Ricky Skaggs has been quiet for a long time. Not retired, not gone, just waiting. And the song he was waiting to release has been sitting in a vault for 15 years.
“Say a Prayer” arrived on all digital platforms Thursday, June 26, via Skaggs Family Records, marking the 15-time Grammy winner’s first new release in more than a decade. Written by Gordon Kennedy and Ben Cooper, the track blends country, bluegrass, and rock with instrumentation that includes sitar, fiddle, mandolin, and banjo.
“It’s a song I recorded right at the end of a gospel CD that I did called Mosaic,” Skaggs told Country Now backstage at CMA Fest. “We recorded it but just didn’t feel like it was to go on that CD. And so we’ve held onto it for all these years.”
Fifteen years in a vault. He could have released it at any point. He didn’t, because the moment wasn’t right.
“Right now with the way the world is, I felt like it was the right time for a message like ‘Say a Prayer’ because it talks about war. It talks about greed and it talks about all these things,” he said.
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The Man Has Been Shaping Country Music for 60 Years
Skaggs started playing music over 60 years ago in Cordell, Kentucky. He was performing with Bill Monroe on the Grand Ole Opry stage as a child. By 15, he and a young Keith Whitley were playing with Ralph Stanley’s Clinch Mountain Boys. In the early ’80s, when pop-country crossovers were pushing traditional sounds to the margins, Skaggs walked into Nashville and pulled the genre back to its roots with hits like “Highway 40 Blues,” “Country Boy,” and “Uncle Pen.”
Twelve No. 1 hits. Fifteen Grammys. Eight CMA Awards, including Entertainer of the Year. Inductions into the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Bluegrass Hall of Fame, and three more. In 2020, he received the National Medal of Arts, the highest honor the U.S. government gives to an artist.
He’s far from slowing down either. At CMA Fest earlier this month, Skaggs joined Carly Pearce and Molly Tuttle on the Nissan Stadium stage for a performance of “From Now On,” and he’s joining Dierks Bentley on select dates of the Off The Map Summer Tour. He’ll also close out the Bluegrass Nights at the Ryman series on July 21.
At 71, with more awards than most artists have albums, Ricky Skaggs doesn’t need to release new music. But he held onto “Say a Prayer” for 15 years because he believed the world would eventually need to hear it. That’s the kind of patience that only comes from someone who still believes music isn’t content. It’s ministry.
