Kentucky Traveler (11 page)

Those words are what Satan used against me for years. Being born again is asking Christ into your heart, and that's what I did. Emotions come and go, but salvation is forever. So I really did get saved at the revival. I'm not anymore saved now, at fifty-eight, than I was at thirteen, just a lot more understanding; my faith has grown, and I understand so much more. But my commitment to Christ has never changed. God accepted it then, and it was real.

The Devil wanted to steal my peace and joy, though, and he came real soon after I was saved and planted that doubt in me. For a good while, until I was almost twenty, I lived with a whole lot of doubt in my heart. I was mostly a good kid. I wasn't living bad, really. I just wasn't sure of my salvation, and it haunted me.

I
n eastern Kentucky, shooting a gun is a skill that just runs in your blood. Or at least, it did when I was coming up. Shooting your first gun wasn't some kind of formal rite of passage, but it was an important part of growing up. And it was something you had to learn, too, just like learning to play a banjo or throwing a baseball.

When Dad handed me a rifle for the first time and said, “Okay, you can shoot now,” man, that was something I'll never forget. Up until that moment, guns were something strictly for the men and the teenagers who were old enough to handle them. And now I was one of them. Not necessarily a man yet, you understand, but I wasn't a boy anymore, either.

There were always guns in my house, and the Skaggs men were always out hunting and shooting. My dad was a good shot and so was his father, John M., and so was
his
father, Cornelius. Dad's uncle Calvin could hit quail flying and rabbits running with a .22 rifle. It was what a mountain boy needed to know, in the old days, at least—learning how to shoot, to take care of the hunting gear, and to hunt and fish. That way, they could provide for their families when they were grown-ups.

At Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and any big family gatherings, the men would go out back after dinner, set up targets, and shoot. It was really a social thing as much as a competition. Shooting is a real skill, same as playing music. It may take some natural ability, too, but you have to practice. You have to understand how to take proper aim. Sighting a rifle in is an art, and the old-timers knew how to sight theirs in at twenty-five yards, fifty yards, or a hundred yards. And these old Skaggs men were such fine marksmen they could shoot the eye out of a groundhog at fifty yards.

My great-uncle Calvin was a gunsmith. If a part broke on a gun, he could make the replacement piece, or at least get hold of one, to fix it. He had diabetes, and that forced him to quit his welding job, but he stayed busy repairing guns in his later years. I wish Uncle Calvin were still around today, so he could help me maintain all the old flintlocks I have.

Guns are weapons, make no mistake, and they're not anything to play around with. My dad was real cautious about us kids being around guns, and he supervised us and taught us good gun safety. We learned to respect guns. Dad always kept his guns locked up, 'cause he didn't want us getting in the gun case and getting into trouble.

Dad had a few shotguns and a few rifles he really loved. One day, not too long after I was saved at the revival, he handed me a Remington Model 24 semiautomatic .22 rifle and said it was time I learned how to use it. I quickly put it on my left shoulder, and he said, “No, son, you're putting it on the wrong shoulder.” I said, “Dad, it feels right over here on this shoulder.” “Well,” he said, “you're supposed to shoot from the right shoulder!” Thing was, it
was
right for him, but I'm left-eye dominant, so it was gonna be the left shoulder for me.

It was kind of a rough start on my road to becoming a Skaggs dead-shot marksman. Once I started knocking the snot out of a can at forty yards, though, Dad realized I really was a lefty shooter. He said, “Son, as long as you can hit what you're aiming at, go ahead and shoot from whatever side you want to!”

Shooting cans is one thing. Hunting is another, and it wasn't just sport for us. Growing up, we hunted groundhogs, squirrels, and rabbits, as well as game birds like quail and grouse. As I've told you, we didn't just hunt 'em, we ate 'em. It was part of our food supply, and we put 'em in the freezer so we could have meat through the wintertime.

Mom would get a knife, take the time to get the pellets out of a squirrel, and then fry 'em up with biscuits. If you've never had fried squirrel and biscuits, you don't know what you're missing. If the squirrels were older and the meat was tougher, my mom would boil 'em in a big pot and use the juice for squirrel gravy and dumplings.

In the fall, me, Dad, and my older brother Garold would go out on squirrel hunts with those .22 rifles. We had a great squirrel dog named Lassie, and she loved to go hunting and chase them up a tree. To her it was all fun.

Coon hunting was a whole different deal. For one thing, you didn't cook and eat raccoons. You hunted 'em for their hides. They were still the fashion back then, coonskin caps for kids and coonskin coats you'd see at college football games. My dad would sell them for twenty or twenty-five dollars a hide, and you could haul in thirty or forty in a season fairly easy, so that was pretty good extra money in those days.

Coon hunting also takes a different kind of dog. Dad's best hunting dog, the one he loved most, was a hound named Ol' Pal. He was a black-and-tan, but his mother was a shepherd. Because of that shepherd blood, his nose wasn't as sensitive as a full-blooded hound, but he got the job done. With Pal, you didn't have to go out there all night long and sit, waiting for a warm scent. You could get a great coon hunt going with Pal, because he'd pick up a fairly recent scent and start running the coon. And Ol' Pal was so fast on the run that when the coons heard him, they'd have to take a tree pretty quick.

Dad had some friends who lived in Paintsville, and they'd come up and coon hunt with us a lot. But there were times we wished they'd a-stayed in Paintsville. Their coon dogs made a hunt into a marathon. These were registered, 100-percent, pure-bred hounds, and they could pick up a coon scent a day old. Running with them was like a wild goose chase. We'd be out there all night following every coon scent for miles around, and I had to be up at 6 a.m to get ready for school.

One thing about coon hunting with Dad was that he didn't show a lot of etiquette, not by my reasoning, anyhow. I'd be following him through the woods, and he'd just let all those limbs and branches brush off his legs and swat me right in the face. He'd tell me, “Son, don't follow so close! If you back off just a little those branches won't hit you.” But I was just bad to follow my Dad, almost right on his butt. I had to keep up no matter how them branches stung. I didn't want to miss out on anything, or get left behind.

I still cherish memories of coon hunting with Dad. We'd be high up on a ridgetop, and the hounds would be down in the valley barking. When the trail got cold, everything got real quiet, and the only sound was the wind through trees. The bare branches would rub up against each other, and you'd swear it was the sound of fiddles playing. Around eastern Kentucky, we also had a lot of grouse to hunt. Grouse are the Ferraris of the game birds—totally wild and extremely fast. They also seemed to know just where to fly to make sure there was a tree between you and them. I shot a lot more tree bark than birds when I was hunting grouse. But on those lucky hunting trips when we did bring home a mess of grouse, there was nothing that tasted better. Dorothy Skaggs sure owned the kitchen!

* * *

S
hooting and hunting was fun, but I still got my biggest kicks from music. There was nothing like that feel of wood and steel on an instrument, and when I was thirteen, I got a new thrill when another instrument came into my life. It was my third musical companion, and number three was a handful. It was a fiddle that was up on the wall in our living room. It was a cheap ol' German model that Dad had got at a pawnshop, same as he did my first mandolin. He bought it for my youngest brother, but Gary didn't take much interest in it. So Dad just hung it on the wall.

One Christmas Eve, that fiddle caught my eye for some reason or another. I took it down, dusted it off, and started playing it. Well, I tried to, anyhow. I didn't know a thing about fiddles. I can tell you one thing, the fiddle didn't come as natural to me as the mandolin did. It was awfully hard to learn. Forty-five years later, I'm still learning how to play the fiddle.

The left hand came pretty easy because a fiddle is tuned in fifths, exactly like a mandolin, though without frets. I already knew where to put my fingers. The trick was getting the bowing down. It took months. The hardest part was figuring out how to handle the bow itself. That means, for a beginner, trying to avoid the sharp and flat notes, and to work the bow smooth without squeaking the strings. Then you have to learn how to use the proper amount of tension on the bow. Not too little, not too much. The bow has to be handled just right to get a fiddle sounding good.

I'd practice a lot around the house, and it used to drive Mom crazy. “Honey,” she'd say, in her sweetest-sounding voice, “why don't you go over yonder on the bridge and sit down and play there? And I can get supper ready and watch you from here. Okay?” This was her way of saying “Get that thing out of this house!” without destroying my confidence.

I'd take my fiddle out in the woods and find an old stump or bed of moss where I could sit and play. It was so peaceful under the trees, with the wind blowing through the branches. Out there I had my own secret place where nobody cared how many mistakes I made. It was the perfect place to learn.

Alone or not, learning fiddle was hard work. Now I realize how smart Dad was to start me out on the mandolin. If he'd bought me a fiddle first, I would have screeched on it so bad I'd probably have given up on music for good.

Dad wasn't bothered a bit by my fumbling on the fiddle. He was fired up that I'd taken to another instrument. He grabbed his guitar, and we started playing together. I was old enough to know it'd take a lot longer to get decent on fiddle, and I didn't get discouraged. I was too busy studying and learning new songs. I soon found out that I could play a lot of tunes on fiddle that I couldn't play very well on the mandolin, like “Orange Blossom Special,” “Grey Eagle,” and “Cumberland Gap.”

I started to understand the science of the fiddle and how it fits into the music. I learned how it fits with the singing, how it handles backup and works in a breakdown. I was connecting with it, but it just took a little longer to make the connection than it did with the mandolin. So many things in life happen for a reason, at least I believe they do, and I call it God's providence. I've been really blessed in this regard, meeting people at certain times or, in this case, meeting a new instrument at just the right time. The fiddle came into my life when I was a shy teenager and needed a new buddy I could pal around with, one who could protect me in a new environment, because our family was on the move again, this time up north to Ohio. It wasn't for long, but it sure was a big change for me. We were going from the hollow to the city of Columbus.

Grandpa and Grandma Thompson were still living up there, and they were getting up in years, especially Grandpa, who had some health problems, so my mom thought it'd be good to spend time with them. Grandpa Walter was a night watchman at Darby Dan Farm, where they raised thoroughbred racehorses. We moved up to be with them in West Jefferson, a suburb of Columbus.

I arrived in Ohio fresh out of the mountains with my fiddle and my accent. At first, it wasn't easy. I felt awkward and out of place, especially when the teacher called on me in class. My English teacher would cringe whenever she heard me talk. Not because of what I said, but because of the way I said it. Of course, I thought I was talking just fine!

I told my mom that the teacher didn't like how I sounded when I talked. Mom didn't downplay it, but she didn't blow it up, either. She took the humble road. She didn't get mad at the teacher or call the school to complain. I was kinda disappointed, to be honest, because I thought the teacher had done wrong. “Honey,” Mom said, “don't you ever be ashamed of how you talk or where you come from. You just stand up there, and you be proud to be a hillbilly.”

But support and encouragement at home can only take you so far. At that age, it's what the other kids think that really matters. It's one thing to be told to be proud and another to have something to be proud of. Well, I found I did have something to be proud of. My fiddle!

I'd take it to school and play at lunch break and at recess. I'd keep it in my locker during class. My nickname in school became “Hillbilly.” I was okay with it because they were okay with it—and that's what I was, a hillbilly in the city.

I got help early on from some buddies who sort of took care of me when I was the new kid in town. Ron Sloan and his brothers were first-generation Buckeyes, but their folks were from Kentucky. They loved bluegrass and the old country I played, but they loved loud rock and roll and the party life, too.

The Sloans took a liking to me, and nobody messed with the Sloans at school. They protected me—a few words from Ron was all it took. “Don't mess with Hillbilly,” he'd say. “Now, you'll have to go through me to mess with Hill—he's my buddy.”

After school, the Sloan boys would come over to my house. We'd play basketball and goof around for a bit, but after a while they'd get bored. It was music that they really came over for. They'd say, “Hey, Hill, is your dad home? Why don't y'all play a little for us?”

Dad would come outside on the front stoop with his guitar and I'd get my fiddle and we'd play for them. These kids didn't necessarily understand what we were playing, but they liked what they heard. Sometimes one of the boys would grab a guitar and try to play along. It meant even more to get support out in public. Whenever there was any kind of local event, like an ox roast, carnival, or fair, sure enough, Dad and I were the musical entertainment. We'd be playing on stage, and the Sloan boys would come by and point me out to their friends. “Hey, Hillbilly!” they'd holler. I swelled with pride.