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Solid Ground was actually my introduction to Ricky Skaggs’ music. When I first got into country music as a teenager in the early 90s, I remember buying this CD because I liked his cover of “Cat’s in the Cradle”. CMT had the video in rotation.
It might make an interesting post one day to talk about artists whom you discovered when they were in their commercial decline. For example, my first Emmylou Harris album was Cowgirl’s Prayer because I didn’t discover her until 1993. My first exposure to George Jones was, unfortunately, High Tech Redneck.
Ricky Skaggs was already 41 years old when this album was released, meaning that his shelf-life as a mainstream artist was about up anyway, the change in market conditions notwithstanding.
I liked both of the the Atlantic albums, but I knew that the jig was up as far as chart action was concerned, when I purchased the albums. As Jerry Reed succinctly put it “when you’re hot, you’re hot, when you’re not, you’re not”
It was a pretty remarkable run for an artist whose heart was always in bluegrass. Had Ricky quit recording after his second Atlantic album, he still would have left behind a remarkable legacy of recorded music. Fortunately he did no such thing.