Kentucky Traveler (2 page)

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.

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.

* * *

F
or thirty years now I've lived not far outside Nashville, a long way from Brushy Creek. Somehow, I was able to find a house on a hill north of town, where the land is mostly flat. I found my own little mountain right here in the middle of Tennessee. They call it Cherry Hill, after the man who first built up here. It's nowhere near as high as the mountains you'd find in eastern Kentucky, but it's got fifteen acres of elbow room and an awesome view for miles around. We've got nice neighbors, too, and it feels like home.

There's always a breeze blowing up here, so the wind chimes on the front porch go all the time. It's real peaceful.

A few years ago, I was driving around not far from my house, and I ended up in a beautiful wooded area called Mansker's Fort. It's the site of the first permanent pioneer settlement in this area. It's got a reconstructed fort and some old log buildings from those days, back when Nashville was called French Lick.

I was out looking around, and I came upon a sign, one of those historical markers you pass by and never think about stopping to check out. Well, this time I did, and would you believe that the sign tells all about my family and what they did here more than two centuries ago? Come to find out, some of my ancestors were out this way a long time before I was. It reads:

Henry, Charles, and Richard Skaggs were the older brothers of my eighth-great-grandfather Peter Skaggs. Reading those words, I felt proud, and humbled, too. My forefathers were already here hundreds of years before I ever made it out this way to Music City.

My ancestors came out of old Virginia and migrated into the area that later became Kentucky. They were nosing around in these mountains in the 1760s, even before Daniel Boone. They were explorers, and they were instrumental in blazing the trail through the Cumberland Gap and into the eastern part of Kentucky. They had a route they traveled on called Skaggs Trace, and it was used as much, if not more, than the Wilderness Trail.

Neither is around today, but they were two of the main routes that started as hunting trails and backwoods horse paths and were traveled by pioneers settling the early American frontier. The Wilderness Trail was better known, and it went from Cumberland Gap up north through Somerset to Boonesborough. But Skaggs Trace also became an important route for pioneer families making their way with wagons and supplies into Kentucky, and it went up through Harrodsburg and turned west toward the falls at Louisville by the Ohio River.

My ancestors belonged to a group of sharpshooting explorers called long hunters, and they went on expeditions in bands of twenty or thirty men, sometimes for as long as two years, hunting, mapmaking, and charting the waterways and the tributaries. Back then, Kentucky was Indian country, and the long hunters went to places no white men had been before. They traveled light, with just their long rifles and the buckskin they were wearing. They kept on the move and hunted whatever they needed to eat.

From what I've researched on the long hunters, I know they suffered a lot of hardship. They had to leave their families behind in Virginia, and they never knew when they'd be home. Henry Skaggs was gone so long that his wife thought he'd been killed, and so she took another husband. Then Henry came back and ran the fellow off. He and his wife went on to raise a family together. Now, ain't that something? Come on, Henry!

Henry Skaggs was probably the most famous of the Skaggs brothers who came into this territory, and he left a long line of descendants where my family comes from. Eight generations back, there were some who fought at the Battle of Kings Mountain, one of the decisive battles of the American Revolution. John Skaggs, who was Henry's brother, was wounded there. The Skaggses have an amazing family lineage in Kentucky and throughout the Appalachian region. When you have ancestors who gave their blood for America and for freedom, it's very humbling to think about the sacrifices they made. Nobody ever loved liberty more than those hardy mountaineers. They're always among the first to serve in every war we've had, and we owe them a debt of gratitude.

This frontier heritage of exploring and rambling is something I've always connected with, even when I was a boy. I was always drawn to the long rifle and coonskin caps and stories about Daniel Boone. My favorite gun, an old flintlock rifle I've got back at the house, belonged to a man named Lance Skaggs. It had been in his family for years.

Lance ran a store up around Keaton, Kentucky, which is over in Johnson County, where my great-grandfather Cornelius Skaggs and my grandfather John M. Skaggs were born. The old store caught fire many years ago and burned the wood stock off the gun, but the barrel was still good. A friend of Dad's, Mort Mullins, got his hands on the barrel somehow, and that's how it came to me.

One night when I was fourteen years old, we were up at Mort's house playing music and talking about guns and hunting tales and family stories. I told him I loved old flintlock rifles like Daniel Boone had on TV. Mort said, “Son, your ancestors was in this country before Daniel Boone was.” Well, hearing that just blew me away. He left the room and came back with a rusty old gun barrel in his hand.

“Here, take this home with you,” he told me. “It's an old gun barrel from the Skaggs clan. Don't know how old it is, but it's a lot older than me and your dad put together. It will make you a good gun that will last you all your life.”

I kept that barrel safe and in storage, and along about thirty-five years later, I found the right man for the job of restoring it. Robert Eisenhower, from around Boone, North Carolina, is an antique gun refurbisher, and he got a wood stock for my rifle and returned it to its original long-hunter style. Ever since I got it back from him, it's been my favorite flintlock. He said the barrel dates back to the mid to late 1700s. That's about the time Henry Skaggs and his brothers crossed into the mountains of southeastern Kentucky from Virginia.

I didn't know until later on that Henry Skaggs had hunted with Daniel Boone. I've got it chronicled in lots of history books, how the whole thing went down, and I'm still studying it and learning about it.

B
rushy Creek, where my family comes from, is a hollow that gets its name from the stream that empties into Blaine Creek, which really oughta be called Blaine River, given its size. To be designated a river, a waterway has to be at least one hundred miles long, and when they measured Blaine, it turned out to be ninety-nine miles and some spare change, so that's why it's called a creek.

We lived up a dirt road, up the holler in the woods about five miles from the main highway. Your average holler might be ten miles long. Brushy is longer than most, and if you go all the way to the head of the holler, you go clear over into the next county.