Kentucky Traveler

by Ricky Skaggs

  Somehow I made it into the bathroom in time. I didn’t know what was going on. All I know is the first time I ever got drunk, I got sick as a dog. We’d just eaten a big dinner, and I hit everything except the commode. The host’s wife was such a kind lady, and I felt so bad about the mess I’d made. She started cleaning it up while I stood there feeling terrible. She didn’t get angry or scold me, she just felt sorry for me, and that almost made it worse. “Sweetie,” she said. “You probably shouldn’t drink that stuff.”

  The upshot was that Roy Lee was drunk the whole next day. We had a show that night, and boy was Ralph upset with him. By the time we went on stage, Roy Lee could sing and play all right, but any musician could have heard he wasn’t up to his usual standards. And definitely not up to Ralph Stanley’s. As far as me and Keith, Ralph didn’t say a word to us about what happened with the whiskey. ’Course, Ralph knew it wouldn’t have done much good to lecture me. He saw how bad I felt. I was so ashamed of myself. I kept thinking of the man’s sweet wife having to wipe up my mess in the bathroom. The thing was, I was so young and dumb, I didn’t learn my lesson. The second time was even worse.

  I never did tell my mother about what happened when I drank whiskey. It was something I kept to myself. Twice drunk and twice dumb was enough for me. To this day, there’s no way I can drink whiskey. Can’t even stand the smell of it. Thanks, Mom! And, thanks God!

  I learned a little about pride around this time, too. I know pride can cause you to make some bad decisions. I know my dad had some mountain pride, and it got him in some trouble, too, the first and last time I ever saw him drunk. This happened one New Year’s Eve, before Keith and I joined Ralph’s band. He invited us to join him that night for a show at the Country Palace in Columbus, Ohio. This was a much bigger venue than the Astro Inn. You could get three hundred people in the Palace, and that night they had a full house.

  On the drive up, we did our usual rehearsing in the backseat while Dad took the wheel; he was as gung-ho as we were. Jimmy Martin was headlining the show that night, and Dad was a longtime fan, especially after Jimmy left Monroe and went solo with his own band, the Sunny Mountain Boys. When we got there, it turned out that Jimmy needed a mandolin player who could sing tenor with him, and he’d heard about me. “Ralph,” he said. “Do you mind if this boy sings with me on my show?” Then Jimmy shot a look at me; he had a reputation as a perfectionist who was tough on his band. “Son,” he said. “Do you know some of my songs?”

  So now I was on the spot. Truth was, I didn’t know any Jimmy Martin songs, not well enough to play ’em on stage, anyhow. I liked Jimmy’s music fine, but I just didn’t know any of his songs. I sort of looked pleadingly at Ralph to rescue me, but he misunderstood my worried expression.

  “If you want to sing with Jimmy tonight, that’s all right,” said Ralph. “I don’t mind you helping him out.” I could sense that Ralph wanted me to give it a try, because he really loved Jimmy. A lot of people didn’t like Jimmy, since he was known to talk big, but Ralph saw through that. They had a bond, maybe because they were so different in temperament. I felt like I was helping Ralph by helping Jimmy, so I said I’d do my best.

  Now I had to learn a bunch of Jimmy Martin songs in time for his evening show, and all this before I went on stage with Ralph for his first set. Jimmy started running over the material with me right there. He was a great rhythm guitar player, so he was able to show me the arrangements, and I got those down quick. It was learning the lyrics I was worried about.

  I learned a few songs, the choruses at least. It was when I went on stage with Ralph that the trouble started. Not with the music, but in the audience. There was a guy there that night that Dad knew growing up in eastern Kentucky. His name was Whipple Ferguson. He was a distant cousin of my dad’s mom. Well, this Whipple Ferguson, he lived in Columbus now. He was a short little smart aleck, and he’d seen me and Dad come into the club.

  Near the tail end of the first set I played with Ralph, Whipple walked over to my dad’s table and sat down, and they caught up on old times like anybody does. He pointed his finger at me, and then he got right in Dad’s face. “I wish to God Ricky would learn how to stand on stage,” he said. “Just look up there at him! He’s just standing there like an old country stick!”

  Whipple was a little ornery cuss with a big ol’ chip on his shoulder. He’d been drinking, and it made him feel bold enough to mouth off to my dad, I guess. About the only thing that could make Dad upset was if someone tried to put down his family, especially one of his kids. It was too much to take. My dad’s pride wouldn’t let him sit back and stay quiet.

  Whipple had pushed him too far, and Dad lost it. He stood right up and yelled, “Damn you, Whipple Ferguson! I’ll tell you one thing! He’ll be standing there when you’re long gone!” Dad hadn’t been drinking; he wasn’t one to drink, after all. But it aggravated him so much that this sassy cousin he hadn’t seen in years would go after his son.

  There was a half-hour break in between shows, and I guess my dad wanted to calm himself down a little bit. He headed to the bar and got himself a Pabst Blue Ribbon or two.

  I hadn’t seen any of what happened with Whipple, but I knew something was up when I saw Dad standing right at the front of the stage, hollering through his cupped hands as if they were a bullhorn. “Jimmy, that’s my boy up there! That boy singing with you!” I’d never seen him get rowdy in my whole life. I could tell he was tipsy, and I didn’t know what to do. Dad then started shouting out requests from the Jimmy Martin songbook. “Hey, Jimmy! Why don’t you sing that ‘Tennessee, I Hear You Calling Me’!”

  My dad was feeling no pain, and it was more comical than it was threatening. Of course, Jimmy didn’t know who my dad was. He must have figured he was just another customer who’d been over-served at the bar. He tried to calm him down as best he could. “Awwww right, sir, we’ll get to that one a little later. Go back and sit down.” For Dad to make such a scene in public was strange, but it was funny, too. He didn’t talk about it after the show, and I didn’t ask him.

  Next day we were driving home to Kentucky, and that’s when he started to tell me and Keith some of what happened. First off he wanted me to know how awful he felt for making a fool of himself in front of the crowd. He said he had some Blue Ribbon to steady his nerves and to keep from punching Whipple Ferguson in the nose. “I’m sorry, son. You know I’m not a drinker, but he made me so dang mad. I had to keep from hurting him somehow, so I walked straight to the bar. Well, I won’t be doing that ever again. I’m sure sorry.”

  He said he felt sick, but not from the Pabst. He hadn’t had enough for a hangover. What was gnawing at him was how bad he’d acted in front of me. He just felt rattled. The thing was, I didn’t feel bad about what he’d done, and neither did Keith. When he finally gave us the whole story, we laughed about it so hard we just slid to the floor of the car.

  We sure didn’t feel like kids anymore our second summer with Ralph. By then we’d gotten a big raise and had cars of our own. Ralph hiked our pay to thirty dollars for Friday shows, and thirty-five dollars for Saturdays and Sundays, so we could make a hundred dollars for a three-day weekend of show dates. That was pretty good money for a couple of teenagers.

  Now that I was making some more money, I bought myself my first car, a new Volkswagen Super Beetle. I remember going up to the auto dealership in Prestonsburg and picking it out. It was a nice bright yellow bug, like Herbie in the Disney movie The Love Bug. My dad cosigned for it. My first car, and boy, was it cool.

  Not long after that, I wrecked it, and it was all my fault.

  I was coming home from Virginia. I’d been on the road with Ralph, and I was heading through Lawrence County back to Brushy Creek. It was one of those things that happens when you’re young and impatient and not being careful. The closer I got to our house, the more I could smell my mom’s fried chicken. So I was taking those curves between Louisa and Blaine a little faster than I should have.

  About
five miles from home, it started to rain. Not much, but enough to slick the asphalt road top. I had James Taylor’s new album Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon cranked up in the eight-track machine. I was coming down a hill, and I took the curve at the bottom too fast and started sliding. I tried to straighten it up, but ended up off the road and flipped over.

  It was a pretty bad crash, and I had to climb out through the passenger door. Thank the Lord I wasn’t hurt, but I was pretty shook up, and my new Bug was totaled. And you know what? The engine stopped running, but J.T. kept right on singing.

  I think the accident weighed heavy on my mom. Not too long after, we were heading out to play at the bluegrass festival in Hugo, Oklahoma. I was getting ready to go, and Mom came in the kitchen and had me sit down there with her.

  “Honey,” she said. “I’ve had an awful dream. And I don’t want you to go to Oklahoma with Ralph.”

  “Mama, I’ve got to go,” I said. “I can’t miss the show. Ralph’s counting on me.”

  Then she started crying, begging me not to go.

  “I had a dream that you all had a wreck on the highway and you were killed. If you go, you’ll come back in a pine box. That’s what I saw.”

  “Mama, it’s just a bad dream. Don’t you worry, I’ll be careful.”

  Well, she wouldn’t give it up. She was so sure of what she saw in the dream. She was crying and crying. I hadn’t seen her so tore up before.

  “Mama, do you really believe this?”

  “Yes, I do,” she said. “You know I don’t get like this unless I really see something.”

  So I picked up the phone and called Ralph at his house. We were supposed to meet at the bus in the afternoon. I had a two-and-a-half-hour drive to get to Coeburn.

  “Ralph, I can’t go to the show this weekend.”

  “You sick?”

  “No, sir. My mom’s had a really bad dream, and what she saw is that we had a wreck on the highway and I was killed. I think I’ll be fine, but she’s tore up over it. I’d better just stay here.”

  “Rick,” he said. “When your mama has them dreams, you need to listen to them dreams and do what she says. That stuff’s real.”

  Not too many boss men would have been so understanding. But Ralph was from the mountains, same as my mom, and he was validating her. He was raised up like she was, and he knew dreams like the dreams my mom had were a gift to see, and ain’t nothing superstitious about it. The next weekend, Ralph and the band were back from Oklahoma, and we were headed to another date. We were going down the road, and I was talking to Roy Lee about the Oklahoma show. He said, “What’s the reason you didn’t come to Hugo with us?” Ralph hadn’t said anything to the band about my mama and her dream.

  “Well,” I said. “My mom had a really bad dream about us going. Let me ask you a question—did you have any close calls on the road last weekend?”

  “There was something happened, now that you mention it,” Roy Lee said. “There was a big ol’ box fell off a truck in the middle of the road, and man, we had to swerve like crazy to miss it.”

  In recent years, I was thinking about how Ralph handled that situation, how he respected my mom and her dream. And I got to thinking about a song he and Carter recorded in the ’60s, one of the last records they made before Carter died. It was “Dream of a Miner’s Child,” in which a little girl has a bad dream and says, “Daddy, don’t go to the mine.” And he goes into the mine because he has to go to work to provide for his family, and he gets killed. The little girl had foreseen what would happen.

  It takes a pure heart and a real humility and innocence to see that kind of stuff. My mom had it, and Ralph believed.

  Chapter 10

  NEW FRIENDS & GOOD OL’ BOYS

  Hello, stranger, put your loving hand in mine. You are a stranger, and you’re a pal of mine.

  —“Hello Stranger,” by the Carter Family, 1937

  Everybody talks about love at first sight. Well, there’s also love at first sound. You don’t hear about it as much, but it happens all the time. Especially with musicians.

  Take A.P. Carter. He was a young fellow in the mountains of Virginia, out peddling fruit trees door to door. One day in 1914, A.P. stopped by a farmhouse and heard a beautiful voice ringing out. It was sixteen-year-old Sara Dougherty singing on the front porch. He fell in love with her singing, and later on, he fell in love with her. That was how the Carter Family got started.

  Something like that happened to me, too. When I first met my girl, we were just about the same age as A.P and Sara. Only I was selling records instead of fruit trees, and she was from Texas instead of the next hollow over.

  I was working with Ralph, and we were at a bluegrass festival in Kilgore, Texas. It was my first time in the Lone Star State. Part of my job as a Clinch Mountain Boy was selling records at the merchandise table. It was the biggest responsibility me and Keith had on the road, and we went right to it after every show. Curly Ray set up his own record table nearby, because he didn’t trust nobody else to sell his solo albums and souvenirs. Curly Ray was a born salesman, too, and he really loved hawking his stuff. Keith and I saw this job as a way to make a little extra money. We had to haul boxes of the old eight-track tapes and the LP albums with the heavy cardboard sleeves to the tables, and there were plenty to haul, ’cause Ralph was in the studio cutting records every chance we could get. Seemed like there was always a new Rebel release boxed up and ready to go whenever we hit the road. It kept the table busy.

  At this festival, we had to park the bus way up in the woods, because there wasn’t any place close to the stage. So after the show it was up and down the hill and back and forth to the table in the hot summer sun for me and Keith. I’d already taken off my stage clothes, hung ’em up in the bus, and put my jeans on. Let me tell you, it felt good to get out of those polyesters. There were some more record boxes to get to the table, but Keith still had to change his clothes and said he’d handle the last few loads.

  I headed down to the record table ahead of him. I stopped for a minute, catching my breath and hoping for a breeze to cool me down. Through the woods, I could hear a band playing on the stage down the way. I recognized the song, one you didn’t hear very often. It was “When the Golden Leaves Begin to Fall,” a sad old Bill Monroe tune from the ’50s.

  I heard voices singing, sweet as angels, drifting through the stand of tall trees:

  When the moon shines on the Blue Ridge Mountains,

  And it seems I can hear my sweetheart call . . .

  The sound gave me goose bumps. I set my boxes down and started following that sound, walking through the trees to get closer to the stage. I started walking a little faster, and a little faster, until I was almost running.

  I finally made it out of the woods to where I could get a good view. Up on the stage I saw this young girl about my age, playing guitar and singing. She was part of a family band, with her mom singing harmony, her sister on bass, and her dad on mandolin. I watched for a while. I wondered why I’d never seen this group before. It was the first time I’d ever heard girls singing and playing bluegrass music.

  Then I realized I’d better get back and help Keith at the record table. I hustled back through the woods where I left my boxes, and by the time I made it, he was finishing setting up. All of sudden, two girls walked up to the table. I could see right away they were the same two girls I had just watched on stage. They were looking mighty fine in their stage dresses. The one with the lead voice came right up to me and said, “Hi, I’m Sharon White!” and the sister, the one on stand-up bass, went right up to Keith. “Hi, I’m Cheryl White,” she said.

  “We wanted to meet you guys,” said Sharon. “Me and Cheryl saw y’all at the Bean Blossom Festival, and we said to each other, ‘When they come to Texas, we’re gonna go up and say hi.’”

  “Well, I sure like your singing, too, Sharon,” I said. “I heard you up on stage with your folks a while ago, and y’all really sounded great.”

  Sh
e had a great big smile. When she heard what I said, she blushed. I smiled right back, not knowing what else to say.

  Sharon told us all about her family band, Buck White and the Down Home Folks. Buck, her dad, played mandolin and sang with her mom, Patty. She played guitar, and Cheryl played bass, and of course they all sang in simple, pure harmonies. They were from Texas but lived in Arkansas. She said they had just put their house up for sale in hopes of moving to Nashville. They really wanted to make a go of it in the music business.

  Cheryl and Keith really hit it off. Keith was a better talker than me, and he was making her laugh. After just a few minutes, though, the girls looked at each other and said they had to get back to their mom and dad. They promised they’d stop and see us at the next festival. And just like that they were gone.

  Of course, back then, there was no way of keeping up with people you met on the road, no Facebook or Twitter or any of the stuff kids have today. So I took it upon myself to see that fair young lady again before we left the festival grounds.

  I was looking for an excuse when I remembered the Monroe song that she and the family were singing when I first heard her voice. After the evening show, I walked over to their little campsite. I said my hellos to all the Whites, and then I asked Sharon if she could write down the lyrics to that song. I told her I needed the words so that me and Keith could learn it.

  “Yeah, I can do that,” she said, and there was that sweet smile again. She was just as innocent as could be. Years later, her mom and dad used to joke with me about it: “Ricky, you knew every word of that song, didn’t you?” Honestly, I didn’t know all of it . . . just the chorus.

  It didn’t matter much either way, ’cause my plan worked. Her mom fetched a piece of paper, and I watched Sharon write down the lyrics for “When the Golden Leaves Begin to Fall.” She handed it to me, and I’d got what I came for. Now what? Sharon started telling me about living in Arkansas. Well, I didn’t hardly know where Arkansas was. I just knew we drove through it on the way to Texas. I also knew it was a long way from eastern Kentucky. Thinking of the distance gave me a bad feeling. I didn’t know when or where I’d ever see her again. Well, about four months later, we were back up in Bean Blossom, Indiana, for the fall festival in November. I didn’t know it, but Sharon, Cheryl, and the Whites were there, too. When I saw Sharon, my heart sank.