Born in Balfour, Aberdeenshire, he was a son of a schoolmaster at Birse, and was educated at Marischal College, Aberdeen.
After the failure of the Jacobite Rising, his congregation was subject to persecution and in May 1746 the Episcopalian chapel at Tiffery was burned by Government soldiers with the active participation of the local landowner, Lady Kinmundy.
After 1760 the penal laws were less strictly enforced, but throughout the century the lot of the Episcopalian ministers in Scotland was far from comfortable, and only the humblest provisions for church services were tolerated.
[2] Skinner wrote The Ecclesiastical History of Scotland from the Episcopal point of view, published in 1788, and several songs of which The Reel of Tullochgorum and The Ewie wi' the Crookit Horn are the best known, and he also rendered some of the Psalms into Latin.
He kept up a rhyming correspondence with Robert Burns, who considered his Tullochgorum "the best Scotch song Scotland ever saw," and procured his collaboration for the Scots Musical Museum.