Kentucky Traveler (6 page)

Blaine had a post office, a gas station, a bank, a barbershop, and a couple of grocery stores. That was it. Butler's was the oldest store in town and the one we always went to. The Butlers loved music, and the store was a local gathering place for years.

Sometimes when Dad and I went over to Butler's to buy groceries, we'd take our instruments with us. We'd play for hours and draw a big crowd. I'd sit with my mandolin on the old Coca-Cola cooler in the middle of the room. That cooler was the old horizontal kind with the two doors that opened on top. It stayed plenty cold for the pop they kept inside, all the Nehi Orange, root beer, 7-Up, RC Cola, grape soda, and ginger ale you could drink.

After I'd played a while, Miss Lorraine would let me pick out whatever soda I wanted. I'd grab me a bottle, and it would taste so good. Sometimes there were even little icy crystals in that ice-cold pop. Dad would play all day long at Butler's, drawing a big crowd into the little store. The only problem was that my little skinny butt would get so cold on that freezer that I couldn't stand it for more than fifteen or twenty minutes at a time.

D
ad taught me how to listen to music, how to really hear what the words were saying, and how to feel those words with my heart. When we sang “What Is a Home Without Love,” he'd help me understand the story of the song afterward. “Now that man is really hurting,” he'd say. “Did you listen to what was troubling him there in the words? How he don't have nobody?” When you open your heart that-a-way, music is more than a bunch of notes.

Beyond the music, Dad was a big influence as a role model. He was quiet in his ways. He was a godly man, but he didn't preach it. He walked the faith, he lived it every day of his life. To me, he was everything, 'cause it seemed there was nothing he couldn't do. He was a Christian, he was a musician, he was a welder, he was a farmer, he was a coon and squirrel hunter, he was a ginsenger, he was a fisherman.

And he was a real Mr. Fix-It, too. Dad could fix anything with a pair of pliers, wire, and duct tape. A neighbor would call him on the phone and say, “Hobert, our cook stove is tore up. Could you come fix it?” He'd say, “Yeah, be over there in a little bit.” He'd grab some tools out of his toolbox and go over and get the stove fired up. It didn't matter if it was ten below zero and the wind was howling, he'd crawl under somebody's house and work on their frozen gas lines. Before we go any further and before I forget, I oughta tell you what a “ginsenger” is, because some of you may not have heard that term before. In the mountains, there's a lot of ginseng growing wild, but it's hard to find. It has green leaves and red berries, but it's the root everybody's after. You have to know where to look, and you have to walk around a lot to get to it, because it grows in small patches deep in the woods. My dad knew the secret places, and he was a fine ginseng hunter.

Now, the reason people go out hunting for ginseng is because it's worth a lot of money. It's highly prized in Asia, where people use it for all sorts of remedies, especially over in China. There, a lot of people use ginseng as an aphrodisiac. When I was real little and curious about everything in the world, especially about whatever my dad was doing, I asked him, “Dad, what do they do with the ginseng you get out in the woods?” For a long time, he wouldn't tell me. Finally, when I was a few years older, I asked him again, and this time he was ready for me: “Well, son,” he said, real serious. “China uses it to strengthen their nation!”

D
ad loved a lot of things, but above everything came music—well, music and family. He really cherished that night in Martha when I got to sing on stage with Mr. Monroe; he told the story to friends and family and anyone who'd listen. Part of the reason was fatherly pride—his own son playing on stage with his hero Bill Monroe was a big moment for my dad. That night confirmed his deep desire to see me become a real musician. It seemed like the natural thing to do was start a family band—Dad could continue to teach me and nurture what he loved most, his family and his music. So we started our own group, the Skaggs Family. Most of the time, it was just the three of us: Dad on guitar, me on mandolin, and Mom singing and clapping her hands.

Sometimes our friend Elmer Burchitt joined us on banjo. Walter Adams and Dad's cousin Euless Wright joined us on fiddle. Euless was a big influence on me. He taught me a lot about how to play music and how
not
to live. Family bands were a dime a dozen in those days, but we had a secret weapon, and that was my Dad. Thanks to his energy and his friendly ways, people started hearing a lot about the Skaggs Family. He had faith in me 'cause I was so young and I had talent, and he played it to the hilt. He got some cool-looking handbills printed up with a group photo that said, “The Skaggs Family Featuring Little Rickie Skaggs, World's Youngest Mandolin Player.” I don't know if that was really true or not, but Dad sure hadn't heard of anybody younger. Even if I wasn't the youngest mandolin player, I may have been the littlest, 'cause I wasn't even four foot tall.

Ours wasn't much of a stage show. We didn't do comedy, and we didn't do a lot of talking. We just played and sang the same songs we did around the house, family favorites by Red Foley and Molly O'Day and radio hits like “Cup of Loneliness” and “Window up Above” by George Jones. Mom and I sang a lot of duets, and Dad would sing lead or sometimes bass, in the same way A.P. Carter used to back up Sara and Maybelle on those old Carter Family records. When Dad sang lead, Mom would sing tenor, and I'd sing high tenor like Pee Wee Lambert did with the Stanley Brothers, and it gave us a real haunting sound.

It was the kind of entertainment that had been around for many years and went back to the days before radio, when vaudeville and medicine shows traveled the back roads. We sang a good share of old-fashioned toe-tappers, mountain ballads, and sentimental songs. One pretty number was called “River of Memory.” Onstage, we were from the tradition of the Carter Family and so many other family groups that came before and after us, in that we didn't put on any airs or try to be something that we weren't. Like it says in the biography of the Carters,
Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?
: “They didn't play hillbillies or hayseeds or cowpokes. They were just regular folks making their own music.” That was us, all right.

I usually took a break on my mandolin in the middle of a song—nothing fancy, just little turnarounds I'd heard on records—and the folks really loved to see the little boy play. But it was mostly the family singing that carried the show, and most of the crowd favorites were gospel tunes like those we'd sing at the Free Will Baptist Church. We got a lot of our songs from the Baptist hymnals, especially the old Stamps-Baxter hymnbooks that people knew so well. These were little paperbacks published in a town called Lookout, Kentucky, and they were popular in the mountains. They printed the words, not the music, because most people couldn't read music.

There was one beautiful hymn, “Jesus Spoke to Me One Day,” that my mom and me used to sing as a duet. It was an old call-and-response hymn, and it was always one we could sing to get the audience involved. I'll never forget the time when that hymn got hold of a woman out in the crowd, and she got to shouting!

It was at the big Fourth of July shindig in Louisa, not too long after we first started playing in public as the Skaggs Family band. This was a huge celebration every year, and all kinds of local homegrown performers like us would show up to help celebrate Independence Day. It was held outside on the grounds of the Lawrence County courthouse. They had lots of music, hamburgers, hot dogs, cotton candy, caramel apples, and custard. It was the biggest event all year, and you'd have folks from miles around come to Louisa to get in on the celebration. There was an old band-shell amphitheater, built back in the Civil War days. It was poured concrete with a curved roof, and you could stand in this round shell and talk to a thousand people without a microphone. It had perfect acoustics, and the music sounded great when you played inside. On the afternoon of the big bash, we were in the amphitheater, just us three, performing our little family-music program. It was the largest crowd we'd ever entertained, and I was getting a real thrill hearing our voices bounce off that band shell into the open air. After a few songs, people started coming up and throwing money at my feet. They'd run up and toss a nickel or a quarter or a silver dollar or whatever change they had. I got so much money in my pockets that my pants came down that day, and it embarrassed me to death. But I was awfully happy to see that people liked the music we were playing. After I got my britches hitched back up, me and Mom started singing “Jesus Spoke to Me.” I was chiming my response parts with my squeaky tenor. There was an old woman out in the crowd, and she stood up and threw her arms up in the air and started shouting hallelujah, as if she were in church. This hymn was really touching her heart, and she was praising the Lord out there in public in front of the drunks and the street people and whoever happened to be passing by. It was just her and Jesus. That was the first time I'd ever seen anyone shout like that outside of church.

I look back at that now, and I think that God was using my music—these old-time hymns I was singing with Mom—to reach out and touch the audience long before I knew there was an audience to be touched. I was just a kid singing with my mom, but our music could carry the message of the Gospel out into the public square. Sometimes a song can take people to a place where a preacher can't. I believe Jesus really was speaking to that old woman on that Fourth of July so long ago, and we were somehow being used to help her hear His voice crying out across a crowded park in downtown Louisa.

At the time, though, the shiny coins those people threw at me made a bigger impression. And there was more of that coming. I started entering a lot of talent contests on my own about this time. There was a contest over in West Virginia where I won fifty silver dollars. I felt like I'd won the lottery.

There's an old photo of me sitting on the floor in the living room with all those silver dollars stacked up on the coffee table. It's one of those family pictures where everybody's pulling a goof. I've got my mandolin, and I'm wearing a cowboy hat cocked sideways. Dad's got his guitar, and his hair is pulled way down on his forehead like Moe from the Three Stooges. Mom is sitting behind us, and she's holding a banjo and making a funny face. She loved banjo, but she couldn't play a lick! It still makes me laugh when I think of that photo. There was another competition at the Pan Theater in Portsmouth, Ohio, where the Skaggs Family band played sometimes. The top prize was a brand-new red Marvel transistor radio, and I beat out a lot of kids to win one and was thrilled. This was when transistors were as cutting-edge and high-tech as an iPod is nowadays. It was an incredible thing to have at that age, especially during that era of American music. Here I was, a kid from the mountains who lived up a dirt road back in the woods, five miles from the main highway, and now I could hear the sounds of every kind of music being made, from places I couldn't even find on a map.

F
or my seventh birthday, I got my first Gibson mandolin, an A-40 model. It was the first good mandolin I ever had, one that was professional quality. I'd never have dreamed that one day that little Gibson would end up in the Country Music Hall of Fame. It almost didn't survive past my tenth birthday.

The Skaggs Family band kept mighty busy, and not just with talent shows. We worked a little radio station in Ashland, Kentucky, called WTCR, where they'd set me up on a box in the studio so I could reach the great big microphone. One time we were guests on a big package show headlined by Roy Acuff over in Huntington, West Virginia. There we were, the Skaggs Family band playing with the likes of Kitty Wells and Johnnie & Jack. It was somethin' else.

But the best was when we went to Nashville for a guest spot on the Ernest Tubb Midnite Jamboree. We had traveled down from Kentucky to go to the Grand Ole Opry for the Saturday night show. My dad figured that we'd find a place to play somewhere, so we had the car packed with instruments. Elmer came with us, as did Euless, who played his fiddle to help the long drive go by.

Then we pulled up to the Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville. I remember my first time at the Ryman like it was yesterday. We bought our tickets and went in and sat down in the old wooden-pew seats. I can still see the rainbow colors of the stage clothes that all the performers wore—the bright blues and yellows and purples and greens—it was so amazing.

In those days, it was important for stars to look like stars, and the theatrical presentation and the fancy costumes were a big part of it. When hardworking people went to the Opry and paid their money to see the show, they wanted a show. Even if you were sitting forty or fifty rows from the stage, you could still get a good look at one of those sparkling rhinestone Nudie suits, the flashy, eye-popping outfits designed by tailor Nudie Cohn, whose country music clients ran the gamut from Gene Autry to Gram Parsons.

Porter Wagoner had an incredible blue Nudie suit with sparkling rhinestone wagon wheels and cactus on it. Here were all the voices I knew from the radio, right in front of us. Shining like true stars. There was Hank Snow, the Singing Ranger; ol' Ernest Tubb; Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs; Webb Pierce; Patsy Cline; Kitty Wells; Jean Shepard; and Hawkshaw Hawkins.

At the time, Jean was married to Hawk, and that night they were scheduled to host the Midnite Jamboree show at the Ernest Tubb Record Shop, down the street from the Ryman. At the end of the Opry show, Hawkshaw invited everyone to come by the Jamboree. Well, that was the invitation Dad was waiting for. We walked down Lower Broadway to the record shop. It was packed elbow-to-elbow, and somehow Dad worked his way through the crowd and made his way back to see Hawk.