By Graham Lees

(....Continued from December 2000)

GL: I know thatyou had a lot of encouragement as a lad. When you were around five years old, Bill Monroe let you play his mandolin on stage, how did that feel to a small boy?

RS: (Laugh) Yeah I think I was about five or sixand I went to seeMr Monroe that night in Kentucky. The people in the audience had kinda seen me playing and singing at the local grocery store, or at church, or the post office, or somewhere I might of landed playing just for fun. So they asked Mr Monroe if he would letlittle Ricky Skaggs get up and sing. Finally after enough requests, to calm the audience down he said "Well where is he at?" So he let me get up and play and I didn't have a mandolin with me. So he took his 'sward' you know and like he handed it to me right there on the spot. I've looked back at that in career and my life and I feel that really was a passing. It was the first instalment on the passing of a torch, or the passing of a mantle. It really has been and I guess you can getreally melodramatic, but just know in my heart and I know how God does something's sometimes. It kinda surpasses our understanding, but I look back at it now and I see the relationship he and I had during the last ten years of his life and it was almostlike a father to a son. Even though it wasn't like that, yet in a deep sense it was because I felt like he knew somehow that I appreciated his music, that I always tried to lift him up and lift his name up. I always like to play his music and keep digging and expanding itas well. So we are doing this great tribute right now. We are doing this album to be called Big Mon, that was his nickname and we've got this first album Volume 1 that will come out this year. We have just a tremendous amount of artistes who have come on board to be a part of that. John Foggarty, The Dixie Chicks, Steve Wariner, Travis Tritt, Dolly Parton, Bruce Hornsby, John Osborne and on and on, just people who love Mr Monroe's music, have come on to be a part of this. We're just really, really excited about it, it's just going to make a larger statement that this music is worthy. That this music has honour, is worth spending time and really making wonderful...

GL: I believe that you used to play an old Martin D28 guitar, do you still play it in your show?

RS: Now we are playing these Dana Bourgeois guitars made in Main. I'm playing mandolin pretty much full time now and as a matter of fact, I think I might have sold that guitar that I used to play a lot, but I've got a few of them left. I had a lot of instruments that I just wasn't using, so I traded them in to get an older Gibson F-style mandolin.

GL: So the mandolin is more or less is your favourite instrument?

RS: Well it was my first one and that was what I started out on. I've always felt very comfortable playing that and I feel that I have an understanding of the mandolin, that I don't have perhaps with the guitar or something else. The mandolin and fiddle have been something that I've been very close to and I don't play a lot of fiddle any more, but I still play the fiddle and try to learn new tunes and everything, but I still love to play the mandolin and is my favourite instrument.

GL: Going back to your two albums. Bluegrass Rules tends to lean towards songs the Stanley Brothers have written and the more recent Ancient Tones leans a little more towards Bill Monroe, why did you choose these tracks.

RS: Well in my early up-bringing Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, The Stanley Brothers and Bill Monroe were my heroes I guess. They were the people I listened to the most. Musically my older sister was listening to The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Dave Clarke Five and The Hollies, so I got this mash, this blending of all kinds of music in my home, because my mom and dad were listening to Jimmy Rogers. My dad was a great fan of Jimmy Rogers the Singing Brakeman and of course my mother loved gospel, so we listened to a lot of that. So there was always music going on in our home. As I said my sister was very much turned on by the Beetles, but when I heard the Beatles music, there was something that still sounded at home. The music itself was fresh and different and when I heard the harmonies, the singing, it was likeThe Everly's, the Louvin Brothers, it was those harmonies between John & Paul. I could tell that they had really got a lot of influence from these guys here in Nashville and the mountains here. I knew that those boys had listened to a lot of old-time mountain type music, or early country music. You could hear the blend in their music.

(To be concluded in April 2001...)

Graham Lees, Heywood. Write to | Website

1st Dec 2000