Ricky Skaggs - Born for Bluegrass

By Debbie Cafazzo - The News Tribune

   You’ve gotta know where you’ve been to know where you’re going, says bluegrass master Ricky Skaggs - and the Kentucky native knows.

   The man who rocketed to stardom as a mainstream country music star in the 1980s reached back to his bluegrass roots in the mid-1990s.

   “The difference between me and the newer artists,” says Skaggs, "is that I have the history with the architects, the masters that started the music.  I know where the music came from.”

   Where it comes from is the same place Skaggs comes from.

Born 50 years ago in a tiny town in Lawrence County, Ky., in the heart of coal country near the border with West Virginia, Skaggs grew up with the winsome music of Appalachia in his ears.

   He started on the mandolin when he was just five and later learned fiddle by watching his dad’s friends play.

   “My dad was a guitar player, and he sang,” Skaggs said.  “He knew what he liked about music.  He had a great memory, and he could show me things.”

   He must have been a pretty good teacher.

   At age six, during a show in Martha, Ky., Skaggs climbed onstage and played with Bill Monroe, widely acknowledged as the father of bluegrass music.

“He was bigger than life,” Skaggs recalled of the giant who would serve as a guidepost for his musical career. “He was just huge.”

As a teenager, Skaggs was invited to play with bluegrass great Ralph Stanley.  By the 1970s, he had established himself on the bluegrass circuit.

But by the end of that decade, Skaggs was headed in a new direction. Crossing over into mainstream country music, he joined Emmylou Harris’ Hot Band, then went on to win acclaim on his own.  Skaggs topped the country charts with his 1981 release “Waitin’ for the Sun to Shine.”  He earned eight awards from the Country Music Association, including Entertainer of the Year in 1985.

   By the 1990s, Skaggs was ready for a change.  What he did raised a lot of eyebrows in country music circles.

   In 1996, both Bill Monroe and Skaggs’ father died.

   “I felt there was a shift in the wind,” Skaggs said.  “They were two strong pillars in my life.”

   Skaggs had learned bluegrass at his father’s knee, and his father had always urged him to record a bluegrass album, but even though he was a country star, contract obligations made it impossible for Skaggs to do the kind of bluegrass album his father wanted.  So in 1997, he launched his own label, Skaggs Family Records, near Nashville, and he started recording bluegrass songs – songs that had traditionally not provided the kind of big payoff that more traditional and popular country music could.

   “I had a very successful career in country music,” Skaggs said recently while driving to his studio.  “But I felt a deep calling in my heart.  I’m a Christian.  I pray.  And I believe in God’s divine providence that he has a plan for my life.  “When I feel the wind change, I have to try to put my face toward the wind.”

   Skaggs calls his return to his roots “coming back.”  Since he came back to bluegrass, he says, he’s earned more Grammy awards than he ever won as a country musician.

Skaggs and his Kentucky Thunder band pay awesome tribute to the roots of bluegrass on their recent album, “Brand New Strings.”  There’s an instrumental called “Monroe Dancin’,” which Skaggs wrote as a tribute to Monroe’s dance style.  As Skaggs describes it in the album notes: “He had a way-cool dance he called the Kentucky Back-Step.  It kinda looked like break dancing, hillbilly style.”  Elsewhere on the album is a song titled “Appalachian Joy,” which features Skaggs on mandolin and members of his band on banjo, fiddle and accordion.

   Bluegrass has its own roots in the Celtic music of the Irish and Scottish people who settled Appalachia centuries ago.

   “After 60 years of this, people are beginning to see where the foundation stones were laid for this music,” Skaggs said.  In addition to Celtic elements, bluegrass is also influenced by blues and jazz, Skaggs said.

   “It’s so free-form, so off-the-cuff,” he said.  “You really have to know your instrument.”

   Skaggs doesn’t aspire to take the place of Monroe, Stanley or other bluegrass greats like Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, but he does hope to take the bluegrass those men invented to new heights.

   “I knew I could never take his place,” he said of his hero, Monroe.  “But I knew there was a place at the table that I needed to come back and take.”

Debbie Cafazzo: 253-597-8635

debbie.cafazzo@thenewstribune.com