“After my divorce in 1990, I thought, ‘That’s it for me; never again.’ I never had any intention of looking for romance again. I thought, ‘I don’t deserve another chance, and I don’t think I want to put forth the effort.’ I don’t know what happened. It musta been the moon.”
Following his divorce, Marty Stuart had also decided he’d never marry again. But after he and Connie had been seeing each other for more than three years, he proposed.
“Pretty clumsily,” he explains. “We were sitting on the front porch of the house, and I wasn’t very good at it. She says that when I really asked her, I said, ‘Go find that rock your birth certificate is carved on, and let’s get this thing over with.’ I don’t think I was that clumsy, but I probably was.”
MARTY STUART AND CONNIE Smith are not the longest-married Opry cast members. Nor are Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood. That distinction belongs to Ricky Skaggs and Sharon White of the family band The Whites. Ricky and Sharon were married on August 4, 1981.
Ricky and Sharon have had parallel careers. Both became country stars around the same time. Both were professional musicians as teenagers. Both are steeped in country tradition. Both work on the bluegrass festival circuit.
Ricky Skaggs was born in Kentucky on July 18, 1954. Sharon’s birth date is December 15, 1953, and she was raised in Texas. Ricky became a member of Ralph Stanley’s band at age fifteen. That’s around the same time that Sharon and her younger sister Cheryl (born January 27, 1955) told their father, Buck White, that they were ready to hit the road as a band. Sharon plays guitar. Cheryl plays upright bass. Buck, who was born January 13, 1930, is proficient on mandolin, guitar, and piano.
“We met in 1971,” says Sharon. “It was the first summer that Ricky traveled with Ralph Stanley. And it was the year that Cheryl and I said to Dad, ‘Whenever you’re ready, let’s put the house up for sale and go for it.’”
“I flipped out when I saw her and heard her,” recalls Ricky. “I wanted to meet her so bad. Went up and kinda flirted with her a little bit. I was sixteen years old.”
“We moved to Nashville in September 1971, and I saw him again in October when he came to town for the Country Music Convention,” Sharon remembers. “We started working the festivals on the bluegrass circuit. We ran into him a lot then. . . . We just gradually got to be pals during that time.”
“Sharon was just someone I could talk to,” says Ricky. “I could relate to her because we both had the same goals. You know, we both wanted to make it in the music business.”
Emmylou Harris discovered The Whites’ abilities. In 1979, she invited them to join her on tour as her opening act and harmony singers. Ricky joined Emmylou’s band, too. In January 1980, Sharon was divorced from her first husband, banjo player Jack Hicks. Eight months later, Ricky was divorced from his first wife, Barbara, with whom he had two children, Mandy and Andrew. The divorces drew Ricky and Sharon together.
“I was hurtin’, and she was hurtin’,” Ricky recalls. “We started hangin’ really close together.”
At first, “there was nothing really romantic happening,” Sharon reports. “When it started becoming a romantic thing, it scared us both. We were afraid it would ruin our friendship.”
Ricky had his first hit records in 1981. He produced the records that made The Whites stars the following year. He joined the Opry cast on May 15, 1982. The Whites became members on March 2, 1984. Since then, Ricky and Sharon have had two children, Molly and Luke.
In 1987, Ricky Skaggs and Sharon White won a Country Music Association (CMA) Award for their duet “Love Can’t Ever Get Better Than This.” Twenty years later, Ricky and The Whites teamed up for their first full CD together, Salt of the Earth. On February 10, 2008, it won them a Grammy Award.
SHARON IS PARTICULARLY CLOSE to Connie Smith. The two women share a deep Christian faith and often pray together. Sharon is also a fan of her friend, and she’s not alone in her admiration for the emotion-drenched singing of Connie Smith. Connie’s fellow Opry star Dolly Parton notably once said, “There’s really only three female singers in the world: Streisand, Ronstadt, and Connie Smith. The rest of us are only pretending.”
Marty Stuart’s recording-studio work with Connie Smith resulted in her comeback album in 1998. Since then, Connie has enthusiastically reembraced the career she once walked away from.
After he took his first snapshot of Connie, Marty developed a passion for photography that has led to two books and several exhibitions. Marty has also collected music memorabilia for many years, and he is now the curator of a traveling museum exhibit called Sparkle and Twang. But nothing he has ever “collected” compares to his wife, he says.
“Connie is so authentic, and that applies to any generation,” says Marty. “Connie’s voice is a true part of America’s atmosphere. She sings better washing the dishes at the sink than most people’s best records. I’m married to Connie Smith, and that’s the standard. My baby is a country-music essential. I am often asked, ‘Marty, what is your favorite treasure in country music?’ Why, Miss Connie Smith!
“The thing that makes our marriage work is we both go back to what we went up to Pine Ridge for, the spirit . . . and the fact that we’ve both been down these roads before. Experience helps. Wisdom helps. Counsel helps. I think even music helps. But at the end of the day, it’s the love and respect and looking to God and having a sense of humor underlying the whole thing.
“When Connie and I have a bad day, the thing that comes up is, ‘You wanna go again tomorrow?’ What is love? Love is going again tomorrow.”
15
Vince and Amy
If you ask Vince Gill why he loves his wife, Amy Grant, he just might look at you like you’re insane.
“Have you ever met her?” he asks incredulously. “That’s all you have to do. Really, all it takes is to spend just five minutes with her and have a conversation with her, and you can’t help but love her. It’s kind of amazing.”
The outrageous New York radio personality Don Imus began making wisecracks about Amy after she and Vince wed in 2000. Vince recalls making a special trip to New York to confront him.
“After Amy and I got married, Imus really turned on me. He really liked me before that. On his show, he was just ragging us every day for getting married. He just started hammering us. So I went on his show after my next record came out. We were talking for a little while, and finally he brought her name up. I said, ‘You know, I heard you said some things about my wife.’ I said, ‘I’ve got to be real honest. That’s the reason I came up here. I didn’t really come up here to promote my record. I came up here to tell you we need to straighten this thing out. Because we’re either going to straighten this out, or I’m going to come across this desk, and I’m gonna whip your butt.’
“He started grinning and said, ‘Well, let’s straighten this thing out.’ I said, ‘You’ve never met her, have you?’ He said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘If you’d ever met her, you would never say those things about her.’ Afterward, somebody called me and said, ‘That is the greatest thing you could have said to him.’ Just my saying, ‘You never met her.’”
Vince avers that to know her is to love her. He explains that Amy Grant is not only glowingly beautiful and immensely talented as a singer-songwriter, she is unfailingly gracious, considerate, kind, compassionate, and warm. She is also the largest-selling Christian-music artist in history. And it turned out that her music community made their relationship much more difficult than Don Imus ever could.
In the 1990s, rumors swirled in Nashville about the two celebrities, particularly in highly judgmental Christian-music circles. But Vince states that he and Amy were simply great buddies and not romantically involved during most of the time the gossip was being whispered.
“It was rumored and so public, long before we really did become a couple,” he says. “There was an awful lot of damage done by the tongue-waggers who really thought the worst of us. They were incorrect.
“It was like me
eting my oldest and dearest friend when I met Amy,” Vince recalls. “I think a lot of people assumed we orchestrated our getting together, and they couldn’t be more wrong. It was never even discussed between the two of us. We just tried to maintain a great friendship. We did the best we could with the high road.”
Vince Gill taped his first Christmas television special at the Tulsa Performing Arts Center in Oklahoma on November 29, 1993. His guests on that Nashville Network special were Michael McDonald, Chet Atkins, and Amy Grant. She and Vince dueted on her song “Tennessee Christmas,” and they “clicked” as personalities at once.
The two first recorded together at Amy’s request. In 1994, she had a tune called “House of Love,” and thought his high voice would sound good singing with hers. He was such a fan of hers that he agreed to her request without even hearing the song first. Their duet became a big pop hit single. On his When Love Finds You album of the same year, she returned the favor by cowriting and singing background vocals on “If I Had My Way.” Prophetically, that album also included the torn-between-two-loves ballad “Which Bridge to Cross (Which Bridge to Burn),” a song Vince cowrote with his fellow Grand Ole Opry star Bill Anderson.
At any rate, by 1996, Vince Gill and Amy Grant were fast friends. Each encouraged the other musically. In his case, the result was his brilliant 1996 album High Lonesome Sound. That Christmas, Vince appeared at the Nashville Arena as a guest at her “Amy Grant’s Tennessee Christmas” concert. She called their close friendship an “investment” in one another.
“My investment has been criticized and called into question and everything else,” she said when asked about the gossip surrounding them. “I just go, ‘I’m not responsible for everybody’s opinion of the people I choose to be friends with.’ I think the world of my friends.”
Complicating and intensifying the rumors about them was the fact that both celebrities were married to two other public figures. Vince’s crumbling eighteen-year marriage was with Janis Gill of the country duo Sweethearts of the Rodeo. Amy’s troubled marriage was with Christian singer-songwriter, humorist, and TV personality Gary Chapman. Amy and Gary married in 1982 and were in marital counseling as early as 1987–1988.
Still, it was Vince who went through a divorce first. His marriage to Janis ended in 1997. During that year, the troubled star found solace at the Opry. For several months, he performed on the show almost weekly.
“When I went through my divorce, I spent most of my time out there,” he comments. “The amount of time I’ve been out there is for the investments I’ve made in all those folks as people, not as stars. That’s the real beauty of the Opry, getting to know the people. It’s even a better thing than knowing them as the big stars that they are.
“All those people know how much I revere them. Part of my getting to know those folks was as much out of respect for my parents as anything else. They loved that music, probably even more so than me.”
VINCENT GRANT GILL WAS born April 12, 1957, in Norman, Oklahoma. His father, Stan, was an attorney and judge who played piano, guitar, and banjo. Both he and Vince’s mother, Jerene, were big country-music fans who sang around the house. By the time he graduated from high school, in Oklahoma City, Vince was an excellent guitarist and the veteran of a high school bluegrass band called Mountain Smoke. An invitation to join Bluegrass Alliance led him to move to Louisville, Kentucky, after graduation. Following a subsequent and brief stint in the band Boone Creek with future Opry star Ricky Skaggs, Vince moved to California.
On the West Coast, nineteen-year-old Vince joined Byron Berline and Sundance. While in that group, Vince met Rodney Crowell, Guy Clark, and Emmylou Harris, who became lifelong friends of his. It was also while in Sundance that Vince first encountered the sister duo Sweethearts of the Rodeo. In 1979, he became the lead singer for the established pop-country group Pure Prairie League. The following year, Vince sang the group’s biggest hit, “Let Me Love You Tonight,” and married Janis Oliver of Sweethearts of the Rodeo.
In 1981, Vince joined The Cherry Bombs, the band that backed Rodney Crowell and Rosanne Cash. Daughter Jenny was born in 1982. Former Cherry Bombs member Tony Brown offered Vince a solo recording contract in Nashville, so the Gills moved to Music City in 1983.
“After I moved here in ’83, I took my dad and my sister to see the Opry. I’d never been to an Opry performance. It was pretty unique to see it for the first time. What’s so neat about the Opry, to me, is that so many of those artists are my family’s favorites. When my dad met Jimmy Dickens for the first time, he said, ‘Hey, I cannot find a copy of “Country Boy” [Jimmy’s 1949 hit].’ Jimmy said, ‘Give me your address, and I’ll just send you one.’ I had no idea why my dad brought that up.
“My favorite story of all is when my dad called me up after I had sung ‘May the Bird of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose’ with Jimmy Dickens. He said, ‘Now you’ve made it. Now you’ve done something.’
“At my dad’s funeral [in 1997], I brought a boom box out and started playing some of his favorite songs. The first song I played was ‘Country Boy.’ After I played that, I asked my dad’s brother to speak. He was kind of in shock. He said, ‘I cannot believe Vince picked ‘Country Boy’ to play. He probably has no idea of this, but when we were little boys, we got a little record player for Christmas, and the first record we ever had was that!’
“So you just can’t help seeing the connection, that circle, and thinking of me as a kid listening to all those records that those Grand Ole Opry stars made.”
In the wake of such hits as “Oklahoma Borderline” (1985), “Cinderella” (1987), “When I Call Your Name” (1990), “Never Knew Lonely” (1991), and “Pocket Full of Gold” (1991), Vince Gill was invited to join the Opry’s cast. The date of his induction was August 10, 1991.
“That was pretty great,” Vince recalls. “How many artists can say that Roy Acuff inducted them? Not many, I’m sure. I always had such a reverence for that place. There’s a side of me that feels like some of the young Turks need to stick up for these people. They need to tell other people who these stars are. It’s like me discovering Eric Clapton and Eric telling me, ‘Hey, Robert Johnson is where I got all this.’ That’s the way you teach. George Jones will tell you that Roy Acuff was how he learned to sing.”
Vince’s fame and acclaim grew dramatically throughout the 1990s. But he always maintained his loyalty to the Opry. “When Love Finds You” (1994), “Worlds Apart” (1996), “If You Ever Have Forever in Mind” (1998), and the rest of his more than twenty-five top-ten hits have delighted Opry audiences as well as millions who have seen his concerts.
Many of his songs come from deeply personal places. “Go Rest High on That Mountain” was written to commemorate the 1994 passing of his older brother Bob. His moving 1998 song “The Key to Life” saluted his late father. “Pretty Little Adriana” (1996) was inspired by the tragic shooting death of a young Nashville girl. “I Still Believe in You” (1992) was written as an apology following a fight with Janis.
He has sung duets with several of his fellow Opry stars, notably Dolly Parton (1995’s “I Will Always Love You”), Patty Loveless (1999’s “My Kind of Woman, My Kind of Man”), Ricky Skaggs and Steve Wariner (1991’s “Restless”), Reba McEntire (1993’s “The Heart Won’t Lie”), and Alison Krauss (1996’s “High Lonesome Sound”). The Opry’s Emmylou Harris enlisted him as her harmony vocalist for her 1987 gospel collection Angel Band. So it was no surprise that Vince found comfort in his frequent visits to the show in 1996–1997, when his marriage was ending.
“I am going to be fine,” he said at the time. “I am going to get through it. I am just trying to treat [the divorce] with as much class and respect as I have everything else in my life. So I’m being respectful of Janis and protective of myself. It doesn’t need to be an open book.”
“My marriage dissolved because it should have,” he reflects today. “It needed to. Not because of Amy, but because of Janis and me.
“What my friendship
with Amy did more than anything was to shine a light on what was really true, that we were both in places that weren’t great, weren’t healthy, weren’t a lot of things. In all honesty, I don’t think I ever believed that we would wind up together.”
They collaborated professionally again during the production of Vince’s 1998 Christmas album. Its title tune, “Breath of Heaven,” was one of Amy’s songs. Originally written for a female voice to sing about the Virgin Mary, Amy agreed to change a few words so that Vince could sing it from a male point of view.
Amy and Gary separated in 1998 and divorced in 1999. Inevitably, her community blamed Vince for the breakup.
“They had a scapegoat, and it was me. I felt like every Christian in the world didn’t like me. All that stuff, in a sense, probably made us withdraw more than normal. I knew those feelings [of love] were there. So we tried to be respectful by not being out in public too much, too soon.
“One of my favorite memories was from when we first started dating. One of the first things we did together was go to one of her niece’s graduation from [the private Nashville girls’ school] Harpeth Hall. I was a little apprehensive about going. I said, ‘Man, the whole West End community is going to be there.’
“But we’re going to go. So away we go. We’re running a little bit late, as we normally do. We round the corner going into this big courtyard area where all the parents are sitting and waiting for the girls. I did not know this, but back farther behind us, the girls were lining up to come out. Everybody was really looking, honestly, where the girls were coming out. And I thought it was me. I was looking at Amy as we were walking up, and I go, ‘This is really uncomfortable. I feel like the whole zip code is staring at me.’ She goes, ‘Me, too.’ Then we turned and saw the girls were behind us, and we go, ‘I think we’re okay.’”
Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain Page 18