Ricky Skaggs at the Birchmere
By • December 23, 2024 0 14
At age 70, Ricky Skaggs is a spring chicken compared to Willie Nelson, who’s 91.
Though Willie (pardon the first-name basis) has never played the Birchmere — he did a 1995 show at Wolf Trap instead — Skaggs has appeared many times at “America’s Legendary Music Hall.” On Friday, Jan. 3, and Saturday, Jan. 4, he’ll be back, joined by his band of genuinely young bluegrass whizzes, Kentucky Thunder.
In 1966, when Gary Oelze opened the Birchmere restaurant in a Shirlington strip mall, Skaggs — 12 years younger and, like Oelze, a native Kentuckian — hadn’t entered his teen years. But the mandolin prodigy had been onstage with Bill Monroe at age 6 and on the Martha White Flour Hour with Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs at age 7. As a teenager, he and guitarist buddy Keith Whitley joined Ralph Stanley’s Clinch Mountain Boys.
Meanwhile, Oelze was adding live music. In 1974, the Birchmere became a full-time music venue with dining, its success partly due to a regular Thursday night gig by a “newgrass” group called the Seldom Scene. That gig lasted 20 years, and the Seldom Scene will return as part of this year’s New Year’s Eve show.
The Birchmere moved to 3901 Mount Vernon Ave. in Alexandria in 1981, then to its current, 500-seat building at 3701 in 1997. Oelze died on Jan. 23, 2023. His wife Susan continues to run the Birchmere with longtime booker-promoter Michael Jaworek.
This book on the Birchmere’s history was published in 2021.
After other progressive bluegrass work (J.D. Crowe & The New South, Boone Creek with Whitley), Skaggs was in the D.C. area playing fiddle with the Country Gentlemen and working for Virginia Electric and Power when, in 1974, he crossed paths at a party with two future stars: Linda Ronstadt, who was playing Georgetown’s 163-seat Cellar Door (now a Starbucks), and Emmylou Harris, valedictorian of Gar-Field High School in Woodbridge, Virginia, who was living in Maryland with her parents — after stints in Greenwich Village and Nashville and a divorce — playing local clubs and about to be discovered by Gram Parsons.
Ronstadt “loved the encyclopedia of old music that was up in my noggin,” says Skaggs in a Sweetwater Sound interview on YouTube. His career was about to enter a new phase: working with Harris’s Hot Band on her 1980 bluegrass-inspired album “Roses in the Snow,” along with Ronstadt and (here we go again) Dolly, Johnny, Willie and Harris’s future husband, producer Brian Ahern.
A shift to mainstream country music followed. What’s the difference between bluegrass and country (this is not a “Blues Brothers” joke)? According to Skaggs, bluegrass is acoustic, with each of the players featured in solo passages, while country typically focuses on a lead singer backed by electric instruments and a drum set.
Skaggs’s Nashville albums “Waitin’ for the Sun to Shine” and “Highways & Heartaches” were big hits in the early 1980s. In 1982, he became the youngest Grand Ole Opry inductee up to that time.
After these high-profile years, Skaggs gradually returned to his bluegrass roots, also bridging genres in collaborations with Phish, Bruce Hornsby and the Raconteurs. In 2021, he received the National Medal of Arts (and was criticized by some due to its bestower).
Ricky Skaggs & Kentucky Thunder
Jan. 3 and 4, 7:30 p.m., $55
The Birchmere, 3701 Mount Vernon Ave.
Alexandria, Virginia
