Kentucky Traveler

by Ricky Skaggs

  My career finally seemed to be taking off. The only problem was my personal life was falling apart.

  Chapter 14

  EASTBOUND AND DOWN

  Now the seven wonders of the world I’ve seen

  It’s many other different places I have been.

  —“Ramblin’ Blues,” by Charlie Poole, 1929

  It takes a worried man to sing a worried song.

  I’m worried now but I won’t be worried long.

  —“Worried Man Blues,” by the Carter Family, 1929

  I was laid off. On the horizon I had the chance for a whole new career, but in the meantime I was just trying to pay the bills. This was a very strange period of my life. I was so busy I didn’t know where I was a lot of the time, but it was usually a studio somewhere. I was a picker for hire, doing all the session work I could. No job was too big or too small. I ain’t never been shy of working.

  I was burning it at both ends, going from the West Coast to the East Coast and back again, flying the friendly skies. Some jobs were in Los Angeles, back on Lania Lane with Brian. I helped out on albums by Rosanne Cash, Rodney Crowell, Guy Clark, and Tony Rice. I was always happy to get a paying gig, and I always did my best to lend a hand however I could.

  There was a lot of work in Nashville, too. I’ve never been able to make my living as a songwriter, but I always found plenty of work picking and singing. Chet Atkins helped open some doors for me. There weren’t many producers with more clout than Chet, and he hired me for a bunch of sessions.

  I remember when Chet produced an album for Janie Fricke that I played fiddle and sang on. I had a ball watching the old master at work. He’d come out in between songs and grab his guitar and we’d play some old fiddle tunes. Chet also played fiddle. I asked him to play for me, he played “Arkansas Traveler.” I learned a lot from him about the Nashville way of recording, which was a little different from the way Brian recorded in LA. Nashville used the number system for their charts. For example, G, C, and D would be written 1, 4, and 5. If you started with 1 being G, you would count up to 4 and have C, and then count one more and have D. It’s just a simple way to know where you are in any key instead of having to read sheet music as they do in LA.

  What made a good session man back then was to play what was called for and not a note more. You needed to check your ego at the door and look at every job as being part of a team. It’s a little different nowadays, especially in bluegrass. I want guys to play what they can when I have them in the studio. It shows off their talents, and it lets folks know that I like sharing the spotlight. I’d rather have a player with a good heart and a teachable spirit than one with all the talent in the world, yearning to be the star of the show.

  Most of all, a session player has to be adaptable and go with the flow. Every job is different, and some are a whole lot different. One week I played fiddle on a superstar session for Bobby Bare, with a major label. The next week I was in a different studio, hired to help produce and arrange a “comeback” album by Jimmy Murphy, who hadn’t cut a record for years. Murphy was totally unique, sort of a rockabilly Rip Van Winkle. A session like that, you do it for the love of the music, not for the money.

  Jimmy Murphy was a character. Back in the ’50s and early ’60s, he’d cut dynamite records like “Sixteen Tons Rock and Roll” and “Baboon Boogie” in Nashville, and then he’d quit music and worked as a bricklayer. It was like he’d stepped out of a time machine, the way he looked and the way he played. He had this Hank Snow kind of hairpiece, for one thing, to make up for his middle-aged baldness, and he had this intense, religious demeanor like some guy you’d see in a snake-handling church. It was that explosive fusion of the spiritual and the worldly, that Pentecostal fervor you find in a lot of Southern musicians, like Jerry Lee Lewis, the gospel-bluesman Reverend Gary Davis, and Brother Claude Ely, the Holiness singing preacher from Kentucky.

  It seemed to me Jimmy had this battle going on between the Pentecostal music and the hard-core rockabilly, like two sides of the same coin, Saturday night and Sunday morning. Holiness music and rockabilly are kin, really; it’s the same groove and rhythm and raucousness. About the only thing different is the lyrics. Jimmy played both kinds, and you could tell he loved ’em both but couldn’t quite reconcile those different worlds.

  It was the first time I’d landed in a studio with somebody who was cut from that kind of cloth, with those two sides to it. It was also the first time I’d heard somebody play with an open-string tuning on guitar. There was a lot of blues in his guitar licks and a lot of church in his singing, which reminded me of those house-rockin’ Holiness services I heard as a boy back in Brushy. I remember one song in particular, “Holy Ghost Millionaire,” that pretty much sums up Jimmy’s music.

  The album, called Electricity, was released in 1979 and earned rave reviews, but it didn’t make Jimmy any richer, and me neither. I ain’t complaining, though. I had loads of fun. If you can’t have a good time on sessions with Bobby Bare and Jimmy Murphy, then something ain’t right. You’re probably taking yourself way too seriously!

  But no matter how much fun I had, and no matter how much I worked, I sure wasn’t earning much. Most sessions paid $150 to $200 back then. You had to work a whole lot of sessions and show dates to make it all add up. With Emmylou, I was on salary and had been getting a healthy paycheck every week. That was on hold. I had a house payment and a mailbox full of bills and a young family to support. To tell you the truth, I was happier at work than I was at home at that time. My marriage with Brenda was just about over. We had filed for divorce, but it wasn’t final yet. Technically, I was still living in Lexington, but I was away more often than not. Whenever I was there, it was to see the kids and try to get some rest. “Try” being the key word there, because it was definitely not harmonious at home. There was a lot of fussin’ and fumin’ and hollerin’, times when our language got a little too loud and the children could hear, so I’d try to stay gone to keep the peace. Seemed like the only time my marriage was on good terms was when I was away from home. That’s another reason I stayed so busy. I felt sorry for Brenda and bad about the situation we were in. I was doing my best to keep the bills paid, and she was doing her best with the kids and keeping the house up. It was a tough situation for us both.

  Mom and Dad knew we were having trouble, and they knew there wasn’t much they could do to help. I remember my mom would just say, “Y’all need to be in church!” And she was right. We were “Eastergoers”—you know, we’d go to church on Easter Sunday and that was about it. We just never could find the time.

  Looking back now, I know I should have stayed home more instead of working another session whenever I could. I was so driven to get my career going. Brenda had a lot of responsibilities with Mandy and Andrew, and I couldn’t really help. I was trying to be the breadwinner and needed to work, and Brenda and the kids needed me at home. It was an impossible situation.

  I was in limbo in my professional life, too, with the record deal and all the pressure to live up to the expectations being placed on me. This was my big chance. Was I going to blow it? All these heavy thoughts kept creeping into my mind. I was trying to be a good dad, a decent husband, a great session player, and a worthy investment for my record company. My emotions were spinning like a top. My mind was fried. My nerves were shot. Help arrived by way of a phone call from an old friend, Joe Wilson. He’s spent his life promoting the music he loves: salt-of- the-earth, honest-to-God country music like the hillbilly string bands he heard when he was a boy in the 1940s in the mountains of east Tennessee. For years he ran the National Council for the Traditional Arts in Washington, D.C. Joe’s the real deal. He has always stood up for the music whenever folks tried to put it down. Joe and his wife, Kathy James, promote artists they believe in. Joe’s got a bloodhound’s nose for talent and a good sense for bringing it to the marketplace.

  “How’d you like to play a tour of the Far East?” Joe asked.

  “Love to,” I said.
“Where are we headed and for how long?” I was eager for a change of scenery.

  Nothing too strenuous, was how he pitched it. It would cover 48,000 miles in about six weeks.

  Well, that sure sounded like a long way to me. I knew a trip around the world was 24,000 miles, so I asked why we had to go twice that. Joe didn’t miss a beat.

  “Well, Ricky, we’ve got seven countries to play, from Southeast Asia all the way to Athens,” he said. “And there’s a lot of doubling back and gyrations involved. All I can guarantee is you’ll see things you’ve never dreamed of.”

  This sounded like a paid vacation. Exhausting, maybe, but exotic, too. What really sold me, though, was the lineup that Joe and Kathy had put together. This was a cultural exchange program sponsored by the U.S. International Communications Agency to spread goodwill through the arts. The idea was to share American music with our friends abroad. They’d assembled a package tour called Southern Music USA. There was a great bluesman and songster from Virginia, John Jackson; and a seasoned Cajun group, D.L. Menard and the Louisiana Aces; and best of all, my favorite family band, the Whites.

  The plan was I’d help Jerry Douglas back up the Whites on my fiddle or whatever they needed. And then the Whites and Jerry would back me up when I played a few songs on my own. That way there was no need to hire a pickup band. It’d make the whole thing more affordable for everybody. Plus, Jerry was an old friend, and it’d be good traveling with a guy my age.

  I told Joe to count me in, but said I had a few shows to get through first. Turned out, these shows nearly did me in. What happened was a physical breakdown. It hit when I was playing a bluegrass festival with the Whites in Grass Valley, California. I was doing the gig for extra cash so I could send some to Brenda and the kids and pay my rent.

  Well, I flew out to Grass Valley for the gig and came up sick. Now, I’d played dog-sick with Ralph and J.D. and all the rest—every bluegrasser has to grin and bear it when they’re under the weather. But this was different. I felt real bad, worse than I’d ever felt.

  The fever started on the flight and then spiked. During the ride to the festival site, it got worse. My shoulders and back were aching something terrible. Somehow, I made it through the first show, but as soon as we finished I went looking for help. At the festival grounds there was a nurse practitioner who checked me out and gave me a deep-tissue massage. The massage broke my fever, but the nurse feared I had an infection.

  She called 911 and sent for an ambulance to take me to the hospital. The Whites had to go on without me. The doctor gave me a worried look and said I was dehydrated and probably had walking pneumonia. He gave me a round of antibiotics and a few shots and told me I’d have to stay at the hospital until they could pump enough fluids into me. Well, this wasn’t gonna work, ’cause I needed to be in Nashville the next day to get my passport for the Far East tour. I promised the doc that I’d check into a hospital once I got my passport. He wasn’t too happy about letting me go, but he gave me the okay. We caught a plane that night in San Francisco, and I was throwing up the whole flight.

  Back in Nashville, I was a wreck. I dragged my sorry self in to have my picture made for the passport, and I could hardly stand up for the camera. I still have the photo on my old passport somewhere, and I look as rough as a cob.

  Somehow, I got the proper documents together, and I went straight to the doctor. My temperature was 104 by then. I heard the nurses say it was double pneumonia. You’ve heard about the “boogie-woogie flu.” Well, I reckon that’s what I had. Too much music, too much work; not enough rest, not enough peace.

  My life was a mess, and my body was paying the price. I was in that hospital for five days. I needed bed rest and lots of medication, as well as fluids to fight the dehydration. I realized this was a wake-up call. Friends came by, and they all said the same thing, You look terrible, Ricky. You gotta slow down.

  The double pneumonia was a warning. This ailment was more than physical, it was spiritual, too. My ambition was in control of my life. I felt like the Lord was telling me that I could keep doing things my way, or let Him help me find the right path. I needed to get humble, and slow down. Lying in the hospital bed made me think about a lot of things. It had been a long time since I’d prayed and asked God to help me. I wondered if He really would.

  A few weeks later we were in San Francisco, rehearsing for the tour. We were staying at Point Bonita in the Marin Headlands overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a foggy night, and you could barely see the lighthouse in the hazy darkness. Somebody had decided we should do a song or two together for a big finale to close the show, so we were there to practice, sort of eyeing each other, wondering what to try. “Hey, D.L.,” said Kathy, “how about a Hank Williams song?”

  It was a great suggestion, and it broke the ice. D.L. hit a chunky rhythm chord on his old guitar and kicked into Hank’s gospel song “I Saw the Light.” His voice hung in the fog like a spell, and then Buck and Sharon and Cheryl all joined on the chorus. I got chill bumps and went hunting for my fiddle. Hearing Hank’s message of hope and salvation, I thought, Maybe this song is meant for me and what I’m goin’ through and what I need. I sure needed some light to shine in my life.

  Singing that ol’ Hank song pulled us together and gave us the right direction. By the end of that rehearsal, we felt like family and knew this tour was gonna be special, and it sure was. We passed through seven nations in Asia and the Near East, doing our best to make friends for our country with our music and fellowship.

  As the trip went on, I found myself spending more and more time with Sharon. We’d talk about what we were gonna do when we got back home, about trying to make it in the music business. Just a couple of young kids dreaming about the future.

  Whenever we had the night off, I’d want to go and find some live music. Everybody was usually too tired to come along. Except for Sharon. She was about the only one who wanted to hang with me. “Shoot, yeah!” she’d say. “I’ll go!” She was game. She was always up for some music she’d never heard before. I had decided to use all my free time and my portable tape recorder to search out local musicians so I could document what I found. I sure was the son of Hobert Skaggs!

  One night we went into a little bar in Bangkok, and we could hardly believe what we found. There were college-age kids on stage picking and singing bluegrass. Thai-style, but it was bluegrass all right, banjo and all. It made me proud that I knew Mr. Monroe. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a country where they didn’t know bluegrass, and love it, too.

  In Pakistan, I went to a workshop program with a legendary sitar player. He was tall and skinny with long spidery fingers, a real master. His expression was calm and peaceful, but man, could he wear it out. I played my mandolin a little, too, but I got the sense it was more his show than mine, so I switched to my Sony recorder to get him on tape.

  He made it look like so much fun that I got the urge to try it for myself, so I made a special request through the translator. Well, swapping instruments wasn’t on the program, and the lady from the State Department wasn’t too happy ’cause it broke protocol. The sitar man didn’t seem to mind, though, and he offered up his instrument with a smile, like, Help yourself, young man. You could tell he wasn’t expecting much, and neither was I.

  A sitar is bulky, so I held it as if it were a big ol’ banjo. It felt good in my hands. I started playing a basic melody, I think it was “Cripple Creek” or “Cumberland Gap,” and I got a decent banjo tune going. It surprised everybody, especially the sitar man. He just stared wide-eyed at my hands, ’cause he’d never heard Western melodies coming from a sitar, which was tuned for ragas, not old-time breakdowns. The gal from the State Department just about fainted. I wish my dad coulda been there—he’d a-loved it!

  Another highlight was when we got to see a concert of Burmese classical music, part of a tradition that goes back two thousand years. It was performed by a circle-drum player who sat in the center of the orchestra, and the instruments blen
ded as natural as porch chimes in the breeze. It humbles you to hear songs that go back to the days when Christ walked the earth. That’s your old-time music. We met the circle-drum player after the show and told him how much we enjoyed his playing. I acted like an interviewer and put a mic up toward his face, asking him what he thought of country music. He said something back to me that sounded so funny, though I have no idea what he said. He may have said, “Get that mic out of my face.” Who knows!

  That Eastern tour was more like a pilgrimage, and I felt lucky to be a musician helping to spread good cheer and fellowship in a language that goes beyond borders. I saw how music can reach the nations of the world and bring people together. It’s a sacred language, really, the breath of the Creator. And it was a privilege to travel with our little troupe, especially with wise elders like John Jackson, and get to watch them share their gifts. It was a great lesson in what music can do.

  Getting away from my life and seeing the world did me a world of good. The trip was full of show dates and catching planes and carrying luggage and running around, but it was a good kind of busy. Seeing places and meeting people who were so different from me opened my eyes and freed my mind. In those days, there was no Internet or e-mail. We didn’t live in a “global” society the way we do now. I was being exposed to cultures that were entirely new to me, and it changed my life. It was also, in many ways, a total break from the reality of my life back home.

  Much fun as I had, there was a sense of dread, too. I knew there was a lot of stuff I had to face down once I got back. There was no escaping the reality that my marriage was over.

  Near the end of the tour, I got the divorce papers. They came special-delivery airmail to my hotel in New Delhi, and the bad feeling came with them. The life Brenda and I had together had come to an end, but it was still hard to face. Getting the divorce seemed like I’d failed. I was raised to believe a marriage was supposed to last forever. Mom and Dad had been married for decades. They’d had some tough times, but they stayed together. They were still standing. I felt like I’d let them down. Not to mention the guilt I felt over what my divorce would do to my children.