Ricky Skaggs – Country Gentleman: The Best of Ricky Skaggs

Here lie the roots, redemption and reaction of the new traditionalism which briefly preceded pop music as the focus of country radio in the 1980s. More than any other artist of that generation (Randy Travis, k.d. lang, et al.), Ricky Skaggs was able to link those two words. Traditional, sure; he and Keith Whitley had played with the Stanley Brothers. New? Absolutely. His next gig, before going solo, was in Emmylou Harris’ hottest Hot Band.

The two-disc Country Gentleman neatly summarizes his career as a leader with Epic, packaging his charting hits from those halcyon days (“Crying My Heart Out Over You”, “Heartbroke”, “Don’t Cheat In Our Hometown”) along with later singles that didn’t fare as well. The first disc is pure magic.

Allowed to produce his own major-label debut (less of a gamble than the liner notes suggest; it was his fourth album, and Skaggs was clearly, by 26, an accomplished musician), he managed to make the old new, and the new old. No vintage clothes, no obsessive tube gear, just fresh, bright sounds carried easily across the airwaves by the warmth (and sadness) of his voice and the brilliance of his picking. Those songs still swing with the certainty of a man doing precisely what he was meant to do. It’s worth remembering, too, that Skaggs is not a songwriter; he has a fine ear, though, moving gracefully from Webb Pierce to Guy Clark to Mel Tillis to Carl Perkins.

Later, of course, they brought in other producers to help, though that’s probably not the problem (Skaggs still co-produced). Somehow the certainty of those first albums has eroded. Radio had changed, country had become a bigger share of the musical commodity market, and Skaggs probably felt pressure to adapt to those changes, rather than to follow his heart (as he had apparently been free to do when the stakes were lower).

The last handful of songs here, full of the airless, errorless sheen that characterizes today’s Nashville sound, spell the decline of Skaggs’ commercial career. The further he got from his roots, the lower on the charts his singles rose. (One wonders who placed “Don’t Get Above Your Raisin'” as the opening track, and whether they did so with irony or innocence.)

Careers in music are like exotic flowers, and require constant, tender nurturing before inevitably succumbing to memory, dried and pressed between pages in a book. Skaggs’ return to bluegrass and the vitality of his latest release is a happy reminder that — radio or not — he is still a comparatively young man, with much good music yet to be made. Meanwhile, this two-disc set is a fine rebuke to the voices on Music Row who still decline to sign artists who are too country for country. Pity Epic/Legacy didn’t care enough to proofread the liner notes. Oh, and those three early records on Sugar Hill? They’re still in print, and well worth tracking down.