Marty Stuart – A pilgrim’s progress
So how did he wind up doing pay-per-views with Travis Tritt?
“When I was starvin’, and nobody paid any attention to anything I was doin’, back in the late ’80s, I was cuttin’ country songs, rockabilly songs — and actually, I was at a point, I was tryin’ to find myself, too. I was out exploring musically. And the thing that hit for me was a song called ‘Hillbilly Rock’. That was a conjured up piece of business, and it was fun, and it was enjoyable, and it took off. And so I tried to keep up with it and help promote it. But it got to a point where I was goin’, ‘It’s not ringin’ as true as it once did to me.’ I don’t think I was guilty of anything, other than tryin’ to keep up with what I had created. I think what I was more guilty of than anything is not walkin’ away from that particular thing six months earlier. But I don’t really apologize for it. It served me well, and I think it rings true for what it was.
“You’ve got to remember too, from the standpoint of a hardcore purist point of view, that Lester’s band, we were looked upon as commercial whizzes, say, compared to Ralph Stanley, who was a more pure mountain tone, or Doc Watson, or the old-time, hardline folkies. They looked at us as like a commercial Opry band, instead of the pure thing that I look back upon it as sometimes. In bluegrass and old-time music and folk music, there’s always been that dividing line, what Dylan put up with at Newport. To this day, you go back to the world of bluegrass, you’ll probably find those that despise Alison Krauss, and think she’s totally commercial, and prefer a more old-time sound, but then again she’s brought a lot of people to the format. And I’m sure Steve Earle singing bluegrass infuriates a lot of old bluegrass hardliners, but once again, it brings a whole lot of light to Del McCoury, and vice versa.”
As president of the CMF, Stuart has frequently and publicly chided country music for abandoning its ancestry, and he remains critical of country music’s commercial state — with one confounding qualification: “I’m guilty of helpin’ it get there,” he confesses. “But there comes a time when you just have to walk away from any gimmicks. In my case, bein’ a rhinestone cowboy. No matter what kind of ass-whippin’ I’m about to get out there commercially.
“I tried to keep it happy and light for years. That’s the way I was consulted and advised and researched to do it. But the thing I miss about country music is the stories. The first country music hit was ‘The Prisoner’s Song,’ and before that I loved Pop Stoneman’s ‘Sinking Of The Titanic’, recorded in the ’20s. Folk and country singers used to be correspondents. Woody Guthrie, when he’d sing to us about Grand Coulee Dam, sing those folk songs — ‘Deportee’, those kinds of things — he was a correspondent. George Jones was a great correspondent of broken hearts; Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, they all were great reporters, and somewhere along the line, the demographics changed, and it just got to be about sellin’ ice cream cones on a radio station.
“But if you really get out and walk the sidewalks and the country roads of this world, you find out that the same problems still exist out there and there’s a lot of tragedy, and everybody’s told not to talk about it anymore. It’s OK to make movies about it, but don’t sing songs about it. Well, that’s a buncha shit.
“This Pilgrim thing, for the most part, there’s so much truth in the darkness and the tragedy of it, and I find that when I stand flat-footed and sing ‘Reasons’ with an honest heart onstage, people understand it.”
And what about the songs that paid for the bus?
“I think there comes a point for certain kinds of songs when you outgrow ’em, and you just have to say, ‘Man, you were my friend, but I don’t expect you to do that for me anymore — you shouldn’t expect me to do that for you anymore!'” He laughs. “Still, Mick Jagger probably hates to sing ‘Satisfaction’, but when I go see the Stones, I’d be disappointed if I didn’t hear it. Johnny Cash told me once, ‘I had no idea “A Boy Named Sue” was gonna do what it did. When you cut a song, you better be ready to sing it for the rest of your life.'”
“It’s a total playground to me out here,” Stuart summarizes, surveying the seemingly contradictory landscape of country music he roams from one day to the next. “Last week me and Uncle Josh Graves and Earl Scruggs did a recording, I sang a spiritual at the funeral of the father of one of the Fairfield Four — he was an old Chess artist and I was the only white boy in that place — and Saturday night I played at a Reno hotel where I had an elephant act as an opener and Wayne Newton on the other end of the hall. It’s like one of the most crazy adventures I could ask for.”
Perhaps you’ve read those Sports Illustrated profiles detailing an athlete’s rise, fall and recovery, the ones that end with the jock out of rehab, back on the field and in the hands of Jesus, the ones that conclude on the upbeat, setting you up nicely for the announcement on Sportscenter a week later that the subject was arrested after blowing out his knee wrestling a transvestite hooker for a bag of crack behind a dumpster. We have learned to mistrust neatly-wrapped tales of epiphany and redemption, and should.
There is redemption in The Pilgrim; it is a solid, uplifting work of informed intent. But the Arty Marty is not prepared to disband the Marty Party. The rhinestone cowboy is right there in the wings, as much a part of the irreconcilable contradictions as the mandolin and the elephants. Marty Stuart isn’t renouncing anything — and you get the feeling he knows this. He won’t be pulling a Cat Stevens anytime soon. The clothes are still by Manuel. The hair is still a salt-and-pepper brushfire. He’s never completely out of earshot of the carnival barker, and he doesn’t mind. He hears the voices muttering about squandered talent, the critics who suggest he has preserved more of country’s heritage with his warehouse than with his music.
But The Pilgrim sounds as if the journey has been more keenly observed than the tight pants may suggest. And when he comes in off the playground, grabs his mandolin and knocks on Earl Scruggs’ door, Earl lets him right on in there.
Someone on Marty Stuart’s road crew once stuffed ND contributing editor Michael Perry’s steel-toed boots with cheese.