Ricky Skaggs could look back and say he’d played with Bill Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs and The Stanley Brothers. He could be proud of the performance resume.

Ricky Skaggs was 10 years old. Suffice it to say his musical leanings were apparent early on.

“I loved music always,” the country and bluegrass artist said during a recent telephone interview with The News. “In my whole life I don’t think I can ever remember a time there wasn’t music going on in my head or going on in my hands somewhere.”

When Skaggs was 5 years old, his father bought him a mandolin. To hear him tell it, Skaggs didn’t so much play the instrument as absorb it.

“It was just like part of my life, part of my body,” he said. “Like little kids drag around a toy or drag around a blanket, I drug around my mandolin. I took it everywhere I went. I just wanted to play it all the time.”

On Friday, the Grammy-winning Skaggs will play it at the Shipshewana Event Center. The venue is roughly 400 miles from where Skaggs got his musical start, his childhood home in Cordell, Ky.

Skaggs said his earliest memories are of his mother singing there.

“And there was such a joy in it,” he recalled. “As a little child I felt real peace and felt real joy just in all that she was singing and that beautiful sound that was coming out of her body.”

Skaggs’ mother told his dad that the boy was singing harmony with her in the other end of the house. (“We didn’t have a big house,” Skaggs quipped.)

“When I heard her sing, it seemed like I just knew where to join her,” Skaggs said, and also add to what she was singing.

A couple of years later, Skaggs’ father bought him his first mandolin and showed him how to play three chords. Skaggs guessed his dad probably paid $5 for the instrument in a pawnshop somewhere in Ohio, where he was working at the time. A welder, Skaggs’ father would drive to where the jobs were and travel back to be with his family on the weekends.

Traveling was more of a chore back then, according to Skaggs.

“I think that’s why I appreciate the old fathers of bluegrass so much,” he said. “They paid such an incredible price — before cell phones, before the Internet, before four-lane highways — to go out and have to take this music and play it and try to make a living at it. It was hard ground in those days.”

Skaggs got a better mandolin a year or so later. Around that same time, he performed with Bill Monroe, the Father of Bluegrass himself.

Monroe was in concert in a little town in eastern Kentucky close to where Skaggs grew up. After about 30 minutes, some people in the audience requested that Monroe “let little Ricky Skaggs get up and sing,” the grown-up Ricky Skaggs recalls years later.

“It finally got Mr. Monroe’s attention to the point where he asked me to come up on stage, and I did,” he said. “I don’t think he had any idea how ‘little’ Ricky Skaggs was at the time. I did a song with them called ‘Ruby Are You Mad at Your Man?’ ... It kind of went off without a hitch.”

That gig proved to be a forerunner to a renowned career full of 14 Grammy wins and 12 No. 1 hits on the country charts. Over the years Skaggs has collaborated with a diverse roster of musicians; the short list includes Emmylou Harris, Elvis Costello, Bruce Hornsby, and Jack White and the Raconteurs.

Ricky Skaggs is a standout musician. In a sense, he’s also helping to carry a musical torch. His repertoire includes an old-time sound that resonates today.

‘An honorable job’

“I think as the world gets more sophisticated, more technical, more 2012, I think there’s something that hearkens back in all of us — that desire for yesteryear, that desire for the way were raised,” Skaggs said in discussing bluegrass music. “... I think we all have a desire in every one of us to know about history, to know about the past, and understand the past — a better time, a better life, a more simple way of life. And bluegrass music to me is the only music in America that fits every one of those criteria.”

Skaggs also hears what he calls a natural thread of the Gospel that runs through bluegrass music.

“I feel like it was birthed out of church music,” he said. “It was birthed out of the Gospel, it was birthed out of hard work, hard times, but a good, secure life in America.”

Skaggs said he’s not such a stick-in-the-mud to suggest that drums or electric bass can’t be incorporated into bluegrass. Still, he loves the essence and foundations of the music, a lot of which come from England and Scotland. Skaggs said he recently completed a tour of Europe, where he and his band were met with thunderous applause every time they performed bluegrass.

“It just seemed to have an explosive effect when we played bluegrass,” he said. “There’s something so exciting about this music. I’m glad to be a carrier of it and a promoter of it, a player of it. It’s an honorable job to have.”