Ricky Skaggs and the Whites

The partnership was by then thirty years old. Skaggs played fiddle on Buck White & the Down Home Folks’ That Down Home Feeling (Ridge Runner, 1977), and in the summer of 1981 he married Sharon, one of his harmony singers. The Whites sang on many of his studio records, and Buck, Sharon and Cheryl joined him on several songs on his Family & Friends (Rounder, 1982). He in turn produced the Whites’ first country hits for Curb and Warner Bros., among them the album Old Familiar Feeling (1983), and in 1984 the Whites joined the Grand Ole Opry.

Salt of the Earth was recorded at Skaggs Place Recording Studio in Hendersonville, Tennessee, and produced by Skaggs and the Whites, with Brent King engineering. Its thirteen tracks share the lead among all four singers. Skaggs sang “Love Will Be Enough,” by Janis Ian and Paul Overstreet, the title song by Jim Rushing and Jim Scaife, “One Seed of Love” and Bob Ferguson’s “Wings of a Dove.” Sharon led “Homesick for Heaven,” “Let It Shine” and “Blessed Assurance”; Cheryl led Don Gibson’s “Big Wheel” and “The Solid Rock” and shared “Farther Along” with Skaggs; and Buck sang Dorsey Dixon’s “Wreck on the Highway,” “Near the Cross” and “This Old House,” playing piano on that and on “Big Wheel.” Skaggs played guitar throughout, adding mandolin, bouzouki and Dobro, and the band came largely from his Kentucky Thunder: Cody Kilby on guitar, Andy Leftwich on fiddle and Mark Fain on bass. Paul Franklin played steel guitar on “Homesick for Heaven,” and Molly Skaggs played autoharp on “Farther Along.”

The Grammy came in February 2008, the year the Whites also entered the Texas Country Music Hall of Fame. Skaggs and Sharon White later recorded as a duo, on Hearts Like Ours (Skaggs Family Records, 2014). Buck White died on 13 January 2025, aged 94.