"They played a little Pentecostal church a mile from my house and they let me get up and play with them and I caught the fever," says Stuart, who spent the summer of 1960 with the Sullivans on the Pentecostal church and bluegrass festival circuit. "I would take the magazine off the stand and go through it and study what kind of guitars people played, what kind of suits they wore, as well as the words to the songs - it started that innocently." "It was the only place in Philadelphia that carried Country Song Roundup," he recalls fondly. There's also Stuart's advocacy on behalf of the Country Music Foundation and his various archival pursuits.īlame it on the Columbia record club and Hamill's Drug Store, which Stuart used to hustle to after elementary school. "I don't know if it will ever see the light of day, or if he wants it to, but we made a cool record."
"Billy Bob wanted to keep cutting, so we did a '60s cover record," Stuart says. Stuart, who also scored Jordan Brady's upcoming "Waking Up in Reno," starring Thornton and Charlize Theron, actually produced two Thornton albums. Not that Stuart has been waiting idly: he produced albums for Jerry and Tammy Sullivan, the bluegrass gospel act that gave him his first job at age 12, and for actor-director Billy Bob Thornton, two of whose films he scored: "All the Pretty Horses" (for which Stuart received a Golden Globe nomination) and "Daddy and Them," finally scheduled for release this winter. In the meantime, I'm waiting for divine inspiration." "I've been poking around, checking everybody's camp, seeing what everybody's up to, seeing where the real heart and soul of country music was going to land and try to work out from there. "It was time for a change and I'm sure they felt the same way," Stuart says. The '90s had been good to Stuart, a brash young country traditionalist who'd helped fuel the music's resurgence with his meld of classic honky-tonk, bluegrass and what he dubbed "hillbilly rock." "The Pilgrim," an ambitious and complex concept album about a doomed-then-redeemed love triangle with an all-star cast that included Cash, George Jones, Emmylou Harris, Ralph Stanley and Earl Scruggs, may well be Stuart's crowning achievement, but it also marked the end of his decade-long association with MCA Records. "We'd had a great decade and achieved more than I'd ever hoped to or expected to, though in other ways, we didn't quite get it all." "I'd been doing it for 28 years and there was a need after 'The Pilgrim' record to call time out, cool down and do something else," he says. Now Stuart is touring after a hiatus of almost two years.
Truth is, Stuart is the walking embodiment of country music, blessed with a deep knowledge and abiding love for the music, as well as an intense work ethic learned from Flatt: keep it slow, keep it steady, build the foundation. Perhaps that's why he's been president of the Country Music Foundation for the last six years. Stuart once joked that should Nashville's Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum be cleaned out by robbers, he could restock it in a day. When he began touring as a headliner in the mid-'80s, Stuart did so in Ernest Tubb's old bus.Īs he made the transition from adoring fan to fellow performer, Stuart became an archivist extraordinaire, amassing one of the world's largest collections of country music artifacts and memorabilia, more than 2,000 items worth $3 million. A decade later, Stuart became part of Cash's band (and family via a brief marriage to one of his daughters). By 13, he'd become a mandolin prodigy and moved to Nashville to join Lester Flatt's band.
THE first records Marty Stuart recalls arrived at the family home in Philadelphia, Miss., courtesy of the Columbia record club: Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" and Flatt and Scruggs's "At Carnegie Hall." Stuart was just a 5-year-old then, but country music grabbed him hard.