Ricky Skaggs' Waitin' for the Sun to Shine may be the most significant country-rock album since Gram Parsons' Grievous Angel. That's more than a casual reference, because Parsons' LP introduced Emmylou Harris to the world, and Harris, in turn, pushed Skaggs into prominence when she asked him to join her Hot Band in 1977, replacing Rodney Crowell. Indeed, Skaggs is largely responsible for rejuvenating Harris' lifeless sound by bringing his youthful freshness and integrity to bear on Blue Kentucky Girl and Harris' certified masterpiece, Roses in the Snow. These same qualities also characterize his own record.

Skaggs' brand of country music is old-fashioned in the sense that it departs from the new fashion in Nashville of soggy MOR orchestrations and cynical sentimentality à la Kenny Rogers. Waitin' for the Sun to Shine's stripped-down, predominantly acoustic instrumentation and impeccably heartfelt harmony vocals lend a palpable robustness to the fairly standard lovin' and drinkin' songs that are the essence of C&W.

The album opens with "If That's the Way You Feel," written by bluegrass legends the Stanley Brothers (Skaggs' mentors and first employers), and it's one of three dynamite duets with Sharon White, who's every bit as fine a partner for Skaggs as Emmylou Harris was. These numbers are classically cornball, but they're sung with shattering sincerity. "Your Old Love Letters" laments "The first you wrote me was the sweetest/The last one broke my heart in two," while "I Don't Care" confesses "I don't care if I'm not the first love you've known/Just so I'll be the last." "Low and Lonely" is a swinging showpiece for Skaggs' top-notch group, featuring Ray Flacke on electric guitar, Bruce Bouton on steel guitar and Bobby Hicks on fiddle.

Only the title tune is a little dull, a mite too melodically reminiscent of Johnny Lee's "Lookin' for Love." In Merle Travis' "So Round, So Firm, So Fully Packed," sexism rears its ugly head. The song rather crudely promotes the idea of women as property ("If you don't think she's a lot of fun/Just ask the man that owns one"), though I'd like to believe that the hidden punch in the lines "She always wears a .45/Gun, that is" suggests that the singer's pistolpackin' mama can take care of herself. Well, good ol' boys will be good ol' boys, I suppose, mixing piety and impropriety until they're blue in the grass.

What's really important is that Skaggs, on his major-label debut (he cut an earlier LP for Sugar Hill) joins the ranks of those artists who continue to renew contemporary country music by going back to its roots. Willie Nelson, Rodney Crowell and Emmylou Harris ought to feel right at home with Ricky Skaggs. (RS 348)

DON SHEWEY