By 1987, Rigsby was enrolled at Morehead State University in Kentucky, struggling to pay his tuition and to pass his classes in journalism. To manage the former, he joined Charlie Sizemore’s bluegrass band in the fall of ’87 and stayed for two years. When he graduated in May 1990, he moved to Nashville and joined Vern Gosdin’s road band. But that lasted just six months, and he couldn’t land another job, nor could he make friends with his suburban neighbors. So he slunk back home to Isonville, moved in with his parents and got a day job. Just when things seemed bleakest, though, he got a call from David Parmley that the Bluegrass Cardinals were looking for a tenor singer.
“I said, ‘Oh boy!’ and drove straight to Virginia for the audition,” Rigsby recounts. “They had some of the best harmony singing in the history of the music. That’s where I learned trio part singing, because they’re real taskmasters about getting it right. I have to give credit where it’s due. Likewise, I learned about timing from J.D. Crowe. I thought I had good timing, but J.D. straightened me out. Jimmy Martin taught him timing, and J.D. taught me.”
Rigsby spent two years with the Bluegrass Cardinals, 1991-93, and two years with J.D. Crowe & the New South, 1993-95. He appeared on David Parmley’s 1993 solo album Southern Heritage, and on Crowe’s Grammy-nominated 1994 disc Flashback. Rigsby was making a reputation for himself, but like most bluegrass sidemen, he wasn’t making much money. In the meantime, Tim Austin kept asking Rigsby to join the Lonesome River Band.
“I turned them down three times before I took that gig,” Rigsby confesses, “but I had good reasons each time. The first time I dropped out of college and moved to Roanoke to join the band, but I realized I was too young to leave home yet, so I went back to school. The second two times it was to replace Dan Tyminski, but you can’t replace Dan; he’s irreplaceable. But the fourth time, Dan had already been replaced by somebody else, so when Tim called and asked, ‘Do you know anyone who would do this job?’ I said, ‘Yes, you’re talking to him.'” Tim said, ‘Are you sure? You’re not going to do me like before, are you?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘this time I’m sure.’
“Still it was a tough thing to leave J.D.,” Rigsby admits, “because I love him to this day. It’s like leaving your daddy. Yet I had less trouble quitting that band than I’ve had with any other band I’ve left, because he was so professional about it. I even rode to a Lonesome River Band gig on his bus. He knows that sidemen come and go. If they do a good job and give two weeks notice, what more can you ask of them?
“J.D. was at a point where he didn’t want to work that much. With a wife at home, I needed to work more. The Lonesome River Band was all younger guys who were all serious about making some money as far as getting out there and hustling.”
Rigsby spent six years with the LRB and appeared on three of their best-selling albums: 1996’s One Step Forward, 1998’s Finding The Way, and 2000’s Talkin’ To Myself. The basic quartet of Rigsby, bassist Bowman, banjoist Sammy Shelor and guitarist Kenny Smith remained intact during those six years, honing a sound that was marked by Smith’s single-note leads and the tension between Rigsby’s high, lonesome voice and Bowman’s smoother tenor.
“My contribution to the sound was I took it back to more of a traditional, mountainy sound,” Rigsby says. “Ronnie and I were a unique blend, because he’s more newgrass and country, while I’m more mountainy. But chefs do it all the time, putting two unlikely ingredients together to make a new dish. Once again sodium and chloride make salt.”
If one was singing lead, the other was singing close harmony, and the push-and-pull between past and present, between gritty realism and romantic hope, gave the music much of its drama. The voices work so well together that they have continued to sing on each other’s solo records since leaving the LRB.
Rigsby left in the fall of 2001; his departure set off a chain reaction that saw Bowman, Smith and fiddler Rickie Simpkins all depart in the next few months. This put the group firmly in the hands of Sammy Shelor.
“My vision was to get back to the sound that got the Lonesome River Band into the bluegrass mainstream in the first place,” Shelor told me last year. “That was the Carrying The Tradition album. That album had an energy that appealed to younger people and traditional songs that appealed to older people. As the years went on, we got away from that style, [that] traditional bluegrass sound delivered with rock ‘n’ roll power, with the instruments locked in so tight they create a wall of sound. I knew I could recapture that sound if I found people who have the same feel for the music.”
With an infant daughter, Rigsby wanted to cut back on his touring after he left the Lonesome River Band. He landed a job that same fall as the first-ever full-time director of the Kentucky Center for Traditional Music, just 15 months after the program began at Morehead State University. As an alumnus with a long list of bluegrass recording credits, he was a natural choice.
This semester he teaches a Tuesday-night course on Traditional Vocal Harmony, but he spends most of his time organizing special events for both high school and college students, using his connections to bring in guests such as J.D. Crowe and James King.
“Now I feel I have another mission in life,” he says, “and that’s to help people learn more about this music. When I went to school there, bluegrass was frowned on by the academics. We’d go to the music department to use a practice room, and they’d run us off. It’s heartening to see that people are now willing to accept these Appalachian traditions that I grew up with. Maybe there’s some substance there after all. Instead of people trying to break us and rid us of these awful things, they’re embracing them.”
