Marty Stuart, The Nashville Flood, And A Country Music Redemption Coming

If there has ever been a better description of what Country Music is, I guess I haven’t read it…it’s in the bio on his web site, www.martystuart.net. This isn’t a plug; I’ve been following this guy since the 70s, and people have asked me more times than I can remember –’Who’s that playing?’ ‘Marty Stuart.’ ‘Who’s Marty Stuart?’ — at home on the stereo or driving down the road. He is a modern legend still in the making, and one hell of a guitar/mandolin/fiddle player, and any other stringed instrument he picks up that day. Singer, songwriter, showman? Sheeit…and as this description says, Ambassador of Country Music.

But he started before the 70s, playing mandolin for Lester Flatt, in a now hallowed ground place known to all in The Biz as RCA Studio B, at age 13.

This is not fan worship, this guy is the real deal, and while all the crap pop-country/not country at all country spiky high heeled stupid dress wearing female and personality face in a cowboy hat male country music impersonator pretenders to the stage coming out of Nashville nigh on for the last 10-15 years and especially now — what exactly IS a Taylor Swift? — but thank God for Toby Keith, Texas and Oklahoma — he has carried the colors of the true heart of Country Music, though for a long time relegated to the almost nobody bin by the Nashville machine and Country radio not to mention his single handed resurrecting and maintaining the Hall of Fame and Museum. Take a breath.

I am so jazzed that he is riding his own train back into the limelight, and maybe he will help turn the tide in Nashville. Hell, that flood in May happened for a good reason, it was almost like the Book of Genesis, telling all the pickers in Nashville that it is not only time to clean up the water damage but clean up the damage to Country Music that has been caused by these usurpers who are dragging the heart and soul of Country Music through the sewers.

This happened before during Urban Cowboy, and in the early 80s some of us woke up to it and turned the tide back, but it didn’t last long, and Nashville has been dying again, riding the gravy train but trashing its roots.

As long as there is Marty Stuart, and some others who are like him, there is a new chance. He carries the tradition, but is anything but traditional.

Be sure to look at his guitar player Kenny Vaughan also (Yardbirds, Jeff Beck, Animals, Led Zeppelin??? After my own heart, who said you could not be a Country Music guitar wizard if you were raised on the British Invasion?) and the others in his current band, the Fabulous Superlatives. This is a classy web site, compared to some artist sites I’ve looked at lately.

http://www.martystuart.net/MartyStuartHome.html

Marty Stuart is a rhinestoned “tear stained traveler,” still standing tall.

By Larry Leon Miller