On his CD collaboration with Ricky Skaggs, Bruce Hornsby retains his own musical identity while playing with Ricky and other leading bluegrass players and takes it somewhere else with his supple piano and the unusual songs he’s written.

There’s one called The Dreaded Spoon about a closet gourmand, and their version of a Rick James song about a groupie, Superfreak, is, well...surprising. The playing is great throughout and Ricky and Bruce harmonise well together. In the process of making the record, Ricky turned Bruce on to old timey musicians Roscoe Holcomb, Doc Boggs and Clarence Ashley, and Bruce turned Ricky on to Bud Powell, Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett.

In March 2007 Hornsby teamed with bluegrass player Ricky Skaggs to produce a bluegrass album, Ricky Skaggs & Bruce Hornsby, and played several tour dates together. The seeds for the album had been sown in 2000 when the pair collaborated on "Darlin' Cory", a track on the Big Mon Bill Monroe bluegrass tribute album and then proposed recording an album together. Ricky Skaggs & Bruce Hornsby, featuring the duo backed by Skaggs's band Kentucky Thunder, combined bluegrass, traditional country, "a tinge of Hornsby's jazzy piano and a splash of humor" on a spectrum of songs from the traditional to new compositions such as the opening track "The Dreaded Spoon," "a humorous tale of a youthful ice cream heist. The pair also reinvented Hornsby's hit "Mandolin Rain" as a minor key acoustic ballad and "give his cautionary tale of backwoods violence", "A Night On the Town," a treatment highlighting the "Appalachian storytelling tradition that was always at the song's heart. The album ended with a surprise cover of Rick James's funk hit "Super Freak" in a bluegrass arrangement. Ricky Skaggs & Bruce Hornsby topped Billboard's bluegrass charts for several weeks.[ The album showed Hornsby carving out a place for piano within traditional bluegrass, disproving the notion that the piano is not compatible with "string-oriented" bluegrass. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.