Kentucky Traveler by Ricky Skaggs

didn’t make good playmates at all. They just ran wild while Benny fiddled.
    So while he was trying to teach me the song, I was thinking to myself, you know, I can’t handle this, Mr. Benny. I mean, my favorite songs were real-life, grown-up, sad-as-all-get-out country records like “Pinball Machine,” the hit from 1960 by Lonnie Irving. It was about a truck driver who lost everything he loved because he loved pinball more than anything. It was one of those tragic recitations you heard on country radio back then, and I knew every word. From the time I started playing, I wasn’t singing kids’ songs at all. I think some people probably thought it was a little strange for me to sing “Ruby, Are You Mad at Your Man?” And it was pretty salty for a kid my age, when you think about it. But it didn’t seem strange to me. I’d grown up loving the old songs from the mountains, the ones my dad was teaching me. I just sort of absorbed them like coal dust on a miner’s child; they just seeped into me.
    One song really had me spooked. It was called “The Little Girl and the Dreadful Snake,” a bluegrass tune Bill Monroe and Jimmy Martin sang in the late ’50s. It was about this girl who wanders out in the woods, gets bit by a snake, and dies. Her father hears her screaming, but he gets there too late. That song made me so afraid of snakes that I avoid them to this day. By and large, most of the music that us mountain kids heard back then was the same music that grown-ups listened to, songs that came into the mountains with Scots-Irish immigrants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—songs of loss and sorry like “Little Bessie” and “Pretty Polly” and “Little Rosewood Casket.” It could be about the death of a loved one—the passing of your mother or the killing of your uncle—or hope for the afterlife, or what happens if you don’t have salvation. Songs were about life and death.
    Those old songs never lose their power. They have lasted because they’re about real things and real emotions and they helped people face hard truths. They put something in the back of your mind to ponder. They would challenge you to think, and prepare you for things that could happen. Because life was as sad as it was happy. There was death, sickness, accidents, tragedies.
    We got our own taste of trouble when my dad got hurt real bad at the job in Paradise. He and another man were carrying a section of heavy pipe, and the guy slipped on a small piece of pipe lying in the walkway. He dropped his end, and all the weight of the pipe crushed my dad’s back. He went down to the ground all twisted up, rupturing two vertebrae in his lower back.
    Boy, poor Dad was in a mess. He just rolled up in a ball and couldn’t hardly move for days. His legs got numb, his feet got numb. Finally he had an operation to ease the pain, but there wasn’t much they could do in the way of repair in those days. He could walk, but he was never the same strength-wise or stamina-wise after the accident. He had to get a lawyer and sue to get his workers’ compensation. But it took years to get all that together.
    I felt so bad for my Dad. He was in so much pain. He was hurting not just in his body, but also in his mind. He had always been a provider, and now he was disabled. It hurt his pride, but he tried not to let it get him down. He had music to help keep his spirits up. His injury was bad for his work, but it didn’t keep him from playing guitar. To tell the truth, I was glad to have him around the house more. It gave us more time to practice together, and he could teach me more songs. Singin’ and playin’ with Dad; that was my paradise.

Chapter 5
SAINTS AND SINNERS
    What is a home without sunshine
    To spread its bright rays from above?
    You may have wealth and its pleasures
    But what is a home without love?
    â€”“What Is Home Without