Ricky Skaggs - Americana Master Series: Best Of The Sugar Hill Years (2008)

Ricky Skaggs' high lonesome tenor voice and his grounding in the Kentucky string band music that is the wellspring of modern bluegrass has made him a sort of transitional figure between the first generation of bluegrass greats and the neo-traditional reshaping of the genre in the 1990s. This set collects some of his key early tracks with Barry Poss' Sugar Hill Records imprint, whose very first album release as a label was a 1978 offering by Boone Creek, a band that Skaggs was playing with at the time. Sugar Hill officially gave Skaggs a solo contract in 1981 and the rest, as they say, is history. Among the gems here are the traditional songs "Bury Me Beneath the Weeping Willow" and "Drifting Too Far from the Shore," and a fine version of Townes Van Zandt's "If I Needed You."