garage band, too. Every Wednesday night we’d get together in the garage at Keith’s house. His dad, Elmer, would tape everything for two half-hour shows. One was a bluegrass show on Saturday, and there was an all-gospel show on Sunday.

  In those days, you didn’t get paid for playing on the radio. A show was just a way to get your name out. We had a couple of sponsors, the Foothills Telephone Company and Montgomery Ward, and they paid the station for the airtime. Keith wrote up a little jingle for Montgomery Ward that opened our program. We were broadcast for a hundred miles around. It was good exposure, but what really mattered was having our own band. It was our own little world. In the same way some boys had a clubhouse or a gang or a sports team they belonged to, we had the Lonesome Mountain Boys.

  Sometimes Keith would go out and play with Dwight as the East Kentucky Mountain Boys; sometimes I’d play with the Skaggs Family band; sometimes I’d go off and play fiddle with Ray and Melvin, the Goins Brothers bluegrass band. But we always came back together as the Lonesome Mountain Boys.

  I remember when Keith was spending the weekend at my house in Brushy Creek. We were out in the yard goofing off and we heard Lassie, our little squirrel dog, barking up a tree in the woods. My dad poked his head out the back door, and he hollered, “That dog’s got something treed, and she ain’t gonna leave it alone. Y’all go over there and see what’s she got!”

  Me and Keith let out a big war whoop and climbed the hill and followed the sound. We finally found the tree, and we saw a big ol’ groundhog on a high branch, hanging on for dear life. There was Lassie at the bottom eyeing it, and she was going crazy. Now, our Lassie was a mix of shepherd and beagle, and she was a great little squirrel dog. She could see ’em from the longest ways away, and man, she’d take off and chase ’em down. In her mind, this groundhog was the biggest squirrel she’d ever treed.

  Me and Keith got so excited we didn’t even go back to the house to get a rifle. We grabbed handfuls of rocks and we knocked that groundhog out cold and it fell out of the tree stone dead. Lassie was proud as could be, even though it was twice her size and she couldn’t carry it back.

  When we brought the groundhog home to my dad, he laughed so hard. He couldn’t believe we’d knocked it out chucking rocks. I know it seems cruel what we did. But it was a different time and place. We were just kids back in the mountains, and we didn’t know any better.

  I have a lot of good memories of those days. It was a carefree time, and we didn’t think about tomorrow. To tell the truth, I’d have never predicted Keith would become a country star, and the same goes for me. I couldn’t foresee what a brilliant career there was down the road for him, and I know he didn’t see anything of the sort for me, either. We were happy just playing music, and that was more than enough. We didn’t think about money or what we could make out of music. We just wanted to sing and pick, and get better on our instruments.

  It took someone else to see a potential in us, and the future that a couple of Kentucky boys could’ve never imagined in their wildest dreams.

  Chapter 8

  HISTORY OF THE FUTURE

  One of the most intriguing events in bluegrass was the issue in the early seventies by two teenaged Kentucky musicians, Ricky Skaggs and Keith Whitley, of an album of early Stanley Brothers songs, imitated so perfectly as to be scarcely distinguishable from the originals. . . . This was attic bluegrass in the purest sense.

  —Bluegrass Breakdown, by Robert Cantwell

  RALPH STANLEY FOR PRESIDENT

  —Popular bumpersticker at bluegrass festivals.

  There have been a lot of stepping stones along my path. Without these to guide me, I’d have surely stumbled. One of the most important was Ralph Stanley. He gave me my first professional job. He taught me so much about music, business, and life, too. He didn’t say hardly a word to me about any of it. Ralph’s way is doing instead of saying.

  In the spring of 1970, Keith and I got some big news. Ralph and his Clinch Mountain Boys were coming to a club not too far away in West Virginia. I hadn’t seen Ralph play since I was a kid. After Carter’s death in 1966, Ralph went out on his own. We heard he had a new lead singer, a guy from eastern Kentucky named Roy Lee Centers who sounded just like Carter. We knew we had to go see him. Ralph was as big a hero to me as Bill Monroe, and he was for Keith, too.

  Well, finally the day came. My dad drove me, Keith, and Dwight to the show. We made the thirty-minute drive about as excited as we could be.

  The club was called Jim & Fay’s. It was in Fort Gay, a town just across the state line. Lawrence County borders the Big Sandy River, and there’s a huge bridge crossing over the two forks of the Big Sandy from Louisa, Kentucky, into Fort Gay. People from the Kentucky side used to drive to Fort Gay to buy beer. Lawrence was a dry county, and Fort Gay was in a wet county. You’d often hear people complain about how weak the beer was in West Virginia. They called it “stump water,” but that didn’t stop them from buying and drinking it. There were a lot of clubs in Fort Gay that sold beer and featured country music shows, and Jim & Fay’s was one. It was just over the bridge, so close you coulda thrown a rock from the parking lot into the Big Sandy.

  Keith and I were actually too young to get into the club. We couldn’t even drive yet! But the man working the door knew my dad, and he let us in. We came early and waited for a while. As it got near show time, there were still no Clinch Mountain Boys.

  The club owner walked on stage and said he’d just heard from Ralph Stanley, who’d called from a pay phone down the road. His bus had a flat tire, so he and the band were going to be late. Ralph said he’d make it somehow or another; he just wasn’t sure when. Now, if you’re running a beer joint, the last thing you want is a situation where you’ve got a packed house and you can’t give the customers what they paid to see. They were restless, and some were getting a little rowdy.

  The club owner was in a jam. Then he spotted us back in the corner. He knew about me and Dad. He asked if we brought our instruments along with us, and if we could play for a while to calm down the crowd until Ralph made it.

  Of course, we said yes. We never went anywhere without our instruments. We always kept ’em in the car in case someone asked us to play. I think American Express may have stolen Dad’s motto: Never leave home without ’em!

  Now, I’ll tell you we had no idea we were going to play at a Ralph Stanley show that night. It was just like in Martha, all those years ago, when Mr. Monroe yanked me up on stage. I know some would say it was just a blown tire. But I believe some things are meant to be, and I believe everything that happened that night at Jim & Fay’s was God’s providence at work.

  We grabbed our instruments out of the car, tuned up, and got on stage as fast as we could. The club owner tried to give us some build-up. “We’ve got some boys from over in Kentucky who sing pretty fine, and we’d like ’em to do a few numbers for you. Let’s give ’em a hand!”

  This was a tough crowd. They came to see Ralph Stanley and his Clinch Mountain Boys. They must have been thinking, “What are these teenage boys doing in our beer joint?” I guess having dad on stage gave us a little more credibility.

  There was no booing or anything nasty. You could just tell the crowd didn’t expect much. They were probably glad to see anybody get up on stage and give ’em some entertainment for a while until the real deal showed up. About all we knew were Stanley Brothers songs, so that’s what we did. We opened with “Riding the Midnight Train.” It seemed like the thing to do, to kick off with a barn burner. I was as nervous as a cat. But when Keith and I leaned in shoulder-to-shoulder at the mic and started singing, the crowd started paying attention.

  About thirty minutes into our set, we got a big surprise. The club door swung open and guess who walked in? Ralph Stanley, carrying his banjo case. He didn’t make a scene or cause any disruption. He didn’t say nothing, and nobody said a word to him. He didn’t stay out there in the crowd, eit
her. He just walked over to the bar in the back of the club and sat down with his banjo case on a bar stool next to him.

  Normally, Ralph would have headed straight to the dressing room, especially since he was already running late. But he just sat there silent, taking in the show like any other customer. He didn’t order a beer or call for the bartender. He just sat and watched the show.

  I can tell you it was awfully strange for me and Keith on that stage, to have grown up listening to Ralph’s music and to now have him listening to us play it back to him. It was one of those testing times, a stretching of the faith we had in our own abilities. Did we really have what it took to be on stage playing Stanley Brothers songs, with Ralph Stanley himself sitting in the audience?

  We just did our best trying to stay focused on the music. Everybody had seen Ralph come into the club, but we didn’t acknowledge him from the stage. We could tell he didn’t want any attention. And the thing about it was, nobody in the audience was bothering him, either. I think the crowd wanted to let him soak up every bit of the moment, too.

  Before, we’d been nervous. Now we were scared to death. All we could do was keep playing. Part of me was glad Ralph was in the club. I was singing every tenor line he ever sung, every little roll in his old style of harmony with Carter. Knowing Ralph like I do now, I think he’d probably forgotten some of those songs. I hoped he was thinking, “Lord, that sounds familiar.” Maybe he took it as a nice tribute, which, of course, it was.

  At the time, though, I couldn’t tell whether he liked it or not. He was listening, but he wasn’t applauding or even nodding in appreciation. Not a twitch. He was paying attention, but he had a stern look on his face. By now, the rest of the Clinch Mountain Boys had come in, too, and they stood behind Ralph at the bar. We just kept on, playing every Stanley Brothers song we could think of. We sang “Sweethearts in Heaven” and “Little Glass of Wine,” one of the first big sellers the Stanleys had. It was from 1947, when they were starting out and not much older than me and Keith. We wrapped up our set, and I looked back to see where Ralph was, but he’d already disappeared.