Ricky Skaggs and Sharon White’s new duets album Hearts Like Ours is a celebration of life, love, faith, and family. Married since 1981, the two Grammy winners and longtime Grand Ole Opry favorites have collaborated over the years on various projects, including their CMA-winning 1987 duet “Love Can’t Ever Get Better Than This.” Hearts Like Ours, however, represents Skaggs and White’s first full-fledged duets album as a couple.
Recently, Skaggs and White graciously welcomed me to their studio in Hendersonville, Tennessee, to sit down and talk about this exciting new project. Try as I might, I can never capture in writing the feeling of being in the room with such a delightful couple and observing their interactions as a husband and wife of three decades.
Fans have been eagerly anticipating this week’s release of the album for some time, but nobody has been waiting for this longer than the couple themselves. “We did have the duet of the year in ’87, and that seemed at the time like the right time to think about doing a project together,” says White. “But it was not possible. I was on one label; he was on another. They just could not get their heads together to do it, so I really didn’t know that it would ever happen.”
Circumstances became more favorable with the 1997 founding of Skaggs Family records, the independent label home of Skaggs himself as well as White and her family band. This allowed Skaggs and The Whites to collaborate on projects such as 2008’s Grammy and Dove award winner Salt Of The Earth. But what led to Hearts Like Ours finally coming to fruition?
White recalls, “Not quite two years ago now, some friends of ours booked us on an event. It wasn’t like a concert. It was a marriage enrichment event, and they were gonna be part of it and we were the musical part. We were supposed to have some songs we’d do and give our testimony and stuff like that. So we went back in and re-cut the five songs that we’ve been singing together since we married. [“Love Can’t Ever Get Better Than This,” “If I Needed You,” “Home Is Wherever You Are,” “Holdin’ On Tight,” and “It Takes Three”]
“We got right in the middle of cutting that, and the event canceled, and I said ‘Great! So what are we gonna do with these and what are we gonna do now?’ He said ‘We’re gonna finish these, and we’re gonna believe and plan toward doing a whole CD.’ So it took a little while to get it together, but we felt like it was sort of the Lord’s way of kicking us up off the couch and making us do something that needed to be done.”
For all the delays, White explains that the timing of the project ultimately worked out for the best. “What I discovered is our hearts are in a different place than they were 25 years ago. I think if we’d done it back then we would have been more focused on maybe making it a commercial success. There’d have been a lot of tension about things, trying to each one have their way. We didn’t have any of that. We had the most wonderful experience recording this. Every detail from start to finish was fun. We enjoyed looking for songs, selecting songs, working them out, planning the arrangements, recording them. Every detail was fun. We didn’t struggle with any of it. We struggled a little bit a couple a times just trying to get what we thought heard in our heads to come forth on the song, but you have that with any project. Some things we challenging, I guess I could say, but we just know that this seems like God’s time for this.”
Skaggs and White have both performed various styles of music over the years, including country, bluegrass, and gospel. Hearts Like Ours includes elements of all three, but Skaggs feels that it is first and foremost a Country record. “If I was gonna put this in a category for iTunes, I would not put it in a bluegrass category. I wouldn’t put it in a gospel category. I would put in a country music category because the sounds sound like retro eighties last century when I was doing a lot of country music. It was big on the charts in those days, and so were The Whites. They were doing songs with the drums (“but also fiddles, dobros, and mandolins,” adds White), blending the bluegrass elements together.”
White continues, “Yeah, I think that’s probably where it would land, but there’s no reason why a gospel person wouldn’t like this record, someone who is a gospel music fan, or even gospel radio could play some of these songs.” She and Skaggs cite “Reasons To Hang On,” “When I’m Good And Gone,” and “It Takes Three” as songs exhibiting a gospel flavor.
Indeed, Hearts Like Ours is an eclectic record, and one which credits a variety of outstanding country music songwriters. “Marty Stuart and Connie are great friends of ours. We love them very much,” says Skaggs. “So we started looking for songs and I went to Marty because I knew he and Connie had done some duet things, and I thought he might have some material. He said ‘Well, you should cut “I Run To You.” That’s a great song,’ and I thought, ‘Well, you’ve already cut that though.’ But after I listened to it, I thought ‘That would be a great song for me and Sharon.’
“It’s a very well-written song,” White adds.
“And I called David Allen, which is Leslie Satcher’s husband,” Skaggs continues. “They used to be in our Bible study that we had at home. We love her writing and singing so much. David sent us ten top choice cuts.”
“We could have done a whole album of Leslie Satcher songs,” White notes.
“We told them we were having a hard time making choices,” says Skaggs. “Which songs do we leave off? But anyway, she sent us some great, great songs, and we ended up choosing three. [song titles here] Keith Sewell was a bandmate of mine many years ago. I hired him when he was nineteen. He played electric guitar in my country band, and he’s a great writer, great singer, great player. He had written a couple two or three songs that he sent, and we chose ‘Forever’s Not Long Enough.’ And then Sharon was listening to the radio one day on Sirius Bluegrass channel and heard an old Flatt & Scruggs song ["No Doubt About It"] that Lester and Curly Seckler, which was the harmony singer in the band at that time, they sang almost like a duet. It was a ‘bro’ duet before bro country became a thing! But Sharon said ‘That doesn’t need to be a male duet! That could be actually a man and woman song.’ And I’d never heard it like that before, and when she mentioned it I said, ‘That’s a great idea! We should cut that. We were kind of looking for a bluegrass tune because of my history in bluegrass for the last few years.”
“I think it’s the cutest song. The lyrics are kind of fun and playful. ‘I think you’re the cutest thing and I like your curly hair and I like the way you walk and I like this…’” laughs White, while Skaggs humorously recalls having at first mistaken the lyric "dimpled chin” for “double chin.”
“We picked songs that we could sing well, and sing together well,” says White. “That was the criteria.”
“Because a lot of songs will be written, but they’re not written in the right key or right range for us,” says Skaggs. “I just didn’t want to be doing all the lead singing all the time and her singing harmony, and her doing the lead singing all the time and me singing harmony. We wanted it to be a duet record where it could modulate and she could sing a verse and I could sing a verse on the first time through or whatever. But those were some of the criteria we had when we were choosing songs."
“And I think the hand of God was in it,” White says. “Because when we’d finished and we looked at what we’d cut and what we’d chosen, these songs really tell a message, and we did not intentionally try to do that. But I think they convey how we feel about each other, how we feel about life, how we look at life from a positive perspective. They give hope to people. If you listen to the lyrics of some of these songs, they’re very hopeful. ‘Reasons To Hang On’ is not just about hanging on in a relationship, but it’s about hanging on in life. There’s a lot of obvious reasons to get scared or to look around and think, ‘This world is getting to be a bad place. I don’t want to be here anymore.’ There’s a lot of good here.”
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