Kentucky Traveler (23 page)

I went down to Jackson for the funeral, and I got to see Ralph and some of the Clinch Mountain Boys. Keith had moved back in with his folks in Sandy Hook but was itching to get back into music. We went to have lunch with Ralph, and he told us he needed a new lead singer to replace Roy Lee. He asked Keith to step in, and Keith went back with Ralph and stayed in the band the next four years. Well, that shot down any future Keith and I had together.

For years, Keith and I planned to put together our own band. It was something we had dreamed about when we were kids and talked about all through our years with Ralph, and it never did pan out. We came close one time, just after we'd both left Ralph and were trying to figure out what was next. We even rehearsed once at my dad's house, and it was magic. I was thinking it was a done deal and the only thing left to worry about was what to call the band.

Not long after, Keith up and decided to go with Jimmy Gaudreau and Jimmy Arnold and start the Country Store. I hadn't seen it coming, and it hurt. I had to face the fact that Keith had ideas about going his own direction, separate from me. There was no blow-up or disagreement. I was just too blind to see that he wanted the same thing I did, which was to have his own band.

The thing was, Dad had foreseen the situation a long time before. He sized it up, but I was too stubborn to hear what he was saying. He said, “Now, Keith's gonna want his own band,” and I said, “I don't think so, Daddy,” and he said, “Yeah, he is. He's been thinking that away for a long time. He's a lead singer, and he's used to the spotlight.”

Dad wasn't saying anything bad about Keith. He loved him. He was just telling me something I wasn't able to see for myself. Truth was, Keith really
had
been thinking and talking that way all along. I just wasn't listening.

To put it plain, I just wasn't as gung-ho to be a star as he was. Now, I was ambitious as all get-out, don't get me wrong. For me, though, it was somewhere further down the road and around the bend. It was something that could wait a while. But Keith wasn't willing to wait. After a while, we both knew our paths were better apart. Much as we'd been through since we first met in Ezel, we weren't Carter and Ralph. We knew we weren't blood brothers who stayed together, thick or thin. We decided we were gonna stay good friends and root for each other, but go our separate ways. We'd sing together when we saw each other and leave it at that. We weren't gonna be able to work together, but we were gonna love each other as brothers, same as always.

And that turned out to be all right, and we loved each other up till the day he died. And I still love him. I just couldn't help him. I don't think anybody could.

I
n the fall of 1974, I met an angel. A Fallen Angel, that is. It was one of those meetings that would change the course of my life.

In Washington, there were always all-night singings and guitar pulls going on somewhere. It was a tight-knit community, yet welcoming to outsiders. These get-togethers were loads of fun, and you never knew who might drop by: bluegrass pickers and folk singers and even rock and rollers playing hooky from their Marshall amps. A lot of people don't know that Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead started out playing banjo in a jug band and always liked to tell people his lifelong dream was to be a Blue Grass Boy!

One fall night Linda Ronstadt was in town playing the Cellar Door in Georgetown. John Starling of the Seldom Scene called and invited me over to his place in Arlington, across the Potomac from Washington. “Hey, Ricky,” he said. “We're having a pickin' party. Bring your fiddle and mandolin and come on over to the house. It's gonna be a blast.”

When I got there, I could tell right off this was a special night. There was Linda, who was gorgeous and already a big star. She was there with Lowell George, her boyfriend at the time. Lowell was singing for Little Feat then, and was digging into old Southern music. He was getting turned onto Monroe and Flatt & Scruggs and bluegrass. Linda was hungry for the old music, too, like a lot of the California rock and roll people.

Now there seemed to be a whole generation of city-bred kids learning about the country music I took for granted. They'd ask me to sing some old ones, and I'd dust off a few. I was starting to realize again just how precious and dear it was, the songbook I'd been taught.

Later that night, a friend of Linda's walked in. “Hey, Emmylou,” everyone called out. I'd never met her. She was a long-haired, long-legged woman. She was so lanky, as skinny as a rail. She hunched over her guitar with her hair hanging down. She closed her eyes, and she was singing, “
One day a mother went to a prison
.” I recognized the Louvin Brothers' “The Sweetest Gift,” a song about a woman visiting her son in prison. Linda started singing on the chorus, and all of heaven started listening in. My God, it was one of those moments you never forget.

It was like everything stopped and time stood still. The room became deathly still, and Emmy's voice hung in the air. John Starling was playing guitar, and I was backing 'em up on mandolin, as quiet as I could. I was thinking,
Man, I don't even want to play a solo. I don't want to touch this moment. It's just too sweet and too pure
. So I just tried to play behind these beautiful voices and stay out of the way.

I just remember how stunned I was at hearing this beautiful voice from someone I didn't know and had never even heard of. This beautiful stranger. This was my first introduction to Emmylou Harris. I found out she'd been a singer with Gram Parsons and his country-rock group the Fallen Angels. Gram had died of a drug overdose, and now she was starting a solo career. We became buddies. A few months later, Emmylou offered me a job playing fiddle with her Hot Band. It was a great offer, and I was tempted, but I had to turn her down. Emmy already had Rodney Crowell singing harmony with her, and I knew if I wasn't singing, I wouldn't be happy.

I'd made an inner vow that I wasn't gonna ever work again in a band where I couldn't sing. I didn't want to let my chops go to waste. I wanted to sing! The Gents were doing fine popularity-wise, and we were playing adventurous music. But the festival circuit was wearing me down again, and my role wasn't developing the way I wanted. I needed room to stretch out, and not just on the bus between shows.

So when J.D. Crowe called and said he had an opening in his group, the New South, for a mandolin player and harmony singer, I was already chomping at the bit. The New South was based in Lexington, Kentucky, and had earned a reputation as one of the most exciting bluegrass bands in the country. It was an offer I couldn't refuse. I was back to my first love, the mandolin, and I could sing my heart out, too. I was ready to go in another direction. It was that long hunter thing again, I guess. Back to ol' Kentucky, go out and explore with some young guns, try something new.

In 1975 Rounder established itself as a label with outstanding contemporary bluegrass when it released “J.D. Crowe and the New South,” one of the most influential bluegrass albums of the decade. . . . In Crowe's band Skaggs began building his reputation as a spectacular singer and entertainer as well as an instrumentalist
.

—
Bluegrass: A History
, by Neil V. Rosenberg

I
knew when I came to Lexington to work for J.D. Crowe that I was gonna have to get me a major-league mandolin. Every man in that band had him a big gun. Tony Rice had the big ol' D-28 Martin guitar that the late, great Clarence White once owned. J.D. had a Gibson Mastertone RB-75 banjo that could knock down trees. I had to have a good, loud mandolin that would measure up. It had to be, as the young kids say, legit.

I had a great job. Now I needed a great instrument. I'd been dreaming about a certain mandolin, one that I'd fallen in love with a few years back. All I had to do now was find it. It wasn't gonna be easy, but I was determined to track it down and hopefully make it mine.

When I was on the road with Ralph, we played a lot in the Detroit area around Port Huron. One day this local guy came to see us before the show. He was an old friend of Ralph's from the early years with Carter. He played a little bluegrass himself, just fooling around, and he brought in his old Gibson mandolin. He noticed I was eyeballing it, and he said, “Son, you want to play a
good
mandolin?” I told him I sure would, and he handed it over to me.

It was a 1924 F-5 Lloyd Loar. There was no finish on it, except on the headstock. The rest of the body was all sanded down or stripped off. And the neck had been cut down so much you could see the truss rod, so thin it was almost like a fiddle neck. You may be thinking, that's a beat-up old mandolin, ain't it? Well, for me it was love at first sight. I loved the way it felt, I loved the way it played. I loved the way it sounded. It was major-league. Legit!

The mandolin I had at the time was a little round-hole model, an A-5 Florentine mandolin. It didn't have any bark. Like I told you a while back, Keith gave it the nickname the Red Bomb as a joke, and it was a bomb all right. I didn't like it, but it was all I could afford at the time.

I wanted a mandolin as loud and ornery as the F-5s that Bill Monroe and Pee Wee Lambert had. Every time we'd go to Detroit, I'd get to spend a few precious hours with this guy's F-5 Loar on stage, and it always sounded killer. It fit me so well, too, 'cause I was playing twin fiddle then with Curly Ray Cline on some songs, and when I'd get back on mandolin, my fingering wasn't off, 'cause that Loar's neck was nearly as small around as a fiddle's. And that made it easy to switch back and forth on the instruments all night long.

After every show, the guy would take that mandolin back home with him. Ralph knew how bad I wanted it, and he tried to convince his ol' buddy to make a deal. Ralph even said he was willing to come up with the money to help me get it. It was always the same answer. “I don't want to sell it,” he'd say. “I'm gonna just hang onto it.”

There was no convincing him, but I wanted a way I could contact the guy if he ever changed his mind, so I finally got his business card, wrote “1924 Lloyd Loar” next to his name, and stuck the card in my wallet. Always hoping one day he'd change his mind.

Like I said, I used to dream about the mandolin, and I wasn't kidding you. It may sound crazy, but I'd have dreams where I'd see myself playing this Loar. Recently, I saw an old black-and-white photo somebody posted on the Internet: It's Keith and Jack Cooke and me on stage with Ralph in Port Huron, and there I am, picking a tune on that guy's Loar and looking happy as a pig in mud.

After I got to Lexington to start with J.D., I knew the Red Bomb wasn't up to the job, so I borrowed a mandolin to have a decent instrument until I found my own. One day not long after Brenda and I had moved into our new place, I was going through some boxes and found my old wallet from the Ralph days. I rifled through it and
bingo
! I found this guy's card. It was wrinkled and worn out, and his name and phone number were barely legible next to my hand-scrawled note. Straightaway I got on the phone and called the number on the card. A gruff voice answered, and lo and behold, it was him. My heart was racing and I was rattled, but I tried to keep my voice steady and calm. “Hey, this is Ricky Skaggs,” I said. “Do you remember me? I used to play with Ralph a few years ago.”

“Yeah, I remember you.”

“Well, I just moved to Kentucky, and I've taken a job with J.D. Crowe.”

“I love ol' J.D!” the guy said. “How in the hell's he doing?”

J.D. was probably the only bluegrass musician more popular in the Detroit area than Ralph Stanley. He'd broken onto the scene with Jimmy Martin's band as a redheaded teenager with a hot banjo in the 1950s.

“J.D.'s doing real good,” I said. “But the reason I'm calling is I need a mandolin real bad. I'm just wondering if you'd be willing to sell that ol' Loar. I sure would like to have it.”

I knew he could probably hear how desperate I sounded over the phone, and that ain't exactly the best way to try to negotiate. But I didn't care. I
was
desperate, and he was the only man who could help me. I guess I caught him in a moment of weakness. Maybe he was hard up for cash, 'cause this time he seemed willing to make a deal.

“Well, I might,” he said. “What can you offer me for it?”

That threw me off a little. I was expecting him to make an offer. “I don't even know what it's worth” I said. “All the finish is worn off, the neck's been cut down, and I'd have to pay extra just to get it up and going. But if you know a price—”

“I won't take nothing less than twenty-two hundred and fifty dollars for it.”

“That's a lot of money for me,” I said. “I'm making five hundred dollars a week. Let me see if I can get some cash together.”

W
ell, this was the only Lloyd Loar mandolin I knew about that was up for sale. There just weren't a lot of old classic Loars floating around then that people were willing to part with. Monroe had made 'em the most prized mandolins in creation. And when people got ahold of one, they wanted to keep 'em forever, just like this guy. Up till now.

One thing was for sure. I could tell this guy wasn't going to budge on the price. Usually I'd have tried to haggle, which is how you make a deal when you're from eastern Kentucky. Not this time. Not with this guy. I wasn't sure why $2,250 was the magic number for him, and I didn't really care. My money supply was low, but my hopes were high. Seemed like the offer was serious, so I called John Paganoni, a friend in northern Virginia I knew from my time in the Washington bluegrass scene. He had one of those real top-secret, can't-tell-nobody kinds of jobs working for the federal government. But besides his day job, John was one of the finest luthiers around, and he specialized in mandolins. If anybody could help, it was John.