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".