CD Review – Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder “Music To My Ears”

This year has been a time of tremendous releases of Bluegrass  music, this new Disc by Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder being up amongst the  top with some Stiff Competition, like The Roys, The Grascals and The Lonesome  River Band.
I’m a bit partial to this as it is an audiophile recording,It has  been seriously recorded by Skaggs Studio and mastered by Georgetown Masters in  HDCD(Old Haunts of genious “Golden Ears” Denny Purcells, now run by his  apprentice Andrew Mendelson and crew), The Sound quality just shimmers, and this  is a full blown production that has a lot of time and love put into it. Skaggs  produced the CD with the help of Gordon Kennedy. All that said, the recordings  of the other artists mentioned were quite incredible themselves, like the latest  Roys’s CD, which is also done in HDCD.

Ricky has some real good material  on this Disc, like “Music to my Ears”, a Christian bluegrass song that has the  grand traditional bluegrass sound. Also, a great tribute to Doc Watson, who  passed away this year, it is called “Tennessee Stud”, a mid paced bluegrass gem  with Cody Kilby on guitar. Kilby is one of the best guitarists in this genre  today, along with Tony Rice, Bryan Sutton and Others. Skaggs is not one to be afraid to step out side the box, and he does some here with the slight sound of electric guitar floating down over some of the songs. Gordon Kennedy takes care of that. Skaggs has songs on here that just live, and they might live on in your heart like “There’s Nothing Like A Family” ,last song on disc ,just leaving you with a sense of joy.