WASHINGTON — The 49th annual CMA Awards unfold Wednesday in Nashville, hosted by Brad Paisley and Carrie Underwood at 8 p.m. on ABC, as a string of country stars compete for Entertainer of the Year: Garth Brooks, Luke Bryan, Kenny Chesney, Eric Church and Miranda Lambert.
Next week, two of the CMA’s biggest winners will play live at The Birchmere in Alexandria, Virginia.
Country/bluegrass legend Ricky Skaggs returns to the venue with wife Sharon White and guitarist Ry Cooder on Nov. 10-11, while Lee Ann Womack plays there for the very first time on Nov. 15.
She is currently vying for Female Vocalist against Lambert, Underwood, Kelsea Ballerini and Kacey Musgraves. The male side includes Bryan, Church, Blake Shelton, Chris Stapleton and Dierks Bentley.
“It’s always nice to be nominated by your peers, so it’s a great week here in Nashville,” Womack tells WTOP. “Kacey and Miranda and I all grew up within about 30 miles of each other. To have three out of five come from the same town pretty much — a small town in East Texas — I think that’s the coolest part.”
Womack is no stranger to CMA dominance.
After bursting on the scene with hits like “A Little Past Little Rock,” “I’ll Think of a Reason Later” and “Ashes by Now,” her signature hit “I Hope You Dance” won CMAs for both Single of the Year and Song of the Year on its way to winning Womack a Grammy.
“The next thing you know, I end up on pop radio with that song,” Womack says. “It just goes to show that honesty, I think, really comes across to people no matter what kind of music they like. … I think that lyric just reached a lot of people. Music, a lot of times, really knows no boundary.”
In 2005, she won Single of the Year for “I May Hate Myself in the Morning” and Album of the Year.
“That was especially sweet for me because, as far as I know, that was the first time since Skaggs … that you had twin fiddles on a song. So that was great for me to enjoy that success of that particular record in a real traditional country song at a time when that wasn’t really being celebrated anymore.”
“I think there’s too many big companies that have gotten a hold of Nashville and record labels here in town. I think they have made too much money in the pop-influence stuff,” Womack says. “I really am outspoken about traditional country music and American roots music. As far as radio, real country music is really dying out, so I think it’s important to be reminded that it’s an American art form.”
Womack says her favorite of them all was “No Show Jones,” who similarly hails from East Texas.
“George Jones has always been my favorite singer,” Womack says. “He pretty much developed a style of singing, and there’s not many people that do that. So he’s always been my favorite, and then Ricky Skaggs is one of my heroes and Dolly Parton and Tammy Wynette.”
Womack has good reason to admire Skaggs, as the bluegrass legend won an astonishing 14 Grammys over his career. He is also no stranger to the CMAs, having won Entertainer of the Year back in 1985, when “Country Boy” was burning up the Billboard country charts as the No. 1 single and album.
“Still very proud of that,” Skaggs tells WTOP. “That’s probably the high-water mark for country music, to win Entertainer of the Year. It was a great honor.”
Skaggs says the genre has evolved a lot since his CMA glory in the mid-’80s. So if you want to hear some real old-school country roots, you might want to head out to The Birchmere.
“What they’ll see (Wednesday) on the CMAs is not real country,” Skaggs says. “The music they’ll hear at The Birchmere is the roots. It is everything from Hank Williams to Hank Snow to Kitty Wells to the Luman Brothers, Merle Travis. We’re doing music from the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s when country music was really defining itself. … My heart has always been to really honor the past, the elders and the fathers of the music and try to keep the old sound fresh and pass it on to the next generation.”
His affection for the founding fathers comes from a personal place, as a number of legends brought him on stage at a very young age. At just age 6, Skaggs played with bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe, who lent his legendary wail to “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” “In the Pines” and “Kentucky Waltz.”
“I got to stand up on stage and play his big mandolin. Well, it was big to my little 6-year-old bony frame. It was quite a thing. I didn’t see him again for about 10 years later … I was 16. I went up to Mr. Monroe at a show and just kind of reminded him of that night, and he remembered it!”
By age 7, he played on stage with Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, who memorably recorded “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” in 1949, which was later immortalized in the film “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967).
“YouTube is a wonderful thing,” Skaggs says. “If you type in ‘Ricky Skaggs and Flatt & Scruggs,’ you’ll find me there at 7 years old playing the mandolin and singing, ‘Ruby Are You Mad At Your Man?’ I didn’t know what she was mad about, but I liked that song.”
Skaggs says he’s blown away by the rare footage you can find online these days.
“That’s pretty amazing that the archival stuff has lasted, because so many of those shows got taped over. It was on videotape, huge big reels, they would syndicate it and send it out all over the country. … When it came back to Nashville to the home base there, they would re-record over those shows to save money, so many of those great performances of different people have been lost. … But this thing survived and thank God it did. I got a chance to see it and my kids and grandkids have seen it.”
Since then, Skaggs has collaborated with a number of country legends.
WTOP ran through some of them in a series of rapid-fire memories.
Rapid-Fire with Ricky Skaggs
Bill Monroe
“Father of bluegrass music, an inspiration that I still aspire to. His music was so fresh and so exciting that it touched me as a six-year-old and I’m still playing from it today.”
Flatt & Scruggs
“Earl Scruggs, I think he was the nucleus. He and Bill Monroe and Lester Flatt all were in the same band at one time. That’s the music I grew up with. It was Earl Scruggs’ banjo style that really made bluegrass what we know of today.”
Keith Whitley
“A brother that died way too soon. We met each other when we were 15. I miss him a lot because there was so much music he had left to sing and play. Just a tragic ending to a great life.”
Emmylou Harris
“Opened the door for me in country music. I met her in Washington, D.C. when she lived there. She was playing the Childe Harold, a little club downtown on M Street I think. Met her, we became great friends and she gave me a job in 1978 after Rodney Crowell left the band. She needed someone who could play a lot of instruments and sing a lot of high parts, and so that was me.”
Vince Gill
“Oh gosh! Played in my band when he was just a teenager. He played with Boone Creek, a band that me and Jerry Douglas had together. I love Vince. He’s done so many great things. He’s just a great person and such a talent. He’s a great songwriter, great musician and just an old friend.”
Bruce Hornsby
“My knucklehead friend! I love Bruce. … He’s a brilliant piano player that can adapt to any kind of music. There’s nothing, I don’t think, that he can’t play. He can play everything from classical music to ‘Cluck Old Hen’ on the piano. He’s an amazing player. We’ve done two albums together, two CDs, and we always love getting to play with Bruce. He always shakes it up a little bit.”
Jack White
“I did one thing with him called ‘Old Enough.’ The Raconteurs had a song on a record called ‘Old Enough.’ … He wanted to do a bluegrass version of that, kind of an acoustic type version, so they called me up and wanted to know if I’d be part of it and I agreed to do it, so it was a fun thing.”
Ry Cooder (who joins him at The Birchmere)
“He’s an amazing slide guitar player, just guitar player in general. … He’s done so many soundtracks like ‘Paris, Texas’ and ‘Crossroads’ … and of course ‘Buena Vista Social Club,’ so he’s quite a showman and he’s just having a ball playing this old music. I’ve had him bring his banjo out. He always loved playing banjo when he was a teenager and played with Bill Monroe one time out in California.”
For all the collaborations, inspirations, and performances, be it massive crowds at the CMA Awards or intimate settings like The Birchmere, Skaggs and Womack have at least one thing in common. They both love the history of the country genre, and both realize the power of music to reach people.
“The Birchmere is just a great place to hear music,” Skaggs says. “People are literally four feet away from the stage. … We’re excited about getting to come back.”
“We’re not curing cancer here,” Womack says. “But music is healing and it can change people’s lives.”
To steal her phrase, that’s something worth leaving behind.
Listen to the full interviews below. Click here for ticket information to both shows.
