Before Marty Stuart started showing up in every country music documentary, he had a run as a country star. He rode a wave of popularity in the 1990s before taking his music into a more personal, less-commercial direction.
“I think Donald Duck could’ve had a hit back in those days,” Stuart said from his home in Nashville. “If you could line dance or stand in one place and wear a cowboy hat and sing a song, you were probably going to be a superstar — at least for a moment.”
Stuart returns to The Ramkat on Jan. 21 with His Fabulous Superlatives, his longtime band. Caleb Caudle, a local favorite son, who will make his debut MerleFest appearance in April, will open the show.
There’s a reason documentary filmmakers point cameras at Stuart on a regular basis. Not only is he a passionate, articulate student of country music history, he has also experienced quite a bit of it firsthand.
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He joined Lester Flatt’s band just before he turned 14 and caught the ear of a reviewer for the Asheville paper in 1974, who wrote that Flatt had “added a mandolin player, a 15-year-old whiz who picks like a seasoned bluegrass pro.”
Stuart toured with Flatt until the bluegrass pioneer died in 1979, then went on to stints with Doc Watson and Johnny Cash before venturing out on his own. His run of Top 10 hits in the ’90s included “Hillbilly Rock,” “Tempted” and “This One’s Gonna Hurt You (For a Long, Long Time),” a duet with Travis Tritt.
“That’s the old saying around here: ‘It all begins with a song,’” Stuart said. “And when that ‘Hillbilly Rock’ song came along, the lights finally came on. It afforded me the opportunity for a bus and a band and cowboy clothes and a bunch of shows. I knew that I had a moment, and I’d better make something out of it and turn it into what was real.”
For Stuart, something real included “The Marty Stuart Show” on RFD-TV and acclaimed concept albums such as “The Pilgrim” and “Way Out West.” The latter is a cosmic country extravaganza from 2017 hailed by Rolling Stone as “a trippy kaleidoscope of deserts, highways and pill-popping hallucinations.” The album was produced by Mike Campbell, the guitarist and songwriter who served as Tom Petty’s right-hand man throughout his career.
On the heels of “Way Out West,” Stuart and his band went on tour with a couple of the original cosmic cowboys, Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman, for a tour celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Byrds’ “Sweetheart of the Rodeo” album.
“We got to be the Byrds,” Stuart said. “Can you beat that?”
The shows provided a perfect opportunity for Stuart to showcase one of his most prized possessions: The customized “B-Bender” Fender Telecaster guitar that the late Clarence White played with the Byrds. Stuart’s TV show had given him his first experience accompanying McGuinn and his trademark 12-string Rickenbacker.
“The sound of his guitar and Clarence’s guitar back in action together, the sound of Chris playing bass underneath all of that, it was magic. It was magic, and I loved every speck of it,” Stuart said.
Four years later, he has a backlog of new material. Up next will be “Songs I Sing In The Dark,” an album of solo acoustic songs, including country classics such as “Skip a Rope” and Waylon Jennings’ “This Time.” The album was a pandemic project.
“Everybody was going stir crazy and started doing viral things and Zooming, and I thought, ‘Nah, I don’t think that’s me,’” Stuart said. “But I just kind of went to my list of projects I’ve been meaning to get to for a long time, and that was one of them. The band wasn’t required.”
Stuart is also working on a couple of new band records. “Altitude” is “a further trip into cosmic cowboyland that I love, love, love,” he said. There’s also a collection of “20 hillbilly surf band instrumentals,” seven of them left over from the “Way Out West” sessions.
One of the many documentaries in which Stuart has played a prominent role was Ken Burns’ “Country Music,” the eight-part PBS series from 2019. He and Burns also teamed up for Honor Your Hometown (honoryourhometown.com), a campaign to celebrate local culture. Stuart has launched a major project in his own hometown of Philadelphia, Miss.: the Congress of Country Music (congressofcountrymusic.org), scheduled to open later this year.
“In reality, it’s my hillbilly presidential library and a place to leave a collection alive and for inspiration,” Stuart said. “It’s not a monument to self, by any means. It’s meant to pass on this culture, and language, and traditions, and people.”
He is also working with his wife, veteran country star, Connie Smith, to complete her 55th album. They have been married since 1997. The couple was enjoying a day off when Stuart did this interview.
“Me and Constance are snowed in, so I can think of worse things to be a part of, hanging out at the house with Constance with a fire going,” he said. “That’s a pretty good day.”