plerestx.blogg.se

• Marty stuart and merle haggard tv#

He’d met a member of Lester Flatt’s band who invited him to ride up to a Labor Day festival in Delaware on Flatt’s repurposed old Greyhound. Right then and there I was hooked.” When the Sullivans brought him home in time to start the school year, he said he felt like “the circus had dropped me off at the edge of town and kept going on without me.” But the feeling didn’t last long. “On my first day away from home, I saw the chain-smoking monkey at the Dixie Gas Station on Highway 45 South.

That same year, his daddy took him to a gospel show in Alabama where Bill Monroe gave him a mandolin pick and he met the Sullivan Family, a bluegrass gospel act whose members asked him to tour with them the following summer. On the way home, he told his mother he was going to marry Smith-and he did, twenty-seven years later in a ceremony on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Even then, the precocious Stuart was all about tradition-he told the local Neshoba Democrat, “It’s hard for a country performer to make a living in a Beatles society.” In 1970, when he was twelve, he was given his first mandolin and saw Connie Smith perform her signature hit “Once a Day” at the Neshoba County Fair.

Marty stuart and merle haggard tv#

He grew up watching Porter Wagoner’s rhinestone-encrusted suits “winking” at him from the family’s black-and-white TV screen and formed his first band when he was nine, playing songs like “Wildwood Flower” at Rotary Club gatherings. Born in 1958 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and christened John Martin, he was called Marty after Marty Robbins. It’s true that Stuart’s entire life has been spent studying, documenting, living, breathing, and playing with pretty much everybody who has ever mattered in the world of country music (and gospel and bluegrass). We’re not astronauts or physicists, but we’re the keepers of all this stuff and we have to pass it on.” “It was like being up there with Geronimo and Red Cloud,” Stuart says, “and we’re next.

Those days are precious.” The night before the Fort Worth show, Willie Nelson joined Stuart and Haggard onstage in Austin. “In California, we had a day off and Merle and I wrote a song, ‘Blue Yodel #14’-Jimmie Rodgers should sue us. (“It enhances the sound,” Stuart says, laughing, “or at least the story value.”) But familiarity does not make him any less respectful. During sound check at Bass Hall, he picks up Haggard’s guitar to show me the through-and-through bullet holes made by Haggard’s pistol when it “accidentally” went off on his bus. Stuart has photographed Haggard, performed with him dozens of times, and watched as the “Poet of the Common Man” inducted his wife, Connie Smith, into the Country Music Hall of Fame. “Marty likes to work in Nashville-I don’t,” he says. Onstage in Fort Worth, he stands shoulder to shoulder with “Hag,” harmonizing and playing guitar on “Okie from Muskogee.” Afterward he tells me, “To lean up against Merle is like leaning against an oak tree-he empowers us.” But Haggard clearly feels the same way.

In his review, the late, great critic Chet Flippo wrote that Stuart was the only musician in Nashville with the chops, credibility, and showmanship to bridge traditional country with, say, the likes of Taylor Swift or Carrie Underwood. At various times in their three-decade-plus friendship, he was Cash’s bandmate, son-in-law, next-door neighbor, and songwriting partner-the pair finished “Hangman,” a song on Stuart’s critically acclaimed 2010 album, Ghost Train, just four days before Cash died. Since then, his extraordinary range and reputation have landed him on stages with everyone from Pops Staples and Bob Dylan to Johnny Cash. “There so little of this left,” he says as Haggard launches into “Sing Me Back Home,” the 1967 hit that draws on his three years in San Quentin State Prison.” At one time, there was so much gold it was falling off trees, and now we’re down to a handful of doubloons.” What Stuart would never say is that a whole lot of people in the sold-out auditorium-as well as Haggard himself-would put him in the same exalted company.Ī consummate showman and virtuoso mandolin player, Stuart was tapped at the tender age of thirteen to play in Lester Flatt’s band and took the stage alone at the Grand Ole Opry barely a week later, an honor most musicians don’t attain for years. At seventy-seven, Haggard is showing signs of frailty-his wife and backup singer, Theresa, has already left her mike to fetch him water and his inhaler-and Stuart is almost hyperconscious of the time remaining with the greats of what he calls “real” country. It’s a frigid night in Fort Worth, Texas, and I am standing backstage at the two-thousand-seat Bass Performance Hall, where Marty Stuart and his band, the Fabulous Superlatives, have just opened for Merle Haggard.