In addition to discussing their excellent new duets record (see part one of the discussion here), Ricky Skaggs and Sharon White also opened up about their commitment as a husband and wife, and why their three-decade marriage is stronger now than ever.
Not surprisingly, love songs feature prominently on Hearts Like Ours. Looking back on history, however, the annals of country music classics seem to include relatively few positive-themed romantic duets. “I think that’s because there wasn’t a whole lot of husband-and-wife duets back then," Skaggs reasons. "George and Tammy, they were married, but you had Kenny Rogers and all the girls that he sang with, and then of course Porter and Dolly, and then Loretta and Conway. They weren’t married, so maybe they weren’t drawn to these great love song duets like I’m drawn to want to sing with Sharon, because I can sing this and look in her eyes and know that this is real to us. I couldn’t do that with Dolly Parton. I couldn’t do that with someone else.”
“You better not!” White teases.
“I couldn’t feel that same feeling and feel right about it in my heart. So I think that’s why we were able to have the positive, because we’re positively in love with each other and have been for 33 years. Our love continues to grow. Our faith continues to grow as Christians, as people, and so our commitment and everything about us just continues to grow in a positive way. So it’s easy for us to sing about that part of life because we see our marriage as that. It doesn’t have to be a bad marriage. You don’t have to have a bad marriage. You have a bad marriage because you choose a bad marriage, I think. Happiness is a choice every day. Being positive is a choice. Being negative is a choice – buying into the lie. A lie has no power until you agree with it. If someone tells you a lie and you agree with it, then there’s power there. But the truth is the same way. Truth has no power until you agree with it.
“So it’s all about agreement, and we’ve agreed with each other that we’re gonna stay together no matter what. Sharon and I both came from a divorced background. I was divorced and had two children. Sharon was divorced and didn’t have any children. But when we fell in love and got married and started having our children, our daughter would go to public school at the time before Sharon started homeschooling, and she would have all these little girlfriends that would come to school crying, just broken and hurt in their heart, and Molly would kind of be this counselor friend even as a little girl like eleven or twelve years old, and they would say, ‘My mama and daddy’s divorcing’ or something’s happened here. So they would come home and carry that home with them, and I just remember there was a bunch of times we would get the kids down at night before we pray with them and say, ‘Look. Look in these eyes right here. I’m telling you me and Mom is gonna be here when you wake up in the morning. We’re not gonna divorce. We’re not gonna separate from each other. We’re gonna be here. When Dad goes on the road, I’m coming home. I’m not gonna leave.’ And I think that was such a source of security for them and such a strength for them to [sigh] ‘Okay, I don’t have to worry about that, so check that off my list of things to be concerned about.’ A lot of moms and dads can’t do that because they don’t know if they’re gonna split up tomorrow or split up next month or whatever. We just believe that it takes God. It takes the spirit of God in us, and the commitment that we have to him and the commitment that we have to each other in order for a marriage to really make it.”
One thing that I’m curious to ask is if Ricky Skaggs and Sharon White have a special song as a married couple – an “our song,” so to speak. “’The Old Gray Man Ain’t What He Used to Be’?” Skaggs jokingly suggests, eliciting a laugh from his wife.
White cites the Townes Van Zandt-penned classic “If I Needed You,” a 1981 duet hit for Don Williams and Emmylou Harris which she and Skaggs cover on their new record. “It was the song we sang to each other at our wedding. That’s special just because of the memory that it brings back to me every time we sing it. He sang one to me, and I sang one to him, and then we sang that one together. It was a real sweet moment. We didn’t sing very well. We were both very emotional. I had a big frog in my throat. (“I had a tennis ball,” Skaggs chimes in) But I don’t guess there’s just one that stands out.”
“I love ‘I Was Meant To Love You,’” says Skaggs. “I just think she sings that so great. And I love ‘Good and Gone’ too. I love the harmony in that. I can’t listen to this record and not tear up when I hear her sing. And sometimes it’s the harmony that she sings as background on some of this stuff. It’s just like…I love that woman! It just touches my heart so deep. I was in Switzerland last week. We went over on Tuesday, got there Wednesday. Wednesday night when I got in I had to go to a dinner to the promoter’s house, so I took him the duet record because Sharon had gone over there with me the last time I was over there and she came out and did a couple songs during the show. So anyway I gave him this new duet single. We had Kellie Pickler and we had Josh Turner on the show over there, so they’re there at the dinner too. And the promoter, he just went in there, ripped the thing off, and put the CD on, so that was our dinner music - our record! I felt kind of weird sitting there with them listening to our record, but they loved it.
“And then on Thursday night, the next night, we go to this sponsor’s dinner at the place where we’re gonna be playing on Friday and Saturday night, and we’re in this one hall, kind of a big bar where they had food set up. So I get out of the cars that have come to the hotel to pick us up and I hear Sharon’s voice inside! I get a little closer, and she’s singing ‘Good And Gone.’ He had taken this CD, the promoter had, and when he got down there he was like ‘Play this! I want you to play this as part of the house music tonight.’ And so I walk in, and I just start to cry because Sharon’s five thousand miles away from me and she’s in there singing, and I can’t help it. It was just really sweet to hear her voice all the way over there. So it’s hard to pick a favorite, but I just loved getting to sing with her and hearing her do so well on this record has just been great. Heart’s full.”
With their long-awaited duets record finally out, what’s next for the couple? “There’s some more things for the label that we’re looking at. We’d love to do a Whites record. Mr. Buck’s not getting any younger, so we’d love to do a Whites thing. I’ve got another Mosaic-type record, another gospel record that I’d like to do. I’d like to include the band a little bit more into it. And then we’ve got another Kentucky Thunder record that we’ll probably need to do here pretty soon as well with the band. Lots of music to do, and then I’ve got some ideas. Bruce Hornsby wants to do another duet record kind of thing with me and the band.
“It’s so much to think about. It’s a lot of investment these days to invest into a project that big, anything that’s a $75,000 or $80,000 project. You can make a record for less than that in your bedroom, but if you pay people, as a label we’ve got to pay at least on an independent record label scale. So it’s a big investment to do something like that, but we’re trying to invest in people’s lives as much as anything, not just let the money that we pay into a record pay us back. We know that it may never pay back in this lifetime, but we want to try to make music that’s going to last a long, long time, and that’s Skaggs Family Records. The records that we leave behind will have an impact on people’s lives many years to come.”
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