Kentucky Traveler

by Ricky Skaggs

  Well, I was surprised in the best possible way. Most people not only forgave me, they embraced me as a prodigal son who’d finally returned to the fold. Instead of hoots, I got hugs. Also, I had support where it mattered most, from my old boss, Ralph Stanley. He made it known loud and clear he was behind me all the way. He said that the name I’d made for myself in commercial country would help raise the profile for bluegrass and bring more folks out to the shows.

  I sure hoped Ralph was right, for all our sakes. All I knew for sure was that playing bluegrass again was a blessing for me, like giving water to a thirsty man. I was forty-two years old when I devoted myself to bluegrass again, almost ancient for the Nashville crowd. But I felt as young and excited as a kid let loose to run the woods again. Being around so many talented musicians at the festivals really stoked my creative juices, too. It was the perfect environment to get my chops back on mandolin, and to reexperience bluegrass as a living, breathing thing.

  My years away gave me new eyes and ears to appreciate things about bluegrass that I’d taken for granted. I realized how pure and uncorrupted and timeless it was. With country music, image was such a big part of the business, especially once CMT, GAC, and the other cable TV networks came along. But bluegrass was still about the beauty of the music, not what the musicians looked like or dressed like. It was music that still had a heart and a soul and an integrity at its core. It was staying alive by staying true to its roots and its heritage. Even many of the newcomers were still paying respect to the music’s fathers while carving out a niche for themselves.

  After a while, though, there came a day of reckoning. You can play the festivals and talk about how wonderful bluegrass is till the cows come home, but I knew I had to put up or shut up. I knew I had to make a straight-up bluegrass record, put it out on the market, and see if the public was interested. And to tell you the truth, we needed a record to sell on the road.

  The contract I had with Atlantic Records gave me the freedom to pursue my own projects. But they also had first right of refusal, and they weren’t interested in a bluegrass album. Well, that gave me the freedom to cut a record as raw and traditional-sounding as I wanted to. Nothing watered down, and nobody to please ’cept myself. My days of worrying about country radio were over, ’cause I knew they weren’t gonna play bluegrass anyway. If I had anything to prove, it was to those bluegrass purists, the doubters and the naysayers. I wanted to show ’em that I wasn’t dabbling. I was dead serious.

  Making this record was pure joy. I felt like a man coming out of jail and getting his first home-cooked meal in years. It was a favorite dish I could put together just the way I liked. So I paid for studio time, the band, and the artwork—every bit of it—myself. When it was paid for and done, it was all mine. I called it Bluegrass Rules!, and it was the first album I’d ever owned in my life. I started a label, Skaggs Family Records, and found a distributor that wanted to work the album.

  It wasn’t that I just wanted to run my label as an independent; I wanted to conduct my business from a Christian perspective as well. This wasn’t easy. There was a lot of conflict in my heart, and there were a lot of sacrifices to be made.

  We went from having twenty employees, two buses, and a tractor-trailer to less than a dozen people and one bus. We didn’t need a stage full of amplifiers, drums, pianos, and electronic equipment to put on a bluegrass show. I had to cut my band and road crew from fifteen to eight and simplify my whole organization. It was painful, but it was necessary.

  At first, the enemy was busy setting traps and whispering in my ear: What sort of Christian are you to let people go from their jobs? What’s gonna happen if this doesn’t work out like you wanted? You won’t be able to make a real living doing bluegrass. I felt bad having to lay off people for sure, but it was necessary in order to do what I wanted to do.

  The Devil tried to sow doubt and unbelief in my heart, but God kept saying, “Trust me,” so I did.

  Then something really wild happened. In the first month, bluegrass Rules! sold well enough to recoup all our expenses. It ended up selling more than 200,000 copies, a whole lot more than my previous two country records combined. Mind you, if a bluegrass album sells 25,000 in any year, it’s a huge hit, so this was a shock. The sales figures told me there was an audience out there for bluegrass music, and all I had to do was deliver the goods.

  I believe the Lord was blessing the leap of faith we took. ’Course, we weren’t selling as many records as in the old days at CBS/Epic, but now I was getting to keep the profits, and keep my masters, too. And now we could pour that money into developing new artists and giving them a fair deal on our label.

  The vision I had for Skaggs Family Records was for it to be more than just a home for my recordings. We wanted our label to be a haven for traditional roots music—for young groups like Blue Highway, Cadillac Sky, Cherryholmes, and Mountain Heart, and for seasoned acts like the Whites and the Del McCoury Band. Our label provided a rare chance for young or unsung artists to grow their talent and grow their audience. I’ll always be grateful to my cofounder Stan Strickland for helping a dream become a reality by helping to get Skaggs Family Records down the runway.

  It was important to show people the bluegrass style we were resurrecting wasn’t a museum piece we dusted off and set on a pedestal. We wanted to tap into the power and dynamics of classic bluegrass, like jump-starting an ol’ ’47 Ford and taking it for a spin on the interstate. I kept thinking we had a big question to answer: Are we gonna settle to be copies, or are we gonna try to take the music to new places?

  Our style of bluegrass was a little different from the start. I included three acoustic guitars, one to play solos, one to play rhythm on the two and four of the beat, and the other to play rhythm in a capoed position. At the same time, I wanted to pay tribute to the high, lonesome vocal sounds of the mountains. Paul Brewster was willing and able to blow out some high tenor singing, and he’s been with me ever since.

  Musically, I felt like myself again, because this was the deepest part of who I was as a musician. There was such a feeling of honesty and happiness singing bluegrass. And the best thing was coming home to the mandolin. It was my first love, and I had missed it.

  Not long after Mr. Monroe’s funeral, I got a call from somebody wanting to know if I was interested in a 1923 Gibson Lloyd Loar F-5. It had been locked away in a gun cabinet for 43 years. This mandolin was signed by Lloyd Loar himself on July 9, the very same date as the signature on Bill’s famous 1923 Gibson. There were only four serial numbers between the two mandolins. I played it, and it had the beautiful, resonant tone you find with aged wood, and I had to have it. So I bought it and named it “Mon,” and I took it with me everywhere. I just couldn’t play it enough. Having a new instrument sparks new ideas, and it wasn’t long before I was coming up with new tunes.

  I remember sitting on the bus and heading to a show date, just picking chords and strumming as the miles rolled by, when a tune came to me out of nowhere. It reminded me of an old Monroe tune. I played it for Bobby Hicks, and next thing I knew, I had a song. I named it “Amanda Jewell,” after my daughter Mandy, and I gave it to her as a graduation present.

  Creativity is the key to keeping the music fresh. Bluegrass has changed in some ways for the better. The musicianship has risen to a very high level. The generation coming up now has some of the finest players I’ve ever heard. You listen to what a brilliant player like Chris Thile can do with a mandolin these days, and you can imagine how thrilling it was for folks back in the ’40s when Monroe raised his mandolin up to the microphone. I’ve heard tapes of live Opry broadcasts from that time, and the applause for Bill and the Boys is ear-shattering, the same sort of excitement there was when the Beatles were on The Ed Sullivan Show. It wasn’t teenagers at the Opry, but the excitement was there just the same.

  Chris is part of a new generation. He’s establishing his own style, and he’s influencing young players all over the world. Sam Bush is another great mandolin
player who influenced a whole generation of young musicians. But even with all the great mandolin players out there, and there’s a bunch, Mr. Monroe started it all, and his style, or echoes of his style, can be heard in nearly everyone.

  I’ve always had the impulse to go both directions at once, to connect to the tradition and nudge it forward, too. That’s why I recorded Honoring the Fathers of Bluegrass, my tribute to the Monroe band of ’46 and ’47. I felt it was important to remind the iPod generation about the masters who birthed this sound when it was cutting edge, and to inspire them to go back to the originals and glean from those records, too. Honoring our fathers and our elders is always worthwhile. It keeps us humble and grateful to the ones who came before us.

  I’m a bridge to the past and to the future both. I try to be a father of encouragement to young musicians. I’m lucky to have a great band of young guns, Kentucky Thunder. They’re the Blue Angels of bluegrass. They keep me young, and they push me to stay creative. It’s a real blessing to have talented guys in your band whom you can pour into, and they pour into me as well. There’s an exchange between us every night on stage, and we feed off each other’s energy.

  I know that Kentucky Thunder is a big reason why people come to see our shows, ’cause the guys in the band represent the highest level of musicianship in the business. They’re my employees, but they’re also my musical partners and bandmates. I know the rhythm will be there where it needs to be, and I know everybody’s competing to play the best solo they can, night after night. Every night on stage, these guys exceed my standards, and I’ll tell you what, the bar is set awful high in bluegrass.

  To work in Kentucky Thunder, you need to have the chops, for sure, but you also need to have a head and heart for bluegrass. And that means knowing the history of the music. You have to be able to pull out licks from the ’40s and ’50s, and love doin’ it. That passion is what makes the difference. I can usually tell what’s in a player’s heart.

  Recording for my own label gave me the freedom to make music that was in my heart and pursue whatever pet project I wanted to. In my later country days, I’d sometimes be second-guessing myself in the studio, wondering if I had a hit or not. I don’t need to worry anymore if radio is going to play a record. Bluegrass radio does not dictate what’s cool or what’s not in the way that commercial country radio does.

  Now, I’d long been wanting to do a gospel album, but my contracts just hadn’t allowed for that kind of artistic experimentation. I knew that some fans had come to expect a certain thing from a Ricky Skaggs album, and it wasn’t gospel. But every once in a while, Dad would say, “Son, you need to do ya a good gospel album, a bluegrass gospel album,” and I’d tell him, “I know, Dad, and I promise I will one of these days.”

  So now I was free to follow my heart. I didn’t have to sit around a conference table with people from the record-label telling me why bluegrass wouldn’t sell to a certain demographic or why a gospel album expressing my Christian faith was bad for my career. I owned the record label, and now I could make good on that promise to my Dad. I aimed high when I made Soldier of the Cross. I knew it had to be a keeper. I thought of those classics on the shelf: Bill Monroe’s first gospel LP, I Saw the Light; the Stanleys’ Sacred Songs from the Hills; Jimmy Martin’s Decca masterwork, This World Is Not My Home; the Louvin Brothers’ Satan Is Real album, and Flatt & Scruggs’s Foggy Mountain Gospel. These were all very important albums, to me and to many others.

  But mostly, though, I kept one goal in my mind: I wanted to cut a gospel record that Hobert Skaggs woulda loved to hear on a Sunday morning!

  There are plenty of gospel evergreens, but I wanted to showcase lesser-known songs, like the title song by Lorin Rowan. I’d seen the Rowan Brothers sing at a festival years before, and the words of that song really spoke to me. A soldier of the Cross lifts up Christ and defends the faith. No matter where he goes. I’m a Christian, and I want to walk the faith. It doesn’t matter if I’m playing music in a casino or shopping for groceries in a Kroger’s. The Christian life is always a presence. It’s not something that you keep in the closet and put on for Sunday.

  I sung a cappella on a hymn, “Lead Me to the Rock,” a song that my preaching uncles Roby and Addie Ferguson used to sing, and boy, did they sing it loud! I love singing that hymn, ’cause it gives me a lot of comfort. When the Sauls of this world are chasing me, I know I can always hide in the shadows of my Father’s wings, where I’m safe and loved.

  What a joy to sing that hymn. In fact, what a joy it was to make that whole album. I’m a “musicianary”—one who brings hope and truth to the lost and hurting through music. I wanted to show that Jesus was alive in my life, and the music was an expression of that truth. James 4:8 says, “Draw nigh unto me and I’ll draw nigh unto you.” We’re all as close to Christ as we want to be.

  One song on the album is very special to me. It’s called “Seven Hillsides,” and it was based on a true story about a pastor from eastern Kentucky who had to preach seven fallen soldiers’ funerals in one day. He struggles with what to say to the loved ones about their loss, and how to show them the Lord’s way. I’ve gotten a lot of letters from pastors thanking me for the song. They struggled and wrestled with the same issues, and it gave them strength.

  With Soldier of the Cross we won our third bluegrass Grammy in a row. It wasn’t the award itself that thrilled me—it was knowing that making this record had been the will of God.

  It was a blessing that my mom had a chance to see my return to bluegrass. It set her mind at ease to have me playing the music she and Dad had introduced me to. And she even told me how tickled Dad woulda been that my gospel record got a Grammy!

  In those days, Mom was living alone in same house on Brushy Creek, and she’d get lonely there, especially ’cause she didn’t drive. She battled depression, same as a lot of folks who’ve lost their spouse, the partner they’ve spent their whole lives with.

  I’d visit with her when I could, and we’d sing together like we used to. Sometimes Sharon and I brought the kids, and they loved to hear their mamaw sing old songs like “Heaven Will Surely Be Worth It All.” It really wasn’t the same on Brushy Creek without Dad, though, ’cause he was the life of the party and the master of ceremonies. But life has to go on, and you have to try to fill that emptiness the best you can. One morning in 2001, Mom woke up early for a doctor’s appointment. There was a lady staying at her place as a caretaker who was gonna drive her into town to the doctor’s office. Mama told her she was gonna lie back down and rest while the caretaker finished getting ready, but Mama woke up in heaven!

  She had a stroke. It was a merciful way to go. She didn’t suffer or have to linger in a hospital. Thank you, Jesus!

  My mom was the first person I ever sang with. She poured her sweet mountain voice into me, and she gave me the gift of harmony singing, which I learned at her feet when I could still barely walk. But the most precious gift she gave me was the gift of faith, pointing me to the Cross. Our love for Jesus always drew Mom and me close together, the same way that music did for me and Dad.

  All my life, Mom was there when I needed her. Not having her anymore hurt so bad, but it made me feel glad to know that she had gone home. The next year, Sharon’s mom had a heart attack and died on Father’s Day. Patty White was a powerful Christian woman and another great example of the love of Jesus.

  Now both the family matriarchs were gone. These women were so important as mothers and wives and sisters. Mothers are the soul of a family, and they model the faith in a way that nobody else can. I had wonderful grandmothers, I had a great mother and mother-in-law, and I’m married to a great mom. I’m convinced that there is no way that two men can do the work of one woman!

  Too often, people like Patty White and Dorothy Skaggs don’t get the recognition they really deserve in this life. But God knows their names, and they are both big in heaven. You know, it’s better to be known in heaven than to have the praises of men here on the earth. An
d their prayers for us are felt every day.

  In our family, we’re blessed to have Sharon carrying on that matriarchal role. It’s a big job, and I thank God every day for her. She is a true Proverbs 31 woman: “strength and dignity are her clothing.” She’s raised our children to fear the Lord, and to love and honor Him.

  Putting God first has made the difference for us. That’s what’s kept us in love and in tune with the Lord. We’ve had rocky times, like any couple, but our marriage has never been in jeopardy. I believe God allows us to go through the testing times to help us purify our hearts and make our commitment to each other stronger. We take care of our relationship as husband and wife, and we’re happier now after thirty-two years than when we first got married.

  We’re lucky, too, both of us being musicians and having a shared love and passion. But our faith in Jesus is what helps us stay close when we catch ourselves drifting apart, and that is the intimacy that seals and protects our sacred bond. To us, God is in music, it’s part of His nature. Music was created by Him and for Him (Colossians 1:16).

  That goes for the whole family, too. There are always instruments around our house, and there’s always some music coming from somewhere. It’s a little quieter than it used to be, with Molly and Luke out on their own with bands and ministries they’re involved with. But we get together whenever we can and just sit around and have fun making music as a family. Andrew and Mandy both love music, too. Andrew plays guitar and sings bluegrass up in Kentucky, where he lives, and Mandy is always checking out new bands coming through Nashville.

  In recent years we’ve had an annual tradition that started from the living-room sing-alongs we’ve always had at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Every holiday season, we go out on the road with Kentucky Thunder to perform concerts of carols and hymns and traditional favorites, a show we call Skaggs Family Christmas. There’s Sharon and Molly and Luke, Cheryl White and her daughter Rachel, and, of course, ol’ Mr. Buck, who performs “The Christmas Guest,” a recitation made famous by Grandpa Jones.