Ricky Skaggs Interview: Country Singer Discusses Memoir 'Kentucky Traveler'

Ricky Skaggs is one of those old country dudes who seems to be everywhere and know everybody. He's won more than a dozen Grammys and has enough stories to wear your ears off.

Last year, he finally sat down and put them down on paper in his recent autobiography, Kentucky Traveler. Speaking with The Boot recently, Skaggs dished on the new release.

"I never, ever thought that I would ever write a book," Skaggs said. "I mean, me and books never got along well when I was a kid in school. My history book one time - I had a flintlock rifle, an old black powder rifle, you know, and I remember one morning standing on the porch, I was waiting for the bus to come, and I took my history book and set it way up there in the road, just to see if I could hit it with this flintlock. So I cock it back, take good aim, you know, and shoot a hole in the book. It didn't go all the way through it, 'cause the book was pretty thick, but it just tore my book up so bad! And it was so ridiculous that I did that. I would've probably wore my kids out if they did that with their books."

Skaggs said he'd been weighing publishing offers since the early 2000s, but didn't actually say yes until HarperCollins came knocking roughly five years ago.

"At first, it wasn't working," he said. "It really wasn't. I mean, when he would send me back what he'd written down of what I had said on tape, or on a little digital recorder or whatever we were using, it wasn't what I'd said. It wasn't the way I'd said it. I don't sound like someone that graduated from Princeton. I'm never gonna talk like that. I talk mountainese. I talk like Kentucky, and like it or not, that's who I am, and that's who the fans have grown up knowing who I was and would expect to hear that from me."

The country veteran also said that he'd like to put his book down on tape.

"One thing I keep saying to myself that I'd like to do, I'd love to release an audio version," he said. "I think people would really love to have it in their car on a long trip, where they could just sit and listen to this story, and maybe even intertwine some music."

The Boot calls Kentucky Traveler "quite simply one of the best musical memoirs of its type in recent memory." Check out more here.