Ricky Skaggs To Jam For Piedmont Land Conservancy

Country and Bluegrass star Ricky Skaggs has sustained one of the most successful musical careers in history. He sprang onto the scene nearly 60 years ago, at the age of seven, performing with Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs. This month, Skaggs will be inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame and honored with the ASCAP Founders Award.

This Friday, the self-described “eastern Kentucky mountain kid” returns to the Carolina Theatre in Greensboro to raise money for the Piedmont Land Conservancy. Ricky Skaggs spoke with WFDD's David Ford about being recognized by his peers, his earliest musical influences, and his love of all things natural. 

On being inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame

I'm so humbled. Golly, this is an amazing thing. I mean ASCAP is a big deal but wow, I mean the Hall of Fame is voted on by musicians. It's not a panel of a bunch of business guys or anything like that. These are all colleagues and people that I love and admire, and have appreciated their music all these years. It's just very, very humbling when you're in a roomful of people like that, and then when you look at the list of people that's in the Musicians Hall of Fame, it's quite stunning. [I'm] just very thankful.

An early musical lesson from Ralph Stanley that Ricky Skaggs lives by to this day

So, [playing with Ralph Stanley] it was my time to take a solo on this one song, and I remember jumping up into the mic, and I just threw a couple of those progressive mandolin licks into Ralph's ancient old, traditional mountain, stinky good music, you know. And I just remember catching the eye. I remember Ralph he just kind of...he didn't look mean, he didn't look ugly at me, but I could just see the eye. And my little discerning heart, I just went 'Oohh, I don't think I should've played that'. And so when we came off---and I knew it when I played it---it just didn't fit. It was like, no! But yet the other part of my brain just wanted to adventure out onto the end of that limb. 

After the show, Ralph came up to me and said 'Now, Rick, you know when I take a [solo] break, I try to play it so that people will know just exactly what the melody is, and just what I'm a singin'. That's what I'm a playin' on the banjo.' And I said 'Okay, Ralph. That's what I'm gonna do too.' What he said was just exactly what I needed to it hear and it was just so tempered with salt and love.

Watching a tape of his appearance on television's Martha White country music variety show with Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs as a seven-year-old

It was like I had this future and this destiny in my eyes when I look back at it now. I couldn't believe how---I wasn't driven or anything like I was like some showboat kid, you know. But I just knew what I was doing and I knew that this was what I was supposed to do for the rest of my life. It was just crazy.

On his special connection with the great outdoors

I love the woods. We live up here on top of a hill here in Sumner County in Tennessee. From my house I can stand on my porch and look about twenty miles down the road and see Nashville from here, so I love the hills. I love the mountain tops and the high places. I've always loved that and as a kid I started venturing off and going by myself and I always loved just going and setting in the woods and just listening, you know, just hearing the wind blowing through the trees and making these sounds. And many times it'd be just dead quiet back there. You could hear a hickory nut fall off of a tree and hit the ground seventy-five yards. And you'd hear it and it's just like, 'Ah. That's great!', you know and hear the birds singing. So I really have a heart for that and I think [land] conservancy like that is so important, because it's just so easy to just cut something down and pour concrete over it and build something. 

The Piedmont Land Conservancy Land Jam 2016 with Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder
takes place on Friday, October 14, at 8:00 p.m. at the Carolina Theatre. The Jon Stickley Trio is scheduled to open the concert. Land Jam 2016 celebrates 26 years of local land conservation throughout the Piedmont Triad and surrounding areas.