Ricky Skaggs is sharing the faith-filled moment he shared with Dolly Parton before helping her make the album that returned her to the top of the country charts. The 72-year-old bluegrass and country star recalled visiting Parton at her Nashville home prior to recording her 1989 album «White Limozeen,» a project that came after a string of commercially disappointing pop-leaning releases.
During an interview, Skaggs said Parton took him to her backyard and showed him a small church that had originally stood in East Tennessee, where she grew up. The structure had been carefully dismantled, with every slat and piece of flooring numbered, then transported to her property and rebuilt. «She wanted me to go in,» Skaggs said. Inside, the church featured a small piano and an altar reminiscent of the old Baptist mountain churches of her childhood.
«We got up by the altar and just started praying after talking in there for a while about our faith. And we asked God's hand to be on this record, that he would bless it, bless the musicians, bless all the singers,» Skaggs said. He described the encounter as unforgettable. «I just never have forgotten just the power of that day. That whole day was just wonderful. It showed me the kind of woman she was.»
The collaboration began after Parton invited Skaggs and his band to appear on her Los Angeles-based television show «Dolly.» As he was leaving, Skaggs recalled asking her when she planned to make «a real country album again.» Her response stunned him: she said she had been thinking about it and wanted him to produce it. «I was shocked to the bone,» he admitted. «That was one of the most mind-blowing, waking up smelling the roses kind of thing that I'd ever had happen at that time, musically for sure.»
Parton, who died on Aug. 25 at age 80, had spent much of the late 1970s and 1980s broadening her sound with pop-influenced material. Her 1987 solo album «Rainbow» was both a critical and commercial disappointment, peaking at No. 18 on Billboard's Top Country Albums chart and failing to produce a Top 40 country single. With Skaggs at the helm, «White Limozeen» brought her back to a more traditional country style. The album reached No. 3 on the country chart, produced two No. 1 hits — «Why'd You Come in Here Lookin' Like That» and «Yellow Roses» — and earned Gold certification from the RIAA.
Although the album remained their only major recording collaboration, Skaggs said he and Parton shared a lasting bond rooted in their Appalachian backgrounds and Christian faith. The Kentucky native said Parton lived out her beliefs through compassion and generosity, even when critics questioned her glamorous image. «Some religious people would have really, and probably did, judge her for the way she wore her clothes, or the way that she did this and that and the other, but man, she reflected the love of Jesus everywhere she was,» he said. «She did so much for the homeless, for the poor, for hurting people.»
Parton's philanthropy was well documented throughout her life. In 1995, she launched the Imagination Library, a program that has gifted hundreds of millions of free books to children from birth to age 5 worldwide. After the 2016 Great Smoky Mountains wildfires, she established the My People Fund, which provided eligible Sevier County families whose homes were destroyed with $1,000 a month for up to six months. In 2020, she donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center for COVID-19 research.
Skaggs said the prayer session in Parton's backyard church stayed with him and shaped his own band's routine. «Me and my band nowadays, we pray every time before we go out on stage and everything,» he said, reflecting on how the moment influenced him long after the recording sessions ended.