In his mind’s eye, Ricky Skaggs vividly sees a little boy walking up to a stage in Martha, Kentucky, where bluegrass music founder Bill Monroe is performing. Members of the audience at that personal appearance had called to Bill to give the local boy a chance to play something.

That little boy—born in rural Cordell, Kentucky—is Ricky himself at about six years old. He just had learned to play the mandolin from his father, Hobert, a welder by trade and part-time fiddle player on weekends, the year before. His mother, Dorothy, had started him singing with her in church when he was only three. By the time of this particular concert, the music-loving folks around Ricky’s hometown had come to realize they had a special boy with amazing talents in their midst.

As for Bill Monroe, the fellow Kentuckian born in Rosine about 49 years earlier, by this time he had become a major radio and recording star through his numerous hit singles and his 20 years of Grand Ole Opry broadcasts over the powerful, Nashville-based WSM-AM radio station.

Now that Ricky today has surpassed the age when Bill first saw that little boy who became an international music star, he treasures those special childhood memories of when it all began in a small town in eastern Kentucky.

“Well, I want to know where the time went,” Ricky said recently with a laugh. “Where did it go? I can still see myself walking up to that stage and have Bill Monroe grab me by the arm and pull me up onstage and ask me, ‘What do you play?’

“And I looked up at him and said, ‘I play the mandolin.’ And he took his big Gibson mandolin off and took the strap and wrapped it around the curl so it would fit me. And he put it on me, and I stood there and played the song ‘Ruby’ when I was six years old. I had learned it from The Osborne Brothers recording. I clearly remember that.”

by: Don Rhodes

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