CONCERT REVIEW – RICKY SKAGGS

I’d planned to review and compare two concerts in this newsletter, Ricky Skaggs from Wednesday and Luke Bryan from Thursday. But I wimped out the second night because of the weather. With wind and temperature both in the 40s, and thunderstorms forecast throughout the evening, I couldn’t motivate myself for the several-block walk between my car and the Premier Center. So I stayed home and missed Luke Bryan, 47, who probably drew 7-9,000 people to Sioux Falls’s biggest event center.

Ricky Skaggs, 69, played the District in Sioux Falls, a theater-type venue with chairs placed on the main floor. The attentive crowd numbered approximately 500. Ricky is a Country Music Hall of Famer (2018) and member of the Musicians Hall of Fame (2016) who has been performing for half a century.

NEWS

When the Cowboy Sings website reports the death of Vernon Oxford, 82, on August 18 in Nashville, after a long battle with dementia and Parkinson’s disease. He was born in Rogers, Arkansas, in 1941 and grew up in Wichita, Kansas, where his father played traditional fiddle music. Vernon performed around Kansas during the early 1960s and moved to Nashville in 1964. Harlan Howard secured him a contract with RCA Victor in 1965, but his seven singles and the album, Woman Let Me Sing You a Song, didn’t succeed. He was rediscovered in the United Kingdom when a compilation of his best works was released in 1974. RCA then re-signed him for a tour in the UK. His top singles in the USA were “Shadows of My Mind,” “Redneck (The Redneck National Anthem),” and “A Good Old Fashioned Saturday Night Honky Tonk Barroom Brawl.” In the UK, they were “I’ve Got to Get Peter Off Your Mind” and “Field of Flowers.” He and Jim Ed Brown recorded a comedy duet titled “Mowing the Lawn.” Vernon turned to gospel music in 1981.