Bringing it all back home: Ricky Skaggs to play in Bantry
RICKY SKAGGS had it all, but it wasn’t enough. By the early 1990s the Kentucky songwriter stood tall as one of the most beloved figures in country — he’d notched up a string of number ones, his walls heaved with platinum discs. Rather than bringing satisfaction, however, success had imbued a deep restlessness in him.
“Country music was going in a different direction,” recalls Skaggs, 60. “You had people such as Garth Brooks coming through. I wasn’t excited about the way things were moving — my heart was calling me to deeper places, back to the mountains.”
Skaggs had been a protege of Bill Monroe, pioneer of the haunting, frenetic style known as bluegrass, early in his career. As things had taken off commercially he had veered in a more conventional direction. When Monroe passed away, Skaggs felt he’d been summoned — to take up the mantle, to return to the source. “Mr Monroe passed away in 1996 and so did my dad. Both were pillars in my life. My dad was a godly man, a wonderful Christian; Mr Monroe was a musical father. They loved the fact I had always tried to incorporate bluegrass into my songs.
“After Mr Monroe was gone I felt there was a void, a lack of leadership in the [bluegrass] scene. No way could I take his place. Of course, I wasn’t coming back to bluegrass to do that — I was coming back to take MY place. There was room for me at the table. Bluegrass had been my foundation.”
He was also, you sense, slightly worn out by the big time. Success complicates. “I didn’t need tour buses, didn’t need a trailer tractor for the gear, didn’t need 25 people on the pay-roll. I had a great name in the market. People wanted to hear me. When I turned to bluegrass, they were fine with it. Nobody was up in arms.”
Did he worry mainstream country was growing too glossy and commercial? “I don’t want to judge and say it was bad. There was a lot of good music. For me, it was about the need to simplify.”
That said, he feels that many of the greats of country would be adrift in the modern scene.
“George Jones, Merle Haggard, Buck Owens… it’s difficult to see those guys getting signed today. With all their great music, they would be hard pushed to get a record deal in Nashville. They’d have to change a lot of things to make records that would be played on the radio.”
Skaggs will be in Ireland this week performing with Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill at the Masters of Tradition festival in Bantry, Co Cork. He’s close to both artists — and has a deep respect for Irish trad, which he believes to be the well-spring for many of the tropes of American country music. With its melancholic sensibilities and bustling arrangements, US country’s debt to Ireland is obvious, he says.
“I’ve told people for years Celtic music is the foundation stone for bluegrass, even country music generally — though it is admittedly hard to heard the Irish influence in ‘new’ country today. Certainly, you can detect it in the old country ballads — it’s in the heart of the songs.”
Bill Monroe was in agreement, he recalls. Without Irish music, there would never have been a bluegrass movement. “Mr Monroe talked about the old sounds and the ancient tones. He was referring to the sounds from Scotland and Ireland — he believed very much his music was a hybrid of that. He’s right of course — you hear bluegrass and you know the Irish influence is there. It’s in the fiddle and the mandolin, the harmonies and the guitar. In all of it, really.”
Skaggs was born in Cordell, a town deep in rural Kentucky close to the border with West Virginia. As a child he displayed prodigious talent. He started playing age five and, within a few years, had auditioned at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville (he was turned away not because he lacked talent but because he was too young). In 1970, shortly after turning 15, he was opening for country figure Ralph Stanley and, from there, joined Emmylou Harris’s band (Skaggs wrote the arrangements for her 1980 album Blood In The Snow).
It was in the ’80s that his solo career took flight : he won Grammys for records such as Wheel Hoss and Raisin The Dickins and routinely topped the country charts. But he was too curious to confine himself to one genre, and collaborated with AOR artist Bruce Hornsby and later Jack White and the jam band Phish.
“It’s fun,” he says. “It’s a cross-pollination. I learn from them, them from me. It’s exciting to take the music in a different direction. With Bruce [Hornsby], you have the addition of jazz and pop piano. It’s new and yet it keeps the music honest. You still have all the elements of bluegrass. You’re just adding something extra.”
Having performed across seven decades Skaggs has accumulated a trove of memories. Perhaps the most precious was the occasion, aged just six, he joined Bill Monroe on stage in Kentucky. “We went to see him in a local school house. My dad had given me a mandolin the year before — when we got there, some of the neighbours started shouting out for ‘little Ricky Skaggs’ to go up and play with Mr Monroe. It started up before every song — I think eventually Mr Monroe was ready to put an end to it. He called me and had no idea how little I was — I guess he figured I was aged maybe 12 or 14. And here I was, this little six-year-old.
“It was the first time I’d played with a band. I got to know him later and always reminded him of that time. He was a big star — and yet he was wiling to step out of the spotlight and let this little kid play. That truly is amazing.”
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