Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys
All I Ever Loved Was You
“All I Ever Loved Was You” was written by Dorothy Skaggs, the mother of bluegrass singer Ricky Skaggs, and first recorded on June 29, 1971, by Keith Whitley and Ricky Skaggs for their album 2nd Generation Bluegrass, released on Rebel Records in 1972. The session captured the teenaged Whitley and Skaggs at a particularly precocious early career stage, and the album remains a foundational document of the late-1960s/early-1970s next-generation bluegrass scene.
Ricky Skaggs has described his mother’s songwriting process: “Mom didn’t play an instrument, but she’d write out what she could and Dad would help her work out the melody on his guitar. She wrote a lot of love songs when Dad was away working and she was missing him.” Dorothy Skaggs would wake up in the middle of the night with lyrics on her mind and write them down before they faded; she said the songs simply came to her. The autobiographical separation-and-longing context gives the song a particular emotional weight that distinguishes it from more generic country-bluegrass heartbreak material.
“All I Ever Loved Was You” was later re-recorded by Ralph Stanley with Ricky Skaggs (on Stanley’s Play Requests LP), bringing the song into the canonical Stanley-tradition repertoire. It has been carried forward by various contemporary bluegrass acts and remains one of the most-cited Dorothy Skaggs compositions, alongside several other songs she wrote that crossed into Ricky Skaggs’s working catalog.
