Kentucky Traveler

by Ricky Skaggs

  You hear about Grandpa going off the handle or forgetting this or that. But you know, there are just as many stories about what a good friend and neighbor he was. I know for a fact he was real good to the Whites when they first moved to Nashville. He hired ’em to work on show dates opening for him in their hungry years. He just wasn’t the type to sugarcoat much, so he could come off as a grouch. Like Mr. Buck said many a time, Grandpa was a salty old gentleman. He loved the Lord, but he didn’t tolerate much foolishness.

  Like Grandpa Jones, Roger Miller was the same off stage as on. He always had off-the-wall jokes to tell, or something outrageous to say. He really knew how to live in the moment. He’d just hang out and be funny, as only Roger could be. He’d tell me about songs he was working on, sometimes just a phrase that popped into his head and that he’d try to get down on paper. One time he said, “Ricky, I’ve got the title and the hook line for a new song, tell me what you think: ‘If You Won’t Be My Number One, Then Number Two on You.’” All I could think to do was say, “Wow,” and then laugh my head off.

  Another time Roger came to Jimmy Dickens backstage at the Opry, and he held his hand down around his belly between his chest and his belt buckle, and he said, “I’ve had it up to here with Little Jimmy Dickens!” You may have heard about when Roger visited the Grand Canyon, looked out on the sunset over the west rim, and said, “Just think what God could have done if He’d had money!” It was never a dull moment with Roger.

  I almost forgot to tell you a little story about Jumpin’ Bill Carlisle. He was another fun-loving hillbilly from Kentucky, one of country music’s great showmen, same as his brother Cliff. In his younger years, Bill was famous for jumping a good four feet high straight up right behind the mic, all the while carrying a tune—I believe he was a Pentecostal, so you can see how he could pull that off. He was still going strong in his seventies as an Opry mainstay.

  One night backstage, I was carrying my daughter Molly on my shoulders. She was maybe three years old at most. We saw Carlisle coming down the hallway, and he went up to Molly and he said, “How are you, little girl?” and he pulled a funny face to try to make her laugh. Molly looked down at him, a little scared. Then she blurted out, “Daddy! He’s ugly!”

  Oh, God, did I ever wince when I heard those words come out of her mouth! I was so embarrassed. I wanted to just crawl under a log somewhere and play dead. I was trying to find a way to apologize for Molly while telling her that what she had said wasn’t very nice.

  Bill just grinned and said, “Ricky, the look on your face was worth a thousand dollars.”

  It was bittersweet to be around legendary performers in their declining years. Herman Crook of the Crook Brothers Band was in the original cast of the Opry and he made his debut on July 24, 1926. He was still a regular when I joined up, a quiet and courtly ol’ fella in a suit and bowtie, never in a hurry. The Opry members knew him but hardly anyone else did. Yet he played his harmonica with such pride, and he enjoyed a good long Indian summer into his late eighties. For a young newcomer like me, Herman was living history, the last of the old-timers.

  I remember seeing Porter Wagoner in his last few months, going on stage with such dignity and honor for the Opry, for the music, and for the fans who came to the Opry. He was weak and sickly and in a lot of pain, but he never let the audience know he was suffering. It was all about the show. He was a master among the old-school country entertainers.

  Some just kept on playing till the very end. On May 26, 1984, the legendary harmonica player and Hee Haw star Onie Wheeler, who’d worked with Acuff and George Jones and so many greats, collapsed and died of a heart attack on stage at the Opry. He died doing what he loved best, playing music.

  The worst thing is to watch the Opry stars grow so feeble that they can’t perform anymore. I remember Minnie’s last show. I knew her bones were aching her, but she didn’t complain. We went to visit Minnie in her final months after a series of strokes put her in a nursing home. Me and Sharon and the kids would go by for a visit and sing to keep her company. She gave Molly one of her Minnie Pearl straw hats, and Molly still has it. Such a kind person, Minnie was.

  These precious elders taught me and my family so much about music, life, and how to soldier on. They taught me how they brought traditional music into the Opry and then expanded on it. Sure, they loved tradition, but they also embraced new artists and new sounds, and that’s how they grew the tradition into the future. That’s how the Opry stays evergreen and everlasting, and that’s why it will always be around. So many of the elders have passed on in the last several years: Jumpin’ Bill, Porter, Hank Snow. And more recently, we lost George Jones, Jack Green, Charlie Louvin, Ferlin Husky, Johnnie Wright, Wilma Lee Cooper, and Kitty Wells. Sometimes in a quiet moment, I’ll catch myself reminiscing, and I’ll feel like crying, I miss ’em so bad. Sometimes I can hear their voices over my shoulder, singing or talking or just encouraging me. It’s that great cloud of witnesses the Apostle Paul talks about. Minnie used to say, “Just go out and love ’em, and they’ll love you back.”

  Sometimes you wonder, Who’s gonna fill their shoes? as the George Jones song says. All we can do is try our best—go out on stage and sing a few songs and try to make the people happy for a while. You don’t play the Opry for the money. There ain’t no big money in the deal, really. You do it out of love and gratitude for the history and to carry on the tradition that’s been handed down.

  And you know what? There are plenty of Opry legends still with us, singing their hearts out every Saturday night when they’re able, from Jean Shepard and Jan Howard to Little Jimmy Dickens and Jimmy C. Newman, and we need to appreciate them while we can. They sure don’t make ’em like that anymore. Family, and the generations, that’s what the Opry is all about.

  Chapter 17

  COUNTRY BOY

  Skaggs is blessed with the clearest and most expressive tenor voice that has been heard in country music since Ira Louvin, and his instrumental virtuosity is breathtaking. . . . He is not purely a traditionalist, even though he does traditional material beautifully. His music is informed by the wide range of music that he and other young people have heard and played in today’s world.

  —Country Music, U.S.A., by Bill C. Malone

  There is a famous quote from Chet Atkins in which he says I singlehandedly saved country music in the early ’80s. Well, I loved my friend Chet, but I didn’t quite do it all by myself. It’s true I had my thumbprint in a lot of places, and I had a big role in the process, but no bigger than Reba McEntire and George Strait.

  Back in ’82, George and I had appeared together at the Country Radio Seminar that really set my career in motion. We started at around the same time in Nashville. Reba had been at it for a while when I got there, and she was an up-and-comer, on her way to becoming the top female country singer of the decade.

  Of the three of us, I was lucky to have the first number-one hit, but they were soon nipping at my heels on country radio and on the Billboard charts every week. We were winning awards from Country Music Association, Academy of Country Music, and Music City News, and there were plenty to go around. Things were going our way, and we were rooting for each other.

  We three didn’t set out to wave a banner; we were just singing from the heart, and the best part was that the music we were making was real country. In the 1980s, there was a revival going on of the old sounds we’d heard growing up. Some writers were giving it a name, the “New Traditionalist movement.” In England, the journalists took to calling me a neo-traditionalist. I had to look up that term in the dictionary. There were lots of changes in the music business. We were all young kids, but we were selling lots of records and lots of tickets to our shows, and the radio was playing country songs with fiddles and steel guitars again. The fans were certainly happy about that, and so were we. It almost seemed too good to be true.

  Back in those days, there were lots of different country sounds and looks. Thing was, I never fit in too good with the h
erd, whether it was neo this or hat-act that. I didn’t sound much like anybody else, and I didn’t look or dress the part. I never wore a cowboy hat, except on a few show dates in Texas, where hats are just about required. Speaking of looks, I had a few crazy hairdos that were popular in the ’80s. Yeah, I plead guilty. I had some doozies. I thought at the time they were cool. My kids look at those album covers now and have a good chuckle! And I just chuckle right along with them. I don’t try to defend my haircuts. I just tell my kids that back then, I thought that was stylin’.

  You can check out the back-cover photo of Don’t Cheat in Our Hometown and get a side profile look at one of the finest hairdos that money could buy in 1983, courtesy of stylist Earl Cox at Trumps Hair Salon in Nashville. Earl still cuts my hair to this day. Well, when I get a haircut, that is, which ain’t all that often, now that I’ve got more of a shaggy sort of “Elijah thing” going on.

  I like to think my music has stood the test of time a whole lot better than my fashion sense. For that, I give a lot of credit to my band. If anything set my sound apart and made it unique, it was the Ricky Skaggs Band. The reason was simple. We were a real band, a band of brothers in a town where musicians could feel like factory workers.

  Being a picker as well as a singer, I always felt part of the band. I knew they depended on me to pull my weight and take a good, hot solo on guitar or mandolin. There was a role for me leading the band besides just singing. I’ve never considered myself to be just a front man. I put on a show, but as a musician and a singer.

  Look at a great singer like Conway Twitty. He was not the entertainer type, either, though he entertained. I toured with him and saw him perform many a time. He walked on stage and just stood there and sang hit after hit for almost an hour, and the crowd went ballistic. All he needed was his band and his voice. That’s why he had forty number-one records. What an artist like Conway proves is that the music itself is enough to satisfy people, whether in a little club or a huge arena.

  I’m not talking about volume; I’m talking about charisma and pure God-given talent. Ain’t nobody sounded like Conway. He had his own sound that was as distinct and recognizable as Elvis Presley or George Jones. There haven’t been many singers who could hold a candle to him.

  In that regard, I wanted to be like Conway and make music worthy enough to stand on its own. My situation was different, though, because I had to play and sing. In the Ricky Skaggs Band, it wasn’t a case of me and the band. It was us, together, making our own sound. This group philosophy went back to my training with Ralph and with J.D. Crowe. In bluegrass, the band is the most important thing, not the soloist or the singer. Monroe started that group chemistry, where the focus was on the whole ensemble. That approach is the foundation of a bluegrass band.

  For all my major albums and hits, I used a full band—a country band with a bluegrass attitude. It was different than the usual Nashville way. A lot of artists used the same session players, and it gave their records uniformity. Having my own band made us sound different, ’cause we worked different. We were working in the bluegrass tradition, where you get in the studio and record an album with the band you tour with. In fact, it was the same with the old country guys, Ray Price, Ernest Tubb, Hank Williams, Little Jimmy Dickens—they all used their touring bands in the studio.

  That was especially the case with Highways & Heartaches, my second LP for Epic. The band was road-tested, and you could sure tell by listening. Every musician added their own flavor to the mix, and it all gelled. Producing is a tricky balance of preparedness and spontaneity. I wanted the record to sound like we cut it live. I think we got close on Rodney Crowell’s “One Way Rider,” where we tried to catch the drive that a band gets on stage when things really start cooking, and where the solos kept shifting into higher gears, and the music took you on a joyride that ended just a little too soon.

  We were making a stand for bluegrass and the integrity it represented. By that second album, we started to make converts of people who’d always turned up their noses at bluegrass music. Maybe for some, the bluegrass sound is too nasally or too fast. All I wanted was a chance to open up their ears. Thanks to country radio, they heard my records, and they liked what they heard. And I had plenty more to give ’em where that came from!

  Though I wanted my music to be popular, I also wanted to keep it clean, and sometimes that meant a compromise. Like when I had to tweak two songs from Highways & Heartaches. I guess the audience didn’t mind, ’cause both singles went to number one. The first was a catchy tune, “Heartbroke,” written by Guy Clark. I had played fiddle and sung backup for Guy on his 1981 album The South Coast of Texas, and the song had grabbed me. I knew I wanted to record it myself, but there was a line in the second verse that started out, “Pride is a bitch and a bore when you’re lonely.”

  Well, I knew I couldn’t sing a curse word, no matter how great the song was. I wanted to keep the lyrics clean and decent. I wasn’t trying to be a prig or a Goody Two-shoes, but I just couldn’t record a song with salty words that I wouldn’t be comfortable singing for my mom and dad. Now, I know life ain’t always clean and decent, but I could try and do songs that talked about a better kind of life.

  That one word was all that was holding me back. I loved Guy’s song. I just couldn’t sing the line the way he wrote it, so I changed it to “Pride when you’re rich is a bore if you’re lonely.” Not much different, but enough so that folks like my parents could enjoy the song and not be offended.

  Now, you hate to take the liberty of messing with a songwriter’s lyrics, especially when they’re from a true wordsmith like Guy Clark. It’s their song and it’s a work of art and it’s almost sacred. But I felt I had to do it. It was the same thing with another killer song I loved, “Highway 40 Blues.”

  The songwriter was Larry Cordle, and his family was neighbors of ours back home in Lawrence County, where his mother Christine delivered the mail on Brushy Creek. I had a feeling that “Highway 40 Blues” could be a huge hit, and I was ready to cut it, bringing in my buddy Béla Fleck on banjo to give it a bluegrass touch. But there was a reference I didn’t care for: “My eyes are filled with bitter tears; sure could use a good cold beer.”

  Now, that may not seem so bad, especially in this day and age and the anything-goes-and-whatever-feels-good world that we’re living in. But this wasn’t about the culture now or back in the ’80s, either; it was about how I was raised as the son of Hobert and Dorothy Skaggs. I didn’t think it was something I’d want them to hear me singing. So I went ahead and changed the last part to “Lord, I ain’t been home in years.” It didn’t damage the song’s integrity, and it didn’t alter the meaning too much. I didn’t like to do it, but I felt I needed to so that I could feel right singing it and be true to myself.

  Hits are great, and you need hits to have success in the music business. But it was more important to have songs that I could live with—and that the kids and the parents could sing along with, too—and not be embarrassed. Lots of country music fans agreed, and both songs went to Number One.

  Funny thing was, the label had wanted me to edit “Highway 40”—not the line that I tweaked, but ’cause of the fact that it had four instrumental solos in a row. They didn’t think the public could handle all that hot picking on a country record, especially on a single targeted for heavy radio airplay. I said sure they could, if the solos were exciting enough, and sure enough, people loved it.

  In that sense, “Highway 40 Blues” was a real breakthrough for ’80s country radio, ’cause it brought the banjo and mandolin right up there with electric and pedal steel guitars. I know that Larry was fine with how it all turned out. He kidded me about how I’d fooled the public into digging bluegrass by adding the piano and drums and steel guitar.

  After Highways & Heartaches did so well, with four number-one singles, Epic wanted to release another album as soon as possible to keep the momentum going. That meant it was finally time for those rough demos I’d made for Sugar Hill to
get finished as masters for my third major-label release. Epic worked out a deal with Sugar Hill to purchase the tracks, and Barry Poss had been wise to wait, because Epic paid dearly.

  There was one glitch. RCA, who had Dolly Parton under contract, found out that she’d sung on two songs, and there was no paperwork granting permission or approval or anything. RCA was a rival label, and Dolly was by then a huge crossover success on the pop charts. Rick told me I’d have to take off Dolly’s vocals. I was so naïve about the record business, I couldn’t believe it. I thought he was kidding.

  “No, I’m not,” he said. “RCA’s throwing a fit, and they’re not playing around.”

  So I went back in the studio and overdubbed Dolly’s vocal parts, which is like trying to repaint the Mona Lisa. It about killed me to sing tenor that high. Pee Wee could have done it with no problem. The overdub sounded all right, it was just bittersweet that no one was gonna get to hear Dolly’s angelic singing on these songs. So we were ready to go ahead and include the Dolly-less songs for release on the album.