The Shadow
Pickin’ and grinnin’ comes as naturally as breathing to Ricky Lee.
Of course, Dr. Ralph Stanley has known that for years.
Ricky, who makes his home in Alleghany County, is a former member of The Clinch Mountain Boys, the band that famously backs up Stanley in his musical travels, and he was honored by Stanley for his time with the band with a Blue Ridge Custom Carter Stanley Limited Edition acoustic guitar.
“I didn’t have any idea that I’d get one,” said Ricky. “I played with them for less time than the others. A lot of them played with him for years, but I played with him at the right time.”
Ricky’s new guitar was given to him by Stanley at Dr. Ralph Stanley’s 41st Annual Memorial Weekend Bluegrass Festival in McClure.
The guitar was awarded to Ricky for his 1972-1975 tenure with The Clinch Mountain Boys, when he cut six albums with the band and put his signature on the tune “Bill Cheatham.”
“People got to know me by that tune,” said Ricky.
Ricky was playing with Bluegrass Tarheels, a semi-pro band, when he got to know Roy Lee, who was the lead singer of the Clinch Mountain Boys at the time.
“Come to find out that Ralph’s lead guitar player was leaving,” he said. “I talked to Roy and told him I’d like to get that job. So Roy talked to Ralph and Ralph said to call him.”
The bands happened to be playing at the same bluegrass festival soon after that and it was then that Ricky would etch his name into the bluegrass history books.
“We talked then and he told me to meet him in Atlanta, Georgia, and told me where to go for the first show and I was hired,” said Ricky.
He quickly found out at he had signed on for a life filled with long hours on the road.
“A band like that, you spend as much time with them as you do your family. When I went to work for him in ’72 he was booked every week for 15 months in advance.”
Those bookings would take Ricky from that first show in Atlanta to the Grand Ole Opry and around the world to Tokyo, Japan.
“In 1975, bluegrass was the number 2 favorite type of music in the city,” Ricky said, speaking of Tokyo. “Number one was country. You turn the TV on and they had soap operas on and the commercials had bluegrass music wide open.”
Ricky and his bandmates traveled to Tokyo with luggage full of albums that they hoped to sell, but they ended up bringing them back home with them.
“We were allowed to take 30 or 40 pounds per person on the plane. Ralph made sure we had our limit in albums. We didn’t hardly sell nothing because they had them all,” he said.
That didn’t stop them from putting on two big shows.
“We played a college in Tokyo, a monstrous, beautiful place. There were about 3,000 people sitting in there,” he said. They would travel on to Osaka, Japan, where they put on another big show, but for Ricky, neither of those shows hold a candle to the legendary Grand Ole Opry.
“That was the ultimate right there,” he said. “You felt like you’d reached the top of the ladder.”
He played the Opry with Stanley in 1973 in the Ryman Auditorium and then later returned to the Opry’s newer home at Opryland USA Theme Park in the early 1990s when he toured with Raymond Fairchild.
“I took a wild hare back in ’91 and left here and went to work with Raymond Fairchild for three years. We ran all over the country.
“I did it just to see if I could still do it,” Ricky said.
An impromptu short jam session in the newsroom of the Virginian Review was enough to prove that he still “has it” after 55 years of strumming the ol’ six string.
