JL: We’re both from Ky. What part are you from?

RS: Eastern Part of Ky. A little place called Cordel Ky. It’s in Lawrence Co. There used to be a post office there, but it fell over in the creek a few years ago, so they moved the name of the place to Blane, Ky. So when I tell people I’m from Cordel they can’t find it on the map!

JL: How old were you when you started singing?

RS: I can’t even remember, my Mother says I was singing when I was about 3 years old, and I started singing in a lot of churches with my Mom and Dad. They’re pretty regular church goers, and my Dad was a welder, so he traveled a lot , back in those days you had to go North to get work, that’s where all the industry was moving to, and so he was going to Columbus Ohio and Detroit, Hammond Ind. and places like that, doing a lot of welding work for Dow Chemical, and a whole lot of refineries. So he’d try to get home on the weekends, but it was kinda hard, I mean 2 lane roads back in those days, there wasn’t no Interstate highways, there was Route 23 North and that was pretty much it. My Dad bought me a mandolin when I was 5, so I was playing pretty early.

JL: Which instrument is your favorite?

RS: I gotta say the mandolin, and the fiddle. You know I love the fiddle. That’s a great instrument.

JL: Who influenced your music career?

RS: First off the bat is Bill Monroe, I think he influenced the whole American Music Scene, probably as much as any one person in America. He influenced the early rockabilly guys, he wasn’t a sappy country singer. He really had something different about his music, it had drive, it had excitement, it had energy, he was a very big man. His stature was big, and so he almost like commanded authority just walking into a place. He was in a way almost like the first bad boy of the music business. Because he wasn’t really well educated, there was a certain amount of shyness that he had, and a lot of people thought he was arrogant and stuff, but he was really a shy person. Musically he influenced so many people. Of course I’ve had a lot of influences, Flatt & Scruggs, The Stanley Brothers, I’ve loved George Jones all my life, Buck Owens, all those guys. You know my Mom and Dad were really big influences on me listening to their music and listening to the things they grew up listening to. My Dad was a huge Jimmy Rogers fan, so I heard a lot of Singing Brakemen around my house. My Dad would sit around on the porch in the evening singing Jimmy Rogers songs, so we had a real mesh of music, having an older sister in the house. When the Beatles came out in the early '60’s I got a real blast of that, that and the Rolling Stones and the Dave Clark Five, Simon & Garfunkel, James Taylor, people like that as I was growing up. It was just great time to be living in the late ‘50’s and early ‘60’s.

JL: Who gave you your first break in the business?