Highways and Heartaches: How Ricky Skaggs, Marty Stuart, and Children of the New South Saved the Soul of Country Music

Like Marty Stuart’s straight-ahead rockabilly guitar licks and Ricky Skaggs’s lightning-fast mandolin runs, this tour de force from documentarian Streissguth (Outlaw) scampers through the musical landscape that shaped and was shaped by the two country artists. Kentucky country boy Skaggs got his start with one of the fathers of bluegrass, Ralph Stanley, while Mississippi picker Stuart began performing with another bluegrass giant, Lester Flatt, as a teen. By the mid-1980s, Skaggs had cycled through a series of progressive bluegrass groups before starting his own band, Boone Creek; playing briefly in Emmylou Harris’s Hot Band; and eventually launching his solo career with the chart-topping 1982 album Highways and Heartaches. Meanwhile, Stuart cycled through bluegrass, country, and folk groups including stints with master guitarist Doc Watson, the Nashville Grass, and Kentucky Colonels. While the musicians traveled along separate paths for much of their careers—they did join forces on “Rawhide” at the 1996 memorial for one of their beloved mentors, Bill Monroe—each was instrumental in bringing “the spirit of bluegrass into their hard-wrought experiments in mainstream country music... fueling the profitability and, more important, the credibility of the fabled genre.” In fine-grained prose, Streissguth sketches a nuanced portrait of two musicians who both preserved bluegrass tradition and innovated within it. The result is a rich and revealing outing sure to delight country music fans. (Aug.)