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In the summer of 1981, Ricky Skaggs scheduled his wedding for the middle of the week so Nashville’s working musicians would be home. The guests received two simple instructions: bring a covered dish and bring a guitar. Ricky was twenty-seven and standing at the edge of the decade that would make him one of country music’s largest stars. His album Waitin’ for the Sun to Shine had just been released, and its mix of fiddle, mandolin and old country songs was beginning to find an audience that Nashville executives had not been certain still existed. The woman he was marrying understood that life from the inside. Sharon White sang with her father Buck and sister Cheryl in a family group that would soon become known simply as the Whites. Their courtship had grown around stages, rehearsals and long trips where instruments occupied as much space as luggage. Only weeks before the ceremony, a reporter found Ricky working in a Nashville studio. He had to leave in the middle of a song because furniture was arriving—pieces he had bought during a State Department tour of Pakistan with Buck White’s band. The interruption captured the life he and Sharon were assembling. There was a recording session to finish, furniture to carry into a new home and a wedding that had to be placed where touring musicians could reach it. They married on August 4, 1981. There was no attempt to separate the ceremony from the world that had brought them together. Friends arrived with food prepared in their own kitchens. Guitar cases opened after the meal. Some of the same hands that spent weekends working stages and studios now passed plates and found chords around the newly married couple. Over the next few years, Ricky collected No. 1 records and became the CMA’s 1985 Entertainer of the Year. The Whites joined the Grand Ole Opry. In 1987, Ricky and Sharon recorded “Love Can’t Ever Get Better Than This” and were named the CMA’s Vocal Duo of the Year. The awards came later. First there was a weekday chosen around the working calendar, a table filled by friends and enough guitars in the room to provide their own wedding music. More from that 1981 season—and the family partnership built around it—is explored below.

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RICKY SKAGGS PLANNED HIS WEDDING AROUND THE PICKERS’ WORKWEEK

On a Monday afternoon in 1981, Ricky Skaggs left a Nashville recording studio in the middle of a song because someone had arrived with his furniture.

The pieces had traveled farther than most furniture entering a young musician’s home. Ricky had bought them in Pakistan while touring with Buck White and the Down Home Folks on a State Department trip.

Now the furniture needed a place inside the life he was preparing to share with Buck’s daughter, Sharon.

The record could wait a few minutes. The wedding could not remain an idea forever.

Furniture From Pakistan

Ricky had spent most of his life treating music as ordinary work.

His father had placed a mandolin in his hands when he was five. By his teens, Ricky was traveling with Ralph Stanley. He later played in J. D. Crowe’s New South, cofounded Boone Creek and joined Emmylou Harris’s Hot Band.

He had already lived through years of buses, backstage rooms and recording sessions before country radio learned his name.

The Pakistani furniture therefore belonged to more than an amusing interruption. It had been purchased while Ricky was working beside the family he was about to join. Buck White was a mandolin and piano player. His daughters Sharon and Cheryl sang the close harmonies that can rarely be taught because they begin around a family table long before they reach a microphone.

Ricky was furnishing a house with objects collected on the road.

The White Family’s Traveling Music

Buck White had supported his family through plumbing work while continuing to play dances and local shows.

Sharon began playing bass when she was young. Cheryl later took over the instrument, allowing Sharon to move to guitar. With their father, the sisters developed a sound built around plain instrumentation and tightly matched voices.

They were not a manufactured vocal group assembled by a producer. They had learned when to enter a line by listening to one another for years.

Emmylou Harris recognized that quality. She brought Sharon and Cheryl into the sessions for Blue Kentucky Girl and later carried the White family as an opening act.

Ricky was working with Emmylou during the same period. He had met the Whites before, but the touring years placed him and Sharon in the same narrow world of sound checks, loading doors and highway meals.

Their relationship did not begin by pulling either of them away from music. Music supplied the rooms in which it could grow.

A Date Between the Weekend Shows

By the summer of 1981, Ricky and Sharon were preparing to marry.

A Saturday ceremony would have created a problem. Saturdays were working nights. Their friends earned their living at festivals, clubs, theaters, Opry appearances and package shows. A weekend wedding would force them to choose between attending and honoring an engagement that had already been booked.

Ricky chose the middle of the week.

He explained the plan to The Washington Post shortly before the ceremony: hold the wedding when most of the pickers would be home. Guests were asked to bring a covered dish and a guitar.

The arrangement placed no barrier between the professional musicians and the people they were when the show ended. Nobody needed formal entertainment. The guests could provide it themselves.

Food would arrive from several kitchens. Music would arrive in cases.

August 4, 1981

Ricky and Sharon married in Nashville on August 4.

Many well-known members of the country community attended, but the gathering had been designed less like an industry event than a musicians’ supper. Its important pieces did not need to be rented: friends, instruments and enough food to pass around.

The timing carried its own quiet uncertainty.

Ricky’s new album had been released in May. He had moved from supporting other singers to placing his own name on the front of a record, but no one yet knew how far the traditional sound would carry him.

Country radio was filled with smoother crossover productions. Ricky was arriving with Buck Owens songs, Webb Pierce material, sharp fiddle lines and a mandolin visible in his hands. The music could have placed him outside the commercial center.

Instead, “You May See Me Walkin’” reached the Top Ten. Then “Cryin’ My Heart Out Over You” climbed to No. 1.

The young man planning a covered-dish wedding was about to become one of the central figures of 1980s country.

Two Careers at the Same Table

Sharon did not become simply “Ricky Skaggs’s wife.”

The White family’s records began reaching country radio during the same period. “You Put the Blue in Me” became their first major hit. More successful singles followed, and the Whites joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1984.

Ricky sometimes produced their recordings. Sharon and Cheryl supplied voices on his sessions. Buck’s piano appeared in the family’s musical work. The marriage connected careers without completely combining them.

That arrangement could create strain. A record label might want Ricky’s production changed. Touring calendars pulled in different directions. Children needed parents who were often expected in separate cities.

In a 1987 interview, Ricky acknowledged the pain of being removed as the Whites’ producer when their label wanted a different approach. He did not publicly attack the decision. Sharon’s group needed to continue its work even when the business separated it from his control.

The family had to remain larger than any one recording arrangement.

A Duet About Staying

In 1987, Ricky and Sharon released “Love Can’t Ever Get Better Than This.”

The song did not portray marriage as a grand rescue. Its language centered on two people carrying ordinary burdens together, finding value in the life already under their roof.

That year, Ricky and Sharon received the CMA award for Vocal Duo of the Year.

The award arrived six years after the covered dishes and guitar cases. By then, Ricky had accumulated a run of No. 1 records and had been named the CMA’s Entertainer of the Year. Sharon had become an Opry member with her father and sister.

Their duet worked because the voices had not been paired for a marketing campaign. The relationship already existed before the microphones opened.

Listeners were hearing two careers meeting briefly inside the marriage that had survived them.

Music That Kept Returning Home

Ricky and Sharon raised a blended family while continuing to perform.

The home contained children from Ricky’s first marriage as well as the son and daughter he and Sharon had together. Later, Molly and Lucas Skaggs would make music of their own.

Family appearances gradually became another branch of the work. Ricky performed with the Whites. He and Sharon recorded gospel music. Christmas tours eventually placed parents, children and extended family on the same stage.

The form changed, but it retained something from the wedding. Music was not a separate profession brought into the house after supper. It was one of the ways the family occupied the same room.

The guitars invited to the ceremony never really left.

What the Midweek Wedding Really Leaves Behind

Ricky Skaggs’s 1980s career can be measured through twelve No. 1 country hits, Grammy Awards and the 1985 Entertainer of the Year trophy.

The wedding used another measure.

Its date was chosen according to when working musicians could come home. The meal depended on each guest bringing something. The entertainment waited inside the guitar cases leaning against the walls.

Ricky and Sharon entered marriage while both were still building uncertain careers. More than four decades later, they remained together, still singing and appearing with the family whose work had first placed them on the same road.

The famous guests eventually returned to their buses and Saturday-night stages. The empty dishes went back to their kitchens.

Ricky and Sharon stayed in the house they had begun furnishing between recording sessions.

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