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underground reserves of natural gas; the natural-gas pipes were everywhere, and they needed fitters and welders.
    There was something else, too, that drew Dad back home to the holler. The Thompson sister Dorothy May was there, and he’d been thinking a lot about her. When he wasn’t welding, he started hanging out at the Thompson place. Sometimes he brought his guitar and played music with the Thompson brothers. Most of the time, though, he was just there to see Dorothy May. It wasn’t long before they got pretty serious about each other.
    Dad and Mom were married on July 1, 1947, and moved into a little one-bedroom house on Brushy Creek. My sister Linda was born the next year, so now Dad had a wife and baby girl to support. Work was hard to find in eastern Kentucky at that time. He heard about a job opening at a large farm in Urbana, Ohio, just north of Springfield. The great thing was, the job paid a steady salary and provided housing for the family. Dad liked the work and the owner of the farm so much that he stayed there for a couple of years. My brother Garold was born there in 1950.
    With a growing family and the Kentucky hills calling, Dad moved back to Brushy Creek and built a house. That was the house we called the homeplace. That’s where the family lived in 1954, when I was born, in 1959, when my brother Gary came along. No matter where Dad’s work would take us, we always had the homeplace to go back to. That was a comforting thought for Dad and, as the years went by, for all of us.
    W hen I was born, I was a handful from the first breath I ever took. Leastways that’s how my mom remembered it. I was born on July 18, 1954, at Riverview Hospital in Louisa, Kentucky, the closest sizable town to our holler and the county seat of Lawrence. They said that when the doctor slapped my butt, I squalled out so loud the doctor told my mom, “Well, you’ve got a healthy boy, and he’s got a healthy set of lungs. He’s either gonna be a preacher or a singer.” Mom replied right quick, “Well, I want both!” My given name is Rickie Lee Skaggs. Rickie wasn’t a nickname for Richard or anything like that. I wasn’t named for a relative or a friend of the family or even a real person. Strange as it may sound, I was actually named after Ricky Ricardo.
    The thing was, my folks didn’t know what to call me at first. My grandfather knew they were having trouble coming up with a name. In the early ’50s, I Love Lucy was the biggest show going on TV, and Ricky Ricardo, played by Desi Arnaz, was about the most famous man in America. You had Lucille Ball hollering “Ricky! Ricky!” at Desi every episode, and the name was very popular, even way out in Brushy Creek, where most people like us didn’t even have television sets yet. So one day my grandfather said, “Why don’t you name him Ricky?” and Dad and Mom were sold. I was named Rickie Lee Skaggs. On my birth certificate it says R-I-C-K-I-E because that’s what looked right to my dad and mom. One thing’s for sure. The doctor sure was right about the singing, and the signs came early. Right from the start, I was a little different from my sister and brothers.
    My mother didn’t play an instrument, but she was a great, natural-born singer, probably the first singing voice I ever heard. She had an old mountain voice, pure and powerful. You’d never guess such a big voice could come from such a small woman. She sang all the time, tunes she wrote herself, gospel songs, and whatever country hits she heard on the radio. Before she knew it, she had herself a little singing partner, and that was me.
    Mama would sing while she did her chores around the house, and I’d be off at the other end of the house playing with my toys. She was all the time singing in the kitchen while she was cooking, and she’d hear me singing harmony along with her. I took my dad’s part when I sang