Sunday News
Published: July 29, 2007
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent
People tend to throw around the term "renaissance man" way to often, labeling anyone as such who may have eclectic tastes in art, has on their living room shelf works by Updike, Foust, and Turkel, but is into "The Simpsons" or watches PBS and reads Maxim magazine.
But if there ever was a renaissance man of country music, it is Marty Stuart. The artist appears at the Schaefferstown Firemen's Carnival at 7 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 4. More accurately, his passion for country music is simply something that cannot be contained to albums and tours. There is just too much, enough to go around several times. And to his credit, he is using it quite well.
In describing Stuart, the dried out and overused term "renaissance man" just sounds even weaker. It would be enough that he provided country music in the 1980s with much needed honesty, being one of the few before or after who would use the guitar for more than a prop. He can really play, providing the missing link between Buck Owens and a refreshing crop of skillfill pickers today. Brad Paisley, Dierks Bentley, Keith Urban, tip your hats.
But consider this; not only has Stuart released a string of good- to-excellent albums since the early 1980s that have earned him a slew of CMA honors and even a Grammy nod or two, but these days he is also a producer, archivist, humanitarian, radio host, and all around spokesman for country music's heritage.
Since touring with Johnny Cash in 1980, he has amassed one of the largest collections of country music memorabilia and ephemera in the know universe, including flashy suits by the celebrated Nudie shop, boots, guitars, tapes, records, letters, studio logs, and lyric sheets. "It started out just in my bedroom when I was still a teenager living with my parents," he explains from his tour bus, weaving its way through the Smokies toward Asheville, N.C.
"Then I got a storage space, then two, then three," he laughs. "And then it took up an entire warehouse." About 20,000 pieces in all, about one quarter of which are on display at the Tennessee Folklife Museum through mid-November as part of an exhibit called "Sparkle and Twang: The Marty Stuart Collection."
Stuart is looking for a permanent home for the collection, as keeping hold of it himself is becoming a huge insurance burden. But Stuart is quick to point out that he is not simply a collector, a music geek raiding estate sales, attics or used record bins for bits of ephemera that others have cast away. "The most important thing is the people who made the music. The most important thing is to remember them. Then the music itself is the next important thing," he says, both music recorded and unrecorded. "Thirdly comes the artifacts in importance, but you need all three to get the whole picture."
His collection includes, for example, a letter written by Patsy Cline ordering stage clothes for an upcoming tour. She was dead only a few weeks later. He's even got Johnny Cash's original black suit. A tape given to him by Cash more than 25 years ago when Stuart was in the legend's band recently saw the light of day on a new album by Porter Wagoner.
A tune called "Committed to Parkville," about the famed detox center outside Nashville where both Cash and Wagoner had gone to clean up, found its way onto Stuart's new album, "Wagonmaster." It was Stuart, acting as producer, who got the 79-year-old Wagoner into the studio in celebration of his 50 years at the Grand Ole Opry. Johnny Cash had written the song specifically for Wagoner, but Stuart only remembered where it was once the Wagoner sessions had begun.
The album has earned favorable reviews from just about every music publication that matters, exposing Wagoner's music to a new generation of fans. "Country music has always had something of an identity crisis," he speculates. "Way back in the early 1970s the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, a rock group, recorded an album called Will The Circle Be Unbroken,' and it opened up country music history to a lot of people."
"It always seems to take a movie or a rock star to get country music to recognize its heritage," Stuart says. Now Stuart has made yet another crossover hit. Recently, Wagoner opened for the White Stripes at Madison Square Garden and stole the night. "There were 20-year-old kids singing along with the Green, Green Grass of Home.' You'd think by now Nashville would get it," Stuart said.
The case of Wagoner, Stuart says, is emblematic of the problem he sees all to often. "He's a country music figurehead, a true artist. But I had to try and get him back into his sound again." Consequently, he bypassed Nashville altogether, and took "Wagonmaster" to indie punk label Anti for release.
"It used to be that Nashville owned its soul," Stuart intones.
"But now most of the labels are owned by corporations thousands of miles away, and so they don't know about the music. To them its just dollars and cents. "I just don't understand why some folks have to go outside of country music to get a country record made." Stuart has perhaps done more than anyone of his generation to ensure the folks he learned from as a young mandolin phenom are not forgotten.
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