Kentucky Traveler: My Life in Music

When he was six years old, Skaggs, who had been playing mandolin and violin at home with his father, met his destiny. One summer night in 1960, the Skaggs family heard that the father of bluegrass, Bill Monroe, would be playing at a local high school; piling in the car, they arrived at the school, and Skaggs’s father asked Mr. Monroe if the young Ricky could play a song with the Blue Grass Boys. Before he knew it, Monroe was wrapping his big Gibson mandolin around Skaggs’s neck, and he and the band were skittering off on a rendition of the Osborne Brothers’ “Ruby, Are You Mad at Your Man?” Skaggs is as cracking good at telling stories as he is at singing high-lonesome melodies and letting his fingers fly across the frets of guitars and mandolins, and he delivers an entertaining and inspiring tale of his boyhood and youth in rural Kentucky and his early days playing with Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys and later with J.D. Crowe and the New South; his work with Emmylou Harris in her Hot Band; and his rise to fame with his first album, Waitin’ for the Sun to Shine, in 1981. Refreshingly forthright, Skaggs declares that he would have never made it to where he is today without the deep love and care of his family, his wife, Sharon (herself a member of the well-known bluegrass and gospel group, the Whites), and his faith. (Aug.)