💍 Joyful Ricky Skaggs Schedules Midweek Wedding So Picking Friends Can Bring Dishes And Guitars 🪕

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.

Bring a covered dish and bring a guitar.

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 those two simple instructions from the couple.

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.

Sharon White Understood That Life From The Inside

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 with 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.

Food From Their Kitchens And Music From Their Cases

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. More from that 1981 season and the family partnership built around it shows how a midweek wedding became the perfect beginning for two careers and one marriage rooted in the same music.