Best known as a member of the family vocal group the Whites, Sharon White (guitar, vocals) was just a kid when she began performing in her parents' band, the Down Home Folks. Consisting of White and her sister Cheryl White (bass, vocals), along with their parents Pat White (vocals) and Buck White (vocals, mandolin, piano), the Down Home Folks recorded five bluegrass-tinged albums in the 1970s. Pat White retired from performing in 1973. Now a trio, the Down Home Folks caught a break when they were prominently featured on Emmylou Harris' Blue Kentucky Girl album in 1979. Now calling themselves the Whites, the trio went on tour with Harris in support of the album as her opening act, shifting their sound closer to mainstream country as the '80s opened. The group charted a single, a version of "Send Me the Pillow That You Dream On," in 1981, and hit the Top Ten country charts a year later in 1982 with "You Put the Blue in Me." White married country and bluegrass star Ricky Skaggs in that same year (Skaggs had played on some of the Whites' early sides), and in 1983, the group's first album as the Whites, Old Familiar Feeling, appeared from Warner Bros., featuring new member Jerry Douglas on dobro. The Whites placed four singles in the Top Ten in 1983 and 1984 before moving over to MCA Records and releasing three albums between 1984 and 1987. They switched to gospel with 1988's Doing It by the Book, which was released by Word Records. White and Skaggs had recorded one single together as a married couple, 1987's "Love Can't Ever Get Better Than This," which was a Top Ten hit that year, but since White was under contract to MCA/Curb as part of the Whites, and Skaggs was contract bound to CBS-owned Epic Records, the obvious husband-and-wife duets album was never attempted, a landscape that changed many years later when Skaggs formed his own label, Skaggs Family Records, in 1997. The long-rumored duets album, Hearts Like Ours, finally appeared from Skaggs Family Records in 2014. ~ Steve Leggett, Rovi