Kentucky Traveler Read online

  DEDICATION

  This book is dedicated

  to my mother, Dorothy Skaggs,

  my father, Hobert Skaggs,

  and my musical father, Bill Monroe.

  They taught me how to pick and sing and honor God.

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Prologue: Martha, Kentucky: Summer 1960

  Chapter 1: Roots of My Raising

  Chapter 2: Preachers and Prophets

  Chapter 3: Boy Meets Mandolin

  Chapter 4: Chasing a Dream

  Chapter 5: Saints and Sinners

  Chapter 6: Hillbilly Rock of Ages

  Chapter 7: The Lonesome Mountain Boys

  Chapter 8: History of the Future

  Chapter 9: Rules of the Road

  Chapter 10: New Friends & Good Ol’ Boys

  Chapter 11: Bluegrass Capital of the World

  Chapter 12: New South

  Chapter 13: Hot Band

  Chapter 14: Eastbound and Down

  Chapter 15: Music City

  Chapter 16: Opryland

  Chapter 17: Country Boy

  Chapter 18: Highways & Heartaches

  Chapter 19: Honoring the Fathers

  Chapter 20: Heroes

  Chapter 21: The Prodigal Returns

  Chapter 22: Somebody’s Prayin’

  Photo Section

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  About The Publisher

  Prologue

  Martha, Kentucky: Summer 1960

  Then Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the midst of his brethren.

  —First Book of Samuel, Chapter 16, Verse 13

  Somehow we heard that Bill Monroe was coming through eastern Kentucky. In those days, musicians advertised shows with handbills stuck to electric poles, posters in grocery-store windows, and promos on local radio stations, but word still traveled fastest by mouth. And word got around Lawrence County that the great Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys were going to play a show at the high school in Martha, just up the road.

  Martha was a little town a few miles toward the county line between Blaine and Sandy Hook, Kentucky, not far from where we lived in a hollow called Brushy Creek, near Cordell. It was named after my eighth-great-grandmother, Martha Cothron Skaggs, a Cherokee from Wilkes County, North Carolina. She married my eighth-great-grandfather, old Peter Skaggs, in 1788, in Fincastle, Virginia. They moved to Floyd County, Kentucky, in 1802 and then to the head of Blaine Creek in Lawrence County in 1812. Peter Skaggs was a Baptist preacher. There’s an old cave near there that my dad used to play in when he was a kid, and it was called Peter Cave. The way the story’s come down is that Peter and Martha were considered the elders in that area; they had a lot of kids and did a lot for the community. A cave is one thing, but it took some doing to have a town named after you, especially with Martha being of Indian blood and married to a white settler from Virginia, so she must have been quite a woman to receive such an honor.

  Cordell was even smaller than Martha, but it didn’t matter how small your hometown was or how far out in the sticks you lived, because back then, everybody in our corner of the world knew who Bill Monroe was. He was a big star on the Grand Ole Opry, broadcast on WSM radio every Saturday night from Nashville. Mom and Dad loved his music, and I did, too. I’d never seen a picture of him, so I didn’t know what he looked like. All I knew was that he sung real high and he played mandolin, just like me. I was so excited to hear how he’d sound singing “Blue Moon of Kentucky” in person. I was six years old and this was my first live country-music show. Heck, I’d never been anywhere more exciting than the county fair in Louisa.

  The weeks dragged on until the big night finally came. We all packed into Dad’s Ford Fairlane 500—Mom, Dad, my brother, my sister, and me—and made the drive on Route 32 into Martha, passing the little general store run by Gar Ferguson and pulling up to the ol’ stone high school. We joined the crowd milling around outside and waiting for the band. It started getting close to sunset, and I was wondering if Mr. Monroe had decided not to show up after all.

  Then up went a shout, “There he comes!” and an old Cadillac eased into the gravel parking lot. It was a big black stretch limousine, not like any car you’d see in Lawrence County. There was a wooden box on top with stenciled letters: “BILL MONROE AND HIS BLUE GRASS BOYS.” The Cadillac was fancy all right, but it was dusty from so many hard miles spent on the back roads that had brought the band here to our town. This was before there were many interstate highways, before a lot of things we take for granted now.

  The Blue Grass Boys climbed out of the dirty limo first, and I could hardly believe my eyes. They looked as if they’d just stepped right out of the dry cleaners. No wrinkles on their suits, not a speck of road dust. How they managed it, I’ll never know. There weren’t any motels or rest stops for miles around. I was amazed at how great they looked after so much hard traveling. I thought that was so cool!

  Next, a back door of the Caddy swung open and I could see the tip of a blond beehive hairdo poke out. Come to find out, the bass man for the Blue Grass Boys was really a girl! Not a girl, actually, but a woman older than my mom. She swung her legs out and found a spot on the gravel to plant her high heels, and she slowly stepped out of the limo, careful not to mess up her stage dress. Then she walked ’round back and got her bass fiddle out of the trunk.

  Finally, a man got out of the other side and stood straight as an arrow, looking over the crowd. I knew right off it was Mr. Monroe. You could tell he was the bandleader and boss man. He was dressed real sharp in his suit and hat, and he was carrying his mandolin case. The crowd rushed at him, and he didn’t move an inch, just let ’em come and gather round. He was head and hands above everybody else, as big as an oak tree. Imagine it! The Father of Bluegrass right here in little Martha!

  I didn’t know that Mr. Monroe was in lean times then, just trying to survive by barnstorming the country for fifty cents a head at schoolhouses and fire halls and theaters—wherever he could draw a crowd when he wasn’t on duty at the Opry. I didn’t know rock and roll had nearly put him out of business. I didn’t know that the woman in the fancy dress was Bessie Lee Mauldin, and that she was not only Mr. Monroe’s bass player, she was his girlfriend, too.

  There was a whole lot I didn’t know back then. I was just a pup, and I was awestruck. There were three other Blue Grass Boys: a banjo man, a guitar player, and a fiddler riding in the front seats. They were dressed to the nines, same as Mr. Monroe. The sound system was in the box on the limo roof—two speakers and a couple of microphones, along with the instruments. They loaded all the gear into the building, and in no time they were set up and ready to go.

  Out in the parking lot, I watched Mr. Monroe tip his hat and say his howdies to fans as he tried to make his way through the crowd. Finally, he got to the school door and ducked inside. Everybody piled in after him. We quickly found seats on the folding metal chairs set up on the gym floor. The place was packed with a few hundred people.

  What a show! The band was louder and better than any record or radio broadcast. You could feel the force of the music in your chest. Dad and Mom were loving it, and so was I. The crowd was going crazy. After about thirty minutes, some neighbors from our neck of the woods started shouting out, “Let little Ricky Skaggs get up and sing!”

  Now, these people, they’d seen me pick and sing around Cordell—at our church, at Butler’s grocery store, and on the front steps of the bank. I’d got a little pawnshop mandolin as a present from my dad, and I’d been playing for about a year. Wherever I could, I’d go out and play, mostly with Dad and his guitar. We had us our own little duet, and sometimes, especially on Sundays at church, Mom sang with us, too.

 
; The crowd was hollering for me to do my thing on stage, in the middle of the Bill Monroe show. They wanted to brag on Hobert and Dorothy’s boy, and they got carried away. Mr. Monroe didn’t pay ’em any mind, ignoring all the commotion. But that was like throwing gasoline on a fire, ’cause mountain people can be stubborn. They weren’t gonna give up, and they kept at it hollering, “Let little Ricky sing one!”

  Finally Mr. Monroe got tired of hearing it. He stepped up to the microphone and said, “Where is this little Ricky Skaggs? Where’s he at? Get him on up here!”

  Well, now it was plain to see that he meant business, and I surely wasn’t gonna chicken out and let everybody down. But I was a little nervous, so Dad got up to walk me down the aisle to the stage. Just before I got out of earshot, Mama said, “Now, Ricky, don’t you sing that pinball song!”

  “Pinball Machine” was a novelty hit by Lonnie Irving in the summer of 1960, a song about a truck driver who loses all his money playing pinball. My mom knew how much I loved it, and she also knew that Mr. Bill Monroe wouldn’t want that tune played anywhere near his stage. She was always looking after me.

  Well, when I reached the edge of the stage, I just froze. When Mr. Monroe looked down to see a little towheaded boy, he wasn’t amused. I think he was expecting a teenager. And here I was, looking up at this mountain of a man. On stage, he was even bigger than he looked in the parking lot.

  The stage was only a few feet above the gym floor, so Mr. Monroe just stooped over and grabbed me by the arm and pulled me up like a sack of feed. He stood me right next to him. He towered beside me, but I tried to stand up straight like he was.

  “What do you play, boy?” he barked into the mic.

  “I play the mandolin!”

  Well, he just laughed and said, “You do?”

  Slowly, he took his great big F-5 Lloyd Loar Gibson mandolin off his shoulder, carefully wrapping the old leather bootstrap around the curl of the instrument’s body until it fit me just right, and then he hung it on my shoulders. It was the first time I’d ever seen a mandolin that big, much less held one. My pawnshop mandolin was a pint-sized model. This mandolin of Mr. Monroe’s seemed as big as a guitar. I had to think about where to put my fingers on it.

  “What do you want to sing, boy?” he said.

  “‘Ruby!’”

  I was so excited I sort of yelled it out. The song just popped into my head. The Osborne Brothers’ “Ruby, Are You Mad at Your Man?” was a huge bluegrass hit at the time. The band knew it well. Bessie Lee and the rest of the Blue Grass Boys were smiling, kinda amused at my choice. The lyrics were pretty salty for a six-year-old to be singing on stage. I know Mom must have been mortified! To me, though, it was just a catchy tune I heard on the radio, so I’d learned it and played it around the house.

  Somehow, I found E and started chunking rhythm on that big ol’ mandolin. The band joined in, and we were in the right key. I didn’t know much about musical notes and keys back then—I just copied the way Bobby Osborne had done it on the record. I sung my verses, the banjo player took a solo, and I sung the rest of the verses. We rode it till the end.

  The crowd was cheering us on as Mr. Monroe stood off to the side, his big arms folded against his barrel chest. I thought I saw him grinning, but I couldn’t be sure.

  When the song was over, everybody in the place let us know we’d pulled it off. Thinking back on it now, our rendition of “Ruby” was probably just average, but I was the hometown kid, so the crowd was with me all the way. Maybe a little too much. Mr. Monroe came right over, took the mandolin off me, and slung it back on his shoulder. He grabbed me by the arm just like before and set me back down off the stage.

  He didn’t say a word. He just kicked into his most famous tune, “Mule Skinner Blues.” That was his first big hit, the song he’d been featuring on the Opry since 1939, and the Blue Grass Boys really tore it up. I think it was Mr. Monroe’s way of reminding the crowd who they’d paid to see that evening.

  There wasn’t much more to it. I went back to my folks and sat down, and we watched the rest of the show. Afterward, people came up and said, “Son, you done a good job.” It felt good to hear that, but I knew they were just being neighborly and nice. We didn’t go backstage and meet Mr. Monroe that night. I kinda wished we had, ’cause it turned out I didn’t see him again for another ten years.

  It was fun to share the stage with the Father of Bluegrass, and I enjoyed the applause. As much as I had played and sung in church, people there didn’t roar and shout and clap for you. At our Free Will Baptist church that would have been irreverent. So the crowd response that night in Martha felt good ringing in my ears, but what I enjoyed most was playing with a real band. It was the first time I’d ever played with a bunch of musicians instead of just my dad. I liked the big, loud sound of the full band with a bass player, banjo player, fiddler, and a guitar player, too—all the instruments blending together into something powerful. I loved feeling part of that.

  That night in Martha was the biggest thing that had ever happened to me up till then, and I sure was glad it did. Mostly, though, I was just glad I didn’t mess up. It was late by the time we piled into Dad’s Ford and headed back to Brushy Creek. All the excitement had just worn me plumb out. I slept the whole way home.

  Chapter 1

  ROOTS OF MY RAISING

  Lay down, boys, and take a little nap,

  fourteen miles to Cumberland Gap.

  Cumberland Gap, Cumberland Gap,

  way down yonder in Cumberland Gap

  —“Cumberland Gap,” Appalachian folk song

  I was young when I left my home back in the mountains, but the mountains never left me. It don’t matter how many years I’ve been gone or how many miles I’ve traveled. Where I come from is who I am, head to toe. It’s there in the way I sing and the way I talk and the way I pray. Country as a stick!

  I grew up in the hills of eastern Kentucky in a hollow called Brushy Creek. My mom and my dad were spiritual people, and we went to a little Free Will Baptist church where I grew up hearing gospel music and old-time preaching. Real fire-and-brimstone stuff, where they preached so loud you grew up thinking the Lord must surely be hard of hearing.

  We were a community of mountain folks who didn’t have much. But we worked hard and cared for family and neighbors. We all cried together and we all laughed together and we all sang together. We all hurt together when there was a tragedy. We all pulled together, ’cause about all we really had was each other.

  Mom and Dad raised me to be proud of my mountain roots and who I am. Everything I do in my life today reflects on how I was brought up by Hobert and Dorothy Skaggs. They instilled beliefs and values that took root early on, and stayed strong enough to help me through rough times. I’ve had a few.

  My folks knew that a little mountain pride went a long way. They warned me not to get too full of myself. They taught me to be thankful for what I had and where I came from. “Son,” they told me, “always be humble and stay down to earth.”

  Now, when I was a young musician seeing the world for the first time, I was as headstrong as they come. There was a time in my life when you couldn’t have paid me enough to stay in the hills where I was born and raised. I’m older now, and I hope a lot wiser. I can tell you now that I wouldn’t take all the money in the world to be from anyplace else.

  When I was coming up in the business, the only way to get a record deal was to go to Nashville. It was a dream I’d had since I was a little boy and first heard the country stars on the Grand Ole Opry. I used to go to sleep on my Papaw Skaggs’s lap listening to the Opry on an old tube radio in his Ford pickup. To get a clear signal, we’d pull the truck away from the house where all the electric lines were hooked up and park down by the barn. He’d turn on the radio and work the knob to pick up the Opry broadcast on WSM. The radio frequency out of Nashville would come and go up in those mountains, so you had to sit there real quiet and wait for the music to break through the static. And then we’d
hear Roy Acuff and Bill Monroe and it was the greatest sound in the world.

  There came a time when I had to leave home and go to Nashville and try to make my boyhood dream come true. I wanted to carry Kentucky music out of Kentucky, take it out into the world, and deposit it wherever I could. These hills poured music into me from the time I was a child, and I’ve tried to honor that tradition. I’m a carrier of this music. It’s in my DNA.

  Well, I went to Nashville and had a good run in country music, and I was lucky enough to live out my dreams. By the mid-’90s, though, I was over forty years old and the hits were starting to dry up. In 1996, my father, Hobert, and my musical father, Bill Monroe, both passed away. I prayed about what I should do next. It just seemed right in my heart to go back to the old foundation stones of bluegrass, which is what my country career had been built on. I felt a calling to revisit my musical roots again.

  So I went back to the bluegrass I was raised on, the sound that had inspired me to become a musician in the first place. I decided I wanted to play the music I learned as a kid in the mountains, whether I made a good living or not. You know you’re doing the right thing when there’s peace in your heart, and I couldn’t find that in country music anymore.

  My old boss Ralph Stanley made a prediction to an interviewer years ago, when I was having all those number-one records and touring with a tractor-trailer and two buses. “Ricky’s making a name for himself, but you just wait a while,” he said. “I think he’ll come back to bluegrass music.”

  Ralph knew something about me that I didn’t know myself. It makes me think of the Scripture from Proverbs where it says, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and even when he is old, he will not depart from it.” If you pour the foundation into a person and point them to the right path, they may stray from that in their younger years, but they’ll return to it when they mature. That happened to me with bluegrass.

  For me, going back to bluegrass and mountain music was like giving water to a thirsty man. That traditional Appalachian music is part of the wide rolling river of American roots music. No matter how many years pass, or how the place itself changes, that music is a constant flow of fresh water from a deep mountain spring. There are different creeks and tributaries; some flow into the old-time current, and some flow into more commercial waters. But there’s something about that pure mountain stream that still connects us to the old. It’s our musical heritage, and it keeps me nourished. I needed to take a drink of that fresh water straight from the source.