Ricky Skaggs’ 100-year-old mandolin once belonged to Pee Wee Lambert | Opinion
After an outdoor concert in New Hampshire in 2014, I waited in line to ask Ricky Skaggs to autograph his CD and to talk with him. A large man with flowing white hair, Ricky sat at a utility table and signed CDs, photographs, and copies of his book, "Kentucky Traveler."
Telling him how much I enjoyed his version of “Mother’s Only Sleeping,” written by Bill Monroe, I mentioned that I had written a biography of the Stanley Brothers.
He knew the book. “Marty told me about it,” he said, referring to his friend Marty Stuart. Marty had called me at home to let me know how much he enjoyed the book. I was snowed. He has been a member of the Grand Ole Opry since 1992 and is a mover and shaker in Nashville.
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How the Pee Wee's mandolin was salvaged
After we admitted that we had not yet read the other guy’s book, Ricky tapped the protective black travel case on the table. “I think you’ll be interested in what I have here,” he said. “It’s Pee Wee Lambert’s mandolin.”
Whoa! Five-foot four-inch Darrell “Pee Wee” Lambert was the original mandolin player in the Stanley Brothers, who formed their first group in 1945. I was very interested.
The mandolin lay in the plush green lining of a second case. Decades of picking had worn a bare spot in the instrument’s finish. “Pee Wee dropped it after a gig in 1961,” Ricky said. “The head stock broke off. He threw it into a trash dumpster."
Two musicians witnessed this. Ricky added, “As soon as Pee Wee’s tail lights had disappeared, they got into that dumpster and took it out.” After leaving the Stanley Brothers in 1951, Pee Wee died of a heart attack in 1965.
Ricky acquired the instrument in 2010, and had it restored by an expert luthier.
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The encounter with Pee Wee's wife
“The first person I wanted to see it was Hazel Lambert,” he said. Hazel was Pee Wee’s wife. “So I took it up to Columbus (Ohio) and told her I had something I wanted to show her. I had the light on this little video camera going as I opened the case. She looked at it and said that yes, it was Pee Wee’s all right. Of course it was much glossier than when she had last seen it 40 years ago.
“Then she told me something that I never knew. She said that my mother had called her way back and asked her if she could buy Pee Wee’s mandolin for me. Hazel said she didn’t have it, that Pee Wee had gone off to a gig in 1961 and came back without it. He said he had dropped it and broke it.”
I asked Ricky if he would do me the favor of taking the mandolin out of its case and play a few notes. I wanted to hear it, just as I had heard a guitar Carter Stanley once played when I met the man who owned it at a Virginia music store in 2002.
As Ricky picked up the mandolin – his only audience being me and a member of the concert staff who was waiting to fold up the autograph table – he said, “This is what you hear on ‘The White Dove’ and ‘The Lonesome River’” – two of the Stanley Brothers’ classic songs.
Cradling in the instrument in his large hands, he played the introduction to “The White Dove.” I just about teared up. I looked at the member of the concert staff and said, “This is magic.”
A 1923 Lloyd Loar, the mandolin turns 100 this year.
David W. Johnson is the author of “Lonesome Melodies: The Lives and Music of Stanley Brothers,” published in 2013 by the University Press of Mississippi.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Ricky Skaggs’ 100-year-old mandolin once belonged to Pee Wee Lambert
