Garth Brooks and Ricky Skaggs Get Upstaged at Hall of Fame Ceremony — By a Mandolin!

Clearly country-and-bluegrass great Ricky Skaggs didn’t think it could get any better than having Garth Brooks, whom he called “the biggest name in country music anywhere in the world,” induct him into the Country Music Hall of Fame. And yet on this night at Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Brooks — and, for that matter, Skaggs — were one-upped by something else: perhaps the most famous and precious piece of history in the museum, the mandolin of Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass. The 95-year-old instrument permanently resides, like a crown jewel, behind thick glass in the museum, but the decision was made for it to come out on Sunday night and be played by Skaggs, a mandolin master who’s unsurpassed in carrying on Monroe’s legacy. Shocked by its sudden arrival on stage, Skaggs, 64, grinned as he swung the mandolin strap over his shoulder, gingerly cradled the instrument, and offered it a greeting, “Hi, old man.” Strumming the Gibson F-5’s sturdy strings, Skaggs then traded verses with Brooks, also a Hall of Famer, on “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” the anthem of country music that traditionally closes the ceremony. The mandolin’s appearance capped the three-hour invitation-only ceremony in the CMA Theater that also featured the posthumous inductions of country queen Dottie West, whose three-decades-long career included such hits as “Country Sunshine” and “A Lesson in Leavin’,” and fiddle virtuoso Johnny Gimble. In Brook’s induction remarks, he credited Skaggs, Reba McEntire and George Strait — now all in the Hall — for singlehandedly saving the sanctity of country music in the early 1980s.

After Brooks and museum CEO Kyle Young unveiled the plaque that will hang in the Hall of Fame rotunda, Skaggs offered his gratitude to “the fathers and mothers that are in this Hall [who] literally built bluegrass and country music from the ground up.” A child prodigy raised in eastern Kentucky, Skaggs had already played with bluegrass pinnacles Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, and Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs by the time he was 10 years old. At age 6, he attended a Monroe concert, and the hometown crowd kept yelling for the master to let “little Ricky Skaggs” play. Monroe finally gave in, lifted the youngster onto the stage, and strapped his own mandolin on the boy so he could show off his chops. It was the very same instrument Skaggs played on Sunday night — 58 years later — and he talked to it like a lifelong friend... MORE