When Monroe Died In 1996 One Honorary Pallbearer Was The Boy He Once Called From A Kentucky Crowd
Ricky Skaggs had been trusted for a few minutes with the mandolin of Bill Monroe and decades later that boy helped bring bluegrass back into mainstream country
Bill Monroe once handed Ricky Skaggs a mandolin and decades later country music heard what had been placed in that boy hands
It happened in Martha in Kentucky in the early 1960s and Skaggs had been carrying a mandolin almost as long as he could remember
His father Hobert had bought him one when he was five and taught him the old mountain music that filled their home
When the Blue Grass Boys of Monroe came through town Hobert took Ricky to the show
Somewhere in the crowd people began telling Monroe about the little boy who could play and Monroe called him up
The instrument hanging from the shoulders of the six year old was enormous against his small frame but Skaggs played Ruby Are You Mad at Your Man beside the man widely regarded as the father of bluegrass
Years later Skaggs still remembered the gesture of Monroe as one of the moments that set the direction of his life
Every Door Opened Closer To The Source
By seven another door had opened because Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs heard him play and brought him onto their television program
By his teens Skaggs was working with Keith Whitley in the Clinch Mountain Boys of Ralph Stanley and learning the music not from records but night after night beside the people who had built it
Then Nashville pulled him somewhere unexpected because Emmylou Harris brought Skaggs into her Hot Band in 1977 and put his fiddle and mandolin inside a country rock world far removed from the mountain stages of his childhood
A few years later when Skaggs launched his solo country career he carried that older sound with him rather than sanding it away
The Old Sound Became A Radio Force Again
It should have been a difficult fit for radio in the early 1980s but instead Crying My Heart Out Over You reached No. 1 in 1982
Heartbroke and Highway 40 Blues and a string of other chart toppers followed while the Country Music Association named him Male Vocalist of the Year in 1982 and Entertainer of the Year in 1985
By then the little mandolin player from eastern Kentucky had become one of the artists helping turn mainstream country back toward fiddles and harmony singing and bluegrass precision
Bill Monroe lived long enough to see that happen
He did not bring the past back as nostalgia because he brought it back as a working sound
And when Monroe died in 1996 Skaggs stood among those asked to honor him no longer the child in the crowd but one of the men who had helped make sure the sound did not stay buried in the past