Kentucky Traveler (3 page)

My dad, Hobert, was born in Relief, Kentucky, in Morgan County. His father, John M. Skaggs, moved the family to Brushy when my dad was a teenager. There was better farmland there than what they had before. They lived on about seventy acres, with a big white clapboard country house and a great big front porch, and fields to grow corn and other crops. It was a step up in the world.

Dad and his younger brother Okel were brought up hunting and fishing and farming. Being Kentucky boys, they were singing and playing music together early on. Dad sang lead and played guitar, and Okel sang tenor and played mandolin. This was the brother-duet style made popular by Charlie and Bill Monroe.

They favored the brother-harmony songs that were all the rage back then: “Blues Stay Away from Me” by the Delmore Brothers, and Monroe Brothers records like “What Is a Home Without Love.” They performed at pie suppers and house parties and local events and get-togethers, any chance they got to make music. They were pals and musical partners, too.

Dad and Okel were the new kids on the creek, but they quickly got to know the neighbors. The Thompson family lived up the holler a ways, and some of the Thompson brothers played fiddle and guitar. Dad and Okel would walk the mile or so up the creek to the Thompson house to play music and have a good time. The Thompson boys had a kid sister by the name of Dorothy May. She had brown hair and blue eyes and a sweet smile. She was a beautiful mountain girl, and Dad was knocked out the first time he saw her. He also liked that she could sing as good as she looked.

Both Skaggs brothers got drafted for service in World War II. Dad failed his Army entry because he'd had rheumatic fever as a child and it had left spots on his lungs. But Okel passed with flying colors. He was strong and enterprising, a fine example of a young mountain boy fresh off the farm. He entered the service June 17, 1942 and shipped overseas to the Pacific Theater when things were really heating up. His regiment was part of the huge landing operation on the island of Guam in August 1944. They came under heavy fire when they hit the beach. Okel had a buddy who caught a bullet. He ran to get him out of harm's way, and he got killed trying to save him. His bravery earned him a Purple Heart. He was twenty years old.

Dad was devastated. He'd lost his best friend. I don't think he ever got over it. He made a vow to himself that if he ever had a son who showed any musical ability, he was going to get him a mandolin and teach him how to play it and sing tenor with him. Then they could play all the old songs he loved to sing with Okel.

Though my dad lost his singing partner when Okel died, he didn't let his grief kill his love for music, and he played whenever he could. Around about 1947, Dad was working for a while at the Holston Army Ammunition Plant down in Kingsport, a town in east Tennessee. He found out Bill Monroe was coming through Kingsport with a new outfit that had just about tore the roof off the Opry. There were a couple of new Blue Grass Boys: Lester Flatt, who sang lead, and Earl Scruggs, who played a banjo that sounded like a tommy gun.

Well, Dad paid a quarter to get in, and he later said it was the most incredible show he'd ever seen in his whole life, before or since. For years afterward, whenever he talked about that night, his eyes would light up. I'd give anything to have been there with him. What my dad got to see was the classic lineup of the Blue Grass Boys. Once they got to playing, they turned the stage into a battlefield. It was a competition between Bill and Earl, trying to outdo each other on their instruments. With Bill and Lester nailing those great duets, I'm sure Dad was wishing his brother Okel could have been there to hear it. I asked Dad one time if he'd gotten his money's worth at that show. He said, “Son, I'd a-paid a dollar to a-seen them!”

Let me tell you about a bunch of young bucks in their prime. They had a one-microphone setup. They didn't need nothing else. The whole band worked around the mic as smooth as silk. They stepped in and out to take solos and hit the harmonies and never broke stride or missed a note. And then Chubby Wise would wedge his two hundred fifty pounds through the scrum to play a fiddle breakdown, with Bill behind him chopping his mandolin, Howard Watts in back slapping on that big bass, and Lester and Earl blazing away, making the impossible seem easy as pie.

I knew another guy who saw the Blue Grass Boys that same year. He was a farm boy in Turkey Scratch, Arkansas, and his name was Levon Helm. When I saw him at a festival a few years before he passed away, Levon told me the show had changed his life. He got as excited as a kid just talking about that night, same way my dad used to get. “Monroe had put together the dream band, and they really tattooed my brain for good,” he said. “I loved the mandolin and the fiddle and the bass and Earl's banjo—I loved everything about that show. When I got home, I knew right then I wanted to play music for the rest of my life.”

Levon meant it, too. He died in 2012, playing his music right up till the end, same way that I hope to do. In his late sixties, he went back to his roots and cut bluegrass and traditional country albums full of Stanley Brothers songs and old-time hymns. It was a few years after he'd whipped cancer, and he had a resurgence of popularity, bringing a new generation of fans into the fold with his singing and drumming and mandolin picking. I believe certain things happen for a reason, and the last time I saw Levon I told him the Lord wasn't done with him yet. He busted out in a big grin and said, “Son, I believe you're right!”

After his stint at the ammunition factory, Dad left Kingsport and came back to Brushy Creek. There wasn't much work around, but he found jobs welding, which is what his uncles Calvin and Homer did. Lawrence County has never been a major coal-mining region, but the area has huge underground reserves of natural gas; the natural-gas pipes were everywhere, and they needed fitters and welders.

There was something else, too, that drew Dad back home to the holler. The Thompson sister Dorothy May was there, and he'd been thinking a lot about her. When he wasn't welding, he started hanging out at the Thompson place. Sometimes he brought his guitar and played music with the Thompson brothers. Most of the time, though, he was just there to see Dorothy May. It wasn't long before they got pretty serious about each other.

Dad and Mom were married on July 1, 1947, and moved into a little one-bedroom house on Brushy Creek. My sister Linda was born the next year, so now Dad had a wife and baby girl to support. Work was hard to find in eastern Kentucky at that time. He heard about a job opening at a large farm in Urbana, Ohio, just north of Springfield. The great thing was, the job paid a steady salary and provided housing for the family. Dad liked the work and the owner of the farm so much that he stayed there for a couple of years. My brother Garold was born there in 1950.

With a growing family and the Kentucky hills calling, Dad moved back to Brushy Creek and built a house. That was the house we called the homeplace. That's where the family lived in 1954, when I was born, in 1959, when my brother Gary came along. No matter where Dad's work would take us, we always had the homeplace to go back to. That was a comforting thought for Dad and, as the years went by, for all of us.

W
hen I was born, I was a handful from the first breath I ever took. Leastways that's how my mom remembered it. I was born on July 18, 1954, at Riverview Hospital in Louisa, Kentucky, the closest sizable town to our holler and the county seat of Lawrence. They said that when the doctor slapped my butt, I squalled out so loud the doctor told my mom, “Well, you've got a healthy boy, and he's got a healthy set of lungs. He's either gonna be a preacher or a singer.” Mom replied right quick, “Well, I want both!” My given name is Rickie Lee Skaggs. Rickie wasn't a nickname for Richard or anything like that. I wasn't named for a relative or a friend of the family or even a real person. Strange as it may sound, I was actually named after Ricky Ricardo.

The thing was, my folks didn't know what to call me at first. My grandfather knew they were having trouble coming up with a name. In the early '50s,
I Love Lucy
was the biggest show going on TV, and Ricky Ricardo, played by Desi Arnaz, was about the most famous man in America. You had Lucille Ball hollering “Ricky! Ricky!” at Desi every episode, and the name was very popular, even way out in Brushy Creek, where most people like us didn't even have television sets yet. So one day my grandfather said, “Why don't you name him Ricky?” and Dad and Mom were sold. I was named Rickie Lee Skaggs. On my birth certificate it says R-I-C-K-I-E because that's what looked right to my dad and mom. One thing's for sure. The doctor sure was right about the singing, and the signs came early. Right from the start, I was a little different from my sister and brothers.

My mother didn't play an instrument, but she was a great, natural-born singer, probably the first singing voice I ever heard. She had an old mountain voice, pure and powerful. You'd never guess such a big voice could come from such a small woman. She sang all the time, tunes she wrote herself, gospel songs, and whatever country hits she heard on the radio. Before she knew it, she had herself a little singing partner, and that was me.

Mama would sing while she did her chores around the house, and I'd be off at the other end of the house playing with my toys. She was all the time singing in the kitchen while she was cooking, and she'd hear me singing harmony along with her. I took my dad's part when I sang with her. I guess it was because I'd heard them sing together so often that I knew how to fit just right with mom's voice.

This was early on, around the time I was three years old. Being so young, I didn't know it was called harmony and that the part I was singing was called tenor and that it was a third above the lead and so forth. But it must have sunk into me deep, 'cause that's the only singing lessons I ever had!

I learned more about Christianity from my mother

than from all the theologians in England
.

—John Wesley, 18th-century evangelist and circuit rider

I
t wasn't too long before I was singing on Sundays with my mom and dad. Our church was called Low Gap Free Will Baptist Church. It was about five miles down from where Brushy Creek hollow ends at Highway 32. It was a little whitewashed one-room church house with a potbellied wood stove in the middle, same as so many around that part of eastern Kentucky. Our church had congregational singing out of hymnbooks, with everybody joining in and singing together and praying out loud at the same time.

A lot of mountain churches, like the primitive Baptists and the old-time Baptists and the Church of Christ, didn't allow musical instruments in their services, and some still don't. They only sing a cappella. But the Free Will Baptists welcomed guitars and banjos and mandolins and whatever you brought to make a joyful noise unto the Lord. We didn't have choirs because everybody was expected to join in and sing.

There was a little Holiness Church not far from where we lived, just a few miles down an old back road, and they had electric guitars in their services. They got down with it. It was real foot-stomping, wall-shaking music, and I think God loves that as much as any other gospel music. When I was a little older, I'd go by there and hear the worship music coming from inside, and I'd be thinking, “Oh, man, playing electric guitar in church! That must be somethin'!”

Our church wasn't quite as raucous, but it was a sweet, holy place. Some hymns were mournful, but most were joyous. There were a lot of songs about the wonder of God and the gloriousness of God and the love of Jesus. And we sang hymns about the price He paid on the Cross for the forgiveness of sin.

After the congregation sang a few hymns and got things warmed up, the preacher would usually call me and Mom and Dad out of the pews up by the altar to sing a few songs. One of my earliest memories is my mom holding me up in her arms in front of the congregation. I wasn't more than three years old. She'd carry me down the aisle and set me on the pulpit with my little ol' legs dangling down, and I'd sing harmony with her and my dad, who'd play guitar. We'd do our gospel numbers and lead the service for a while, just the three of us.

I remember a hymn we loved to sing called “Prince of Peace.” It dated back to the 1870s, and the words were printed in one of the old Baptist hymnbooks they had at our church. It was a favorite of Mom and Dad. Some of the verses were so pretty, and they stay with me even after all these years: “I stand all bewildered in wonder and gazed on God's ocean of love, and over its waves to my spirit came peace like a heavenly dove.” These were what they called praise hymns, and there was an awe-struck quality in the music and it really touched my heart.

Singing with my parents in church was great. But there were some things I didn't much like. I was sort of shy at that age, and I didn't want to be the center of attention. That was one thing. Another was that I didn't like having to give up my chewing gum. Just before we'd go up to sing at the pulpit, my mom would make me spit out my gum, and I hated that. It was always right about the time the flavor got real good and tasted the best. My brother and sister, they got to keep theirs. I had to go up front and sing, while they got to sit back in the pews enjoying their bubble gum.

We were Free Will Baptist, also known as foot-washing Baptists, named after the foot washing Jesus and his disciples did at the Last Supper. Certain Baptist denominations follow that very ritual at Easter time, usually after the service. The men wash the men's feet and the women wash the women's feet. If you've never had an eighty-year-old man kneel down and wash your feet, well, I can tell you, it's a very humbling experience. Especially when you're much younger. Foot washing is a church tradition going back generations, but now it's mostly a thing of the past. You hardly ever hear about it anymore. It's a shame, because it's something very precious that binds the old and the young. It's humbling for the washer and for the washed; it's a breaking of the hardened heart. Like the verse in Malachi 4:6 says, “He shall turn the hearts of the Fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their Fathers.”