Kentucky Traveler

by Ricky Skaggs

  It was the first real taste of fan adulation I’d ever had, and it felt good. The fans loved our music and wanted us to know it. One way people showed their appreciation was to buy you a drink. This happened so often that if I’d drunk every drink people wanted to buy me, I’d a-been drunk as a skunk every night and passed out on the floor.

  Well, by now you know I just wasn’t a big drinker. I mean, I might drink something every now and then, but I was not a heavy drinker at all. Never was and still ain’t. Especially when music’s involved. For me, drinking and playing music don’t mix. Being a lightweight has saved me from a lot of trouble through the years. In this case, it saved me some money when I needed it.

  If you turned down a free drink, it was an insult in a place like the Red Slipper—at least it was in that day and age. Like you were putting on airs. I didn’t want to offend folks who were only trying to be neighborly, so I came up with an arrangement.

  What I did was make a deal with the bar girl. I told her, “Look, if someone wants to buy me a drink, you go ahead and charge ’em for a drink. Then just bring me a glass of seltzer water and stick a cherry in it to make it look like a Tom Collins.” And that was how we did it. She’d bring me a seltzer, I’d smile a thank-you to whoever was buying ’em, and then I’d sip on however many of came my way. Nobody was the wiser, and everybody was happy. At the end of the night, I’d settle up with her. She’d give me the seventy-five or eighty dollars people had spent buying me drinks, and I’d give her a nice big tip. Sounds like eastern Kentucky to me!

  One thing I didn’t like was that it was my first job trying to emcee a show. I say “trying” because I never really got a handle on it. I’d never really emceed before in my life. But I figured, what better way to learn than four sets a night? J.D. wasn’t a front man, and Tony had tried it but didn’t like it much, either. I had to learn the hard way that there ain’t nothing easy about it. I mean, Carter Stanley and Lester Flatt and Porter Wagoner, these were the great front men of country music. They were the role models I had in my mind. But they were incredible entertainers, and Lord knows they made it look easy. As soon as they hit the stage, they could take the measure of a crowd, and they could talk into a microphone so casual you’d swear they were catching up on old times with a roomful of their best buddies. It took years of work before I felt natural in that job. But I grew into it, and nowadays I love it. With the New South, I just tried to learn from my mistakes.

  Working four shows a night is a great way to hone your skills. Singing with J.D. and Tony was another education for me. These weren’t typical bluegrass vocal arrangements; there were lots of different harmony structures. I had to learn songs like Gram Parsons’s “Sin City” that featured a high lead with J.D. and Tony singing their vocal parts below me. It was something I hadn’t done before, and I really had to stretch and try new things.

  As for my mandolin playing, well, those shows at the Red Slipper helped me get my chops back, and when I came back from Detroit with my Lloyd Loar, I felt like a ball player with a Louisville slugger, finally ready for the big leagues. Turned out it was just in time, because we were getting ready to cut an album for Rounder Records. Rounder had asked J.D. for some instrumentals to showcase the band’s picking skills, and he told ’em we had a batch of fresh songs we’d been working up on stage, a wide range of material that hadn’t been done by a bluegrass band. Rounder gave J.D. the green light.

  We did a lot of rehearsing at J.D.’s house, and then we went to Washington, D.C., to make the record. I knew the young Dobro player Jerry Douglas from our time together in the Country Gentlemen. He still played with the group, so he was in town. I told J.D. about Jerry and suggested he might be a good addition for the album. I was telling him how Jerry was taking his Dobro playing to new levels, and J.D. said, “Well, maybe a song or two.” He didn’t want too much Dobro, ’cause he was worried it might take the music in a direction he didn’t want to go.

  I called Jerry and told him we wanted him to help out on the record. He was stoked and came by the studio. He played on a couple songs, and his Dobro sounded so fresh and fit so well with the group that J.D. asked him to play on another couple, and Jerry ended up playing on nine of the eleven songs we recorded.

  My F-5 Loar was ready for action, and I got to step out with a solo on “Old Home Place.” I know for sure the Red Bomb would have bombed out! The album was a big success. Bluegrass fans took to it, and so did a lot of young musicians. Rounder didn’t give it a title, so people got to calling it the “Old Home Place” record, or just “0044,” for its label number on the record jacket. I think back on it now and realize how fortunate I was to be there at the right time and get to be a part of the record. It’s really become landmark of bluegrass.

  There was a controversy about the photo on the album cover, which showed J.D. poking his finger in Bobby Slone’s ear. J.D. was pranking, but quite a few people thought it looked like he was flipping the bird with his middle finger. Bluegrass purists could be a prickly bunch, and it didn’t take much to get their hackles up. They raised heck about it, so Rounder had to issue a new version of the album with a different cover.

  Not long after the record was released, Jerry Douglas left the Country Gentlemen and joined up with the New South. His Dobro added the right touch to our sound, like the missing piece to a puzzle. With our new lineup, we started a regular engagement at another venue in Lexington, a new Sheraton Inn. They had a dinner room and lounge, and it was much bigger than the Red Slipper. The album was bringing in a lot of curious people who’d never cared much for bluegrass. We were attracting fans who came to our music from folk and rock and roll, too. J.D. and the New South was new, especially when word got around that we had this hot Dobro player.

  When we hit the festival circuit in the spring of 1975, we caused quite a stir. A lot of purists and old-timers didn’t take kindly to our style of bluegrass. They didn’t hear enough old in the new. It wrinkled a lot of feathers, but we didn’t care about the naysayers. There was one man whose opinion did matter to me, though, and that was Ralph Stanley. When he pulled into the campgrounds, I’d tell J.D. and the boys, “I’ll see y’all in a while. I gotta go pay my respects.” I did this because I wanted to honor him and let him know I hadn’t left the fold, no matter what some people might be saying. I’d brag on Ralph, and I’d try to praise him from the stage, too. I didn’t care if it made him feel a little embarrassed. I didn’t want to let him think his music didn’t mean anything to me anymore just because I was playing a different kind of bluegrass now.

  Ralph was never a big booster of progressive bluegrass or newgrass or whatever name they called it, and he didn’t pretend to love what we were doing in the New South. But he never put me down, never lectured me. He told me that he’d always stay behind me just like I stayed behind him. He blessed me when I left his band, and he blessed me now.

  Sometimes we’d see Bill Monroe at the festivals, too. He never said much at all about what he thought of the new groups. I heard he hated the word newgrass and didn’t much like the musical sound of it, either. He tolerated us youngsters more than anything. By then, though, he was already moving into his role as the elder statesman of bluegrass. In those days, we all had shaggy long hair that hung down to our shoulders. Even J.D. had let his red hair grow. Mr. Monroe used to love pointing us out to folks and poking fun at us. “How about J.D. Crowe and his outfit,” he’d say. “They look just like a herd of Shetland ponies, don’t they?” You have to understand that Mr. Monroe still worked his farm with plow horses instead of tractors. Coming from him, that was a real compliment!

  In August we went to Japan for a ten-day, eight-show tour, starting in Tokyo and traveling to some smaller towns. It was the first time I had been out of the country, ever. It was a real eye-opener, and an ear-opener. We played big concert halls, and they were packed everywhere we went. The crowds were louder than anything we’d ever heard, even louder than the drunks at the Red Slipper. In those days, the J
apanese were probably the most devoted bluegrass fans in the world. They were on fire for bluegrass. To them, it was more than music—it was almost like a religion. What impressed me was how many had taken up the music, and they played well, too. After one show, I had a kid come up to me, maybe eighteen years old, hair as long as mine. He didn’t want an autograph. He wanted to pick. He had a little red, round-hole mandolin like my Red Bomb. This kid got right in my face and proceeded to play the whole daggone solo from “Katy Daly.” He played every lick exactly like I had when I recorded it with Ralph. He had it down perfect. When he finished, he smiled real big. I acknowledged that he did a good job and smiled right back. It wasn’t much use for me to try to speak Japanese, being a boy from eastern Kentucky who demolishes the English language to start with! Bluegrass broke through the language barrier. They understood my mandolin playing just fine, and that’s all we needed to connect. It was another step in my journey discovering how music is a universal language.

  During the tour, we got the news that Tony was turning in his notice. He was leaving the band to take a job with David Grisman, who was based in Marin County north of San Francisco. I was glad for Tony, because I knew David’s music would stretch him in a fruitful direction, but I was sure gonna miss him. I’d enjoyed the past year and a half singing with Tony. His singing was different from Keith’s, but we had a chemistry that was rare. He sang hard, and our voices blended so well together.

  In my heart, musically, I would like to have stayed with J.D. a few more years. It was such a fertile creative environment, and I liked all the guys in the band. With Tony gone, though, J.D. had to find another lead singer and guitar player, and there was no guarantee it was gonna be somebody I’d enjoy working and singing with. It was something I didn’t want to go through. It was J.D.’s band, not mine. I couldn’t make those kind of decisions. That was up to him.

  So I asked Jerry, “What are you thinking?” and he said, “Well, what are you thinking?” And I told him, “Well, you’ve known for a while now that I want to put a band together. It feels like the right time to do it. Wanna give it a try with me?” He said yes. I was so glad, because Jerry and I had been in two bands together, and we’d become great friends, and I didn’t want to lose that bond.

  When we got back home from Japan, we told J.D. that we’d be leaving the band, too. J.D. wasn’t sore at all, and he wished us the best. He knew when he hired me about my intentions of putting a band together. I didn’t want it to be hard for J.D. to rebuild the New South, and it wasn’t long till he found the guitar player and lead singer Glen Lawson, who did a great job. He also hired the talented mandolin player and tenor singer Jimmy Gaudreau, who’d been with the Country Gentlemen during my days with Ralph Stanley. J.D. decided not to find a new Dobro player at that time and just stay with a four-piece band.

  I got busy making calls to put together a band and also started calling some promoters who just might book our new band. With Keith back in Ralph’s band after the death of Roy Lee Centers, I knew he wouldn’t be eager to start up a new group, so I called a guy named Wes Golding. Wes sang lead, played guitar, and was a good songwriter. I also called a friend I knew who played really good fiddle, Terry Baucom from Monroe, North Carolina. I had another friend, Marc Pruett, who was gonna play banjo, but at the last minute he decided to start a music store around Asheville, North Carolina.

  Tough luck for us. I’d already started calling promoters for my band that didn’t exist. Then Terry saved the day, saying he could play banjo good enough to get us started and until we could find someone permanent. We never looked for another banjo player. Terry just kept getting better and better, and he was our banjo man for our whole run.

  We originally wanted an upright bass player, but the guy we tried to bring on board decided to stay with the band he was already in. It was hard asking people to move from another state and go to work with a band that had no track record. Some were coming in, some were backing out. Things got serious when Wes and Terry moved to Lexington, where Jerry and I were living with our wives. We started rehearsing together, writing new songs, and working up old gospel quartets and fiery new instrumentals. We still didn’t have a bass player, but now we had a name. We called our band Boone Creek after a little tributary that runs through the area near Lexington.

  The phone started ringing from some of those promoters I’d called a few months before. They wanted to book us. We heard of a bass man named Fred Wooten working at a club in town. He played electric guitar and steel guitar. We thought that might come in handy in the future, but right now we needed a bass player, so we hired him. He’d never played bluegrass before, but we didn’t care. He took to it pretty quick.

  It was the right moment for a band like Boone Creek. Lexington had a diverse music scene well beyond bluegrass. It was a place and a time, a college town in the mid-’70s, where you could pursue any style that you wanted. Boone Creek started off with a bang. There was a youthful energy and a chemistry to what we were doing that just felt right. We landed a steady gig at the Sheraton Inn on I-75 south of town, Tuesday through Saturday. That was our bread and butter, pulling in about $2,500 a week. We were making a living. Of course, you had to slice it four ways, and then pay a bass player, too. It didn’t go far, but we sure were having fun.

  We booked show dates outside of town and tried to expand our fan base. We’d travel to Louisville and work for a week at bars like the Storefront and, our favorite, the Great Midwestern Music Hall. It was new territory, and we wanted to prove ourselves. Things were busy with the band, so busy that I almost missed the birth of Mandy, our first baby.

  Brenda was due, so I had rescheduled a two-week tour of Canada that we had coming up, but the baby was late and the due date passed. The tour dates were set now, so me and the boys drove on up north of the border. We’d played two shows before I got the phone call saying Brenda was on the way to the hospital. I caught a flight back home to try to make it in time for the delivery, but our baby girl wouldn’t wait any longer. Amanda Jewell was born on November 5, 1977. I was back in Canada three days later to help the band finish the tour. It was really hard to leave her and Brenda. A musician’s life sure ain’t for everybody!

  Having Mandy made me want to come home more, but with me doing most of the booking and business for the band, it was hard to find any free time when I wasn’t playing a gig or practicing or planning for a gig. My being away so much was really starting to cause a rift between me and Brenda. I think I may have given too much time and attention to Boone Creek and not enough to my family, but I just wanted to do my best to make the band work, figuring that once that was going well, everything else would go well, too.

  Thing was, those early days in the band were exciting. At first, we got some resistance for being different. We had electric bass, and we played a lot of new songs we’d written. We also had new arrangements for some of the old songs we played. The electric bass was a no-no for a lot of the purists, but it gave us a more progressive, cutting-edge sound. We’d get heckled on stage sometime, but the baiting gave us attitude. I’m not proud of some of the wisecracking I did back then about the bluegrass establishment, but I was just spreading my wings, I guess. It was part of growing up in the music with these towering figures. Sometimes they cast a shadow that smothered you and could stunt your growth.

  We had good reason to be trying something new. We didn’t want to sound like Ralph and Bill and Lester and Earl, ’cause they’d already done it, and done it the best it could be done. We wanted the freedom to paint whatever picture we wanted, and we just went for broke. Most of the crowd was with us, especially the younger kids who really dug it. We even had a young Vince Gill in the band for a while. He was the youngster of the group, barely eighteen years old, but he could already do it all! Hiring Vince worked out great, and not just because of his talent. He had a van, too, so he hauled the sound system and his instruments: electric guitar, pedal steel, electric bass, and fiddle. He could play just about anything w
ith strings, and he sang like a bird.

  * * *

  Boone Creek was the perfect outlet for musical experimentation. I was young, so I can’t say I had a clear vision of what we were supposed to be. I didn’t have a specific sound in mind. It was a musical mesh of stuff that everybody in the band liked. It was swing and country and bluegrass and blazing instrumentals that featured Jerry’s Dobro and Terry’s banjo. But we always had a traditional side, as with our gospel quartets. It was a tradition we wanted to carry on, and our respect for it seemed to keep us in the good graces of the hardcore bluegrass purists.

  Boone Creek’s debut album was my first chance to produce a record, and that too was a learning experience. When we cut the old Stanley Brothers song “The Memory of Your Smile,” we put piano and drums on the track. We felt like we needed to do it our way. We recorded at a studio in Lexington called Lemco. It was a big enough facility for bluegrass bands, but for the drums and piano parts, we decided to go to Nashville. We recorded some tracks at the old Star-day studio on Dickerson Road, and it was a great place to experiment with different sounds.

  That’s what Boone Creek was, a valuable experience, but it didn’t last very long. I needed to learn what it was like to have a partnership in a band where everybody was equal. Musically, there were lots of ideas and lots of different directions, and a lot of it was my own doing. Plus, we were working hard and not making much to show for it. I’d got to a place where I was running the roads and not even making what I was working the clubs in Lexington. I wanted more than that. I loved those guys dearly, and I still love ’em, but I felt like a change was coming.