Ricky Skaggs Breaks The Code

Bluegrass deserves integrity from its heroes.

I don’t think the outside world or even some in the genre recognize how singular bluegrass music is as a unifying force in a divided America. One of the reasons I’ve loved and praised bluegrass for decades is that the music and the spirit behind it attracts and expands a fan base and a music-making family that encompasses everyone - right and left, urban and rural, pious and secular, old and young. More and more, that embrace has widened explicitly for people of color and the LGBTQ community. We’ve seen how fragile and troubled our compacts of citizenship are in the media-addled regular world. So a recent and unfortunate event has made me concerned about the comity in bluegrass, a precious thing that we need to protect.

On April 13, American musical icon Ricky Skaggs gave an interview to evangelical/prophetic Christian YouTube host Steve Shultz on his channel Elijah Streams. Over an hour (the full video is posted below), Skaggs advanced the notion that the 2020 election was literally “stolen” from Donald Trump and endorsed the core tenets of the Q-Anon movement. Following is the core quote that made the rounds in an alarmed bluegrass community over the past week or two. It starts about minute 33 in the video. The premise is that Trump is a God-ordained leader who will with certainty be re-installed as the only legitimate power in the United States, based on prophetic visions that Skaggs describes earlier in the interview.

“I don’t know when, but I do know how. Because if God is going to bring righteousness – righteousness and justice is the foundation of his throne – and so if he’s going to bring justice together in the Earth, in what he’s doing right now, what the Lord is doing right now, with the take down of cabals, take down of all this evil that’s going on and all of the pedophilia rings and the child sacrifices, all that is going on. God is hearing the cries of those children, and he’s making this right. He’s going to make this right. And so it is obvious as the nose on my face that the election—it wasn’t fraud, it was a crime—it was absolutely a crime that happened, and God is not going to stand by and let something like that be stolen.”

Elsewhere, Skaggs says Trump “won the votes. It was just stolen from him” and reiterates the word “fraud,” without offering any evidence. He also proclaims that Christians like him are engaged in a “war,” followed by the assertion that “People don’t realize what a battle that we’re in.”  

This is incredibly painful to think about and write about, but these remarks have sparked a crisis in bluegrass that must be addressed as the business revs back up for a busy post-pandemic calendar of shows and festivals, many featuring Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder.

First it must be said, I love Ricky Skaggs, as a musician and a man, and so does the bluegrass community. His voice was on the bluegrass mix tape that changed my life in 1986, and I’ve followed his every musical move for 30-plus years. I have admired him, learned from him, and championed his artistic and music business choices as uniquely enriching for a great American art form. I have been riveted and appreciative in every interview I’ve done with the man, right up to this one in 2019. He’s an icon who was deservedly inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2018, where he’s enshrined as an “elder statesman” of the music. Consider that designation carefully as we unpack what he has waded into.

I want to be rigorous in defining where Mr. Skaggs has crossed the line in this interview, because I am not here to call him out for his conservative views or how he votes or assign him guilt by association to anybody else. Ricky Skaggs has every right to support Donald Trump as a candidate and every right to base his entire political worldview on “conservative Christian” beliefs, as misguided as I think all that is. As you may be aware, Skaggs is inclined to testify on behalf of his religious views on stage, which rankles some. But even that I can’t resent, because if ‘Shut Up And Sing’ is a nasty thing to say to The Chicks or Jason Isbell, it’s nasty to say to anyone. That is all stuff that his diverse fans understand. When Skaggs accepted an invitation to the White House to accept a National Medal of Arts less than a week after the insurrectionist attack of Jan. 6, it was disturbing, an implicit endorsement of that event. But even that, an established cultural prize, wasn’t worth a rebuke. This interview however is a more proactive (and thus escalating) statement of loyalty to a deeply divisive and dishonest man and a lost cause than to our democracy and to our sense of common purpose.

What Skaggs needs to address and renounce are the two fabrications at the heart of his interview - that the election was stolen and that the Democratic left (that means me and a million other Ricky Skaggs lovers) engages in or suborns pedophilia and child sacrifice. The former stance is an attack on the nation’s precious democratic consensus, and the latter is a sick insult of the values and citizenship of basically everybody I hold dear.

It is not on me to disprove claims that the election was stolen. Every single agency in Mr. Trump’s government, including his hand-picked attorney general, affirmed there was no actionable fraud. The states, where conservatives believe power should reside, investigated and duly certified their elections. The Vice President found no grounds to object either. Some things are unknowable, but the legitimacy of the 2020 election is beyond dispute. To continue Trump’s claims is to endorse the insurrectionist rhetoric and rationale of the Jan. 6 attack on our Congress, our Capitol and our Constitution. If Mr. Skaggs wants a conservative Christian’s take on that event and Mr. Trump’s culpability, I’d direct him to Rep. Liz Cheney. And who knows what to make of the demented Q-Anon movement? It’s an American tragedy that’s still unfolding. In any event, I would say it is incumbent on Mr. Skaggs to back up or withdraw his strident assertions, particularly since elsewhere in the interview he emphasizes God’s anger at “bearing false witness.” Outrageous claims demand abundant and verifiable evidence, but Skaggs surely has no more of a case than attorney Sidney Powell (who renounced her claims when pressed in court filings) or the My Pillow Guy. 

The implications of Ricky Skaggs going public with misinformation and defamatory claims are far-reaching. Some outside the community (at least based on a couple of days of Twitter last week) have already seized on this story as validation that country music and bluegrass are riddled with racists and right wing fascists. It’s a setback for a genre community that’s worked hard to account for its racial myopia and before that to unwind a century of “white trash” or “hillbilly” stereotyping. At ground level though, show promoters are telling me that Skaggs has put them in a very hard place. They are facing pressure to cancel his bookings, though he may well be the headlining anchor of some events. Patrons are fighting on Facebook over stuff that rarely gets aired out on bluegrass festival pages. Presenters now live with anxiety over whether Skaggs will go beyond his past religious rhetoric on stage and begin speaking about the mythical stolen election or child sacrifice.

My point here is that Ricky Skaggs, who is among the biggest stars working in bluegrass today and a worldwide spokesman for the music, owes us the same respect that we’ve afforded him over the years. He owes the many generations and the diverse Americans who look up to him a commitment to verifiable reality, to civil discourse and peaceful co-existence. My argument here is not meant to inflame a culture war but to cool it down. Mr. Skaggs has brought the “war” (his word) into our house, by amplifying a dangerous political lie and dark conspiracy theories that slander the center-left beliefs and values many of his lifetime supporters embrace. He has violated the good faith and mutual support that holds together one of the most important and beautiful cultural communities in our country. I’m curious and prayerful about what he’ll do next.

The interview in full.