Marty Stuart

00:00:15 Speaker 1: Pushkin. Marty Stewart has dedicated his life to playing and preserving old country music. During his forty plus years as a solo artist, Marty has released more than twenty albums and racked up numerous honors, including five Grammys and being inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Marty started his career at the age of twelve, playing mandolin in a gospel band. By twenty one, he joined Johnny Cash's touring band and eventually became a solo artist who combined classic rockabilly sounds with bluegrass and cosmic country. His latest album has a sweeping, spacious feel that's meant to conjure up visions of desert horizons and endless stretches of two lane highways. For today's episode, Bruce Hedler met up with Marty Stewart at Bridge Studios in Brooklyn. Marty shared stories about first going on the road with his Sullivan Family gospel singers, and the very first show he ever played backing Johnny Cash. Marty also talks about how a star studied studio session with Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis gave him the confidence to pursue a solo career in country music. This is broken record liner notes for the digital age. I'm justin Mitchman. Here's Bruce Hadlam with Marty Stewart. So I do want to talk first about your new album. It's your first one in six years, Altitude. Yeah, So tell me how this one came about. Your albums in the last fifteen years have been so they're like concept albums. They seem so carefully planned. How did this one come about? Well, this one was ready to go. Were me and the band rehearsed it. We were on tour. We were touring with Chris Hillman and Roger McGuinn celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Sweetheart of the Rodeo record. We were doing shows with Chris Stiffleton, we were doing shows with Steve Miller Band, and I was just in the presence of these gargantuan songs, just one great song after another, night after night, and I have no but it was the Birds shows that really touched my heart. I love Roger and Chris, they're like big brothers. And the sounds of Roger's twelfth string Rickenbacker and my guitar that I played blunk to a fellow named Clarence White that played in the Birds Chris Hillman's singing and his bass playing. So I have no idea that that did not follow me back to my writing tablet. But we had this record really hot, rehearsed and ready to go, and then the pandemic crashed in on us. So the idea became, well, we were going to Hollywood to Capitol Studios to make the record. They shut down, so we made the decision. The soldier threw and put on mask and stand six feet apart in the drudgery of that in such a space as this, But we got it done. And we sat on the record for over two years, so it wasn't quite six years, but the pandemic took a bite out of that. I used my time wisely during that time made two more records that are ready to go. So I love making records. I still love making records. Now, tell me about Sweetheart of the Rodeo for you, because of course when that first came out, that wasn't popular in Nashville. They got booed at the rhyman famously. Do you remember listening to that growing up with When did you first encounter that? I don't think it was popular anywhere. I think even Birds fans went, I don't think we're buying this journey with them. I bought it in a used record in a record store at a shopping mall in North Nashville in nineteen seventy three. I remember it was two dollars in ninety nine cents. I still have the record with the rapper still on it. And I was playing in Lester Flats band at the time at the Grand Old Opry, and I liked the record because it was the first time that I'd ever heard rock and roll and country and honky tonk and folk and bluegrass and gospel music collide kind of successfully in the group of one record, and so it had an appeal to me because that just just something about it worked for me. And right after that, Lester Flat was kind of an aging Grand Ol Oppry star that was loved and highly regarded. He was as one of the master architects of the culture. But if you remember, at that particular time, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band had done a record call while the circle be unbroken. That opened up country music and roots music to an entirely different generation and maybe people that went to Woodstock. All of a sudden were discovering by way of this hippie band, country music and roots music. And then the movie Deliverance came out and it had that song duel in Banjo's in it, which lit a fire under a lot of people. But Lester had been doing duel in Banjo in his show for twenty years. And we worked a College Buyer showcase in Cincinnati and the bill that night was Lester Flat, Chicarea and Cool in the Gang, and I thought, man, they're gonna las laugh us off the stage, but it didn't work that way. We did Duel in Banjo's, which was a hot at the moment, and we encored nine times in forty five minutes. And the next day his agent booked either seventy two or seventy nine college campuses and rock festivals. One of the first shows we played was at Michigan State and the opening act was Graham Parsons and Emmy Blue Harris. Then Lester played it in. The Eagles were out touring Desperado and I saw Sweetheart of the Rodeo come to life that night, that record that Graham had been a part of, and it had inspired the Eagles, and it inspired me. And I remember going on the bus after the show telling all these old veterans I just saw the future of my musical life tonight. And I think they looked at me like, yeah, yeah, right back to the poker game. But that record had a profound influence on me. It did. That's a long winded answer, but that's how it's a perfect answer. But you saw Graham Parsons before then, you heard the record, or you had the record by that point. I had the record, had the record. I had the record, and he was long gone from the Birds, and I think he was hanging out with the Stones, and I remember he had black fingernail poly seOne and talking in some you know, phony cock in the accent a little bit, but there was something. He was an impressive character and he filled up the room with his presence. And Emmy Lou was just this angelic, kind of hippie girl presence and I love her from the get go. I named her Queenie that night, and she's still queen e to me. She's my val and you've and you've played with her since she she sang on the Pilgrim. The Pilgrim, Oh, I mean it was like a sister. She is and she is one of the most fearless musical padres we have out there because and I find that when I finally get brave enough you're talking about the conceptual records or whatever, When I finally get brave enough to go down the road to some creative endeavor, when I get there, she's already been there. She's one of those. She has just blazed the trail for everybody else. I love her, uh. I think our first song on the Pilgrim is actually called the Pilgrim, and it's a very different sound for her. It's very commanding and a little operatic in a way that you don't associate. It's almost as you were standing in a cathedral addressing the congregation. Yeah, and she really, of course pulls it off because she's Amy Lou Harris. He's Gueeny. What was the thinking going on in this album? Then you had these the Sweetheart of the Rodeo songs in your head. It's not an answer to that record? Was it just inspired some of the songs. I think that maybe the sonics of it, just the attitude or the sounds guitar sounds, more than anything else. Lyrically, as you well know you're a writer, you know the blank page is the biggest spot on planet Earth when there's nothing on it, and songs just kind of come down from the sky and all of a sudden. I mean, I probably left fifteen songs behind, but there was a collection of songs that seemed to hold together. And I don't know that there was an exact theme that ran through this record, but it was just a vibe more than a theme. But I think lyrically it holds up. Okay, mm hmm. And the sound is beautiful, thank you. But a lot of your records sound beautiful, and I mean this is the highest compliment. They sound like records. They sound like great records. You can hear the studio when the drums come in in the first track, they sound like real drums. It's nicety hear yeah. And I tell you, I'm surrounded by four guys on stage and an engineer named Mick Connley. We are a tone freaks. We will go to the ends of the earth searching for yet a better tone. And I think the thing that's missing in a lot of records these days is air. The room is supposed to be a band member and a voice, and just understanding air and space and records makes a whole lot of different. Sometimes it took me a long time to get there, and less is sometimes a whole lot more. How do you do that? Is it peeling away tracks? Is it listening to the room? I know what you mean by that, but I couldn't tell you how you'd get there. Do you remember the great jazz singer Peggy Lee? Oh? Yeah, one of the greatest of all time. I can only imagine going to see Peggy Lee at the right place in Manhattan, and I would think that she was cool as eyes, and I would think by the second note, you were right. She brings you right to her right. Did you ever get to see her? Never saw her? Oh, I've got the records? Well, me too, me too? And I read one time that she talked about going to the studio. She said, Hey, we didn't go to the studio and look for chances. We knew what we were going to do when we got to the studio. And I like to rehearse it up to a point, leave maybe five percent for magic to find its way in and surprises. But Peggy Lee's records were one of those, and there we can just keep going. Dave Brewbeck Records, You know, I listened to all that stuff, but the sonics on those records are just so lush and they're so warm, and they touch your heart and they just seem to check off all the boxes, and you know, it's it's a lifelong mission to try to get there. Is it harder to do recording digitally? Not necessarily. There's a whole lot of value and tape and analog I love that, but it's slower. You better be well rehearsed, and it's hard to edit if you make a mistake. You know, that kind of stuff. But I just think if you have a great band, a great song, good instruments, great engineers, great microphones, and a room that sounds good if you play it right, what can go wrong if you capture it right? It's not rocket science. It's just having a great piece of material is the first and foremost thing. Though, Oh it's rocket science, I think, or magic. What was the room? Where did you record this? We recorded this at East Aris Sound, which is still a House of blues studio in Nashville, which you know the room we're sitting in right now. It has a music vibe to me. This is a creative box. And so many studios are gorgeous and they're cost a good jillion dollars and they're stiff and they're sterile. But I love rooms like this that are just a little bit funky that invites you in and say, you know, come on, show me what you got. This was an old bean sprout factory, was it initially? Yeah, this was a Chinese part of town. How about so they grew because you can grow bean sprouts in the dark, so they would have these big pools with bean sprouts grinds. Also, yeah, well, you go back to rooms like Sun Records in Memphis. It's you know, half the size of this room, probably, but there's something magic in those walls. The little studio down in Muscle Shoals where they made so many great records. Studio B in Nashville, it's just a cinderblock building that was built for thirty thousand dollars, but it still sounds better than everybody else's twenty million dollar rooms. For some reason, there's just some rooms can't be explained. You do sound like Paul Simon because he was obsessed with the slap back in the Sun studio and he would play it for us and say, there are no drums on this record. I know it sounds like there is, but there isn't. So my friend Cowboy Jack Clement was the engineer down there for many years, and he talked about when they would put out a record and it didn't sell, of course they would return it to Sun and all of a sudden, he says, they're just kept becoming. This growing number of boxes along the walls of returned records in the studio kept getting smaller and smaller. One day, Sam Phillips came and said, get those out of here, and when he did, it changed the sound. I said, get them back in there, whatever it takes. People often talk about the Beatles influence on you. I don't know if you ever really spoken about it, but you can certainly hear it. Certainly a lot of your older songs. Were they an influence growing up for you? No, it's really strange. I was a really really late Beatles bloomer. You couldn't avoid it because they ruled the planet. But in the early sixties when they were taking off, the first three records Driver owned was Meet the Beatles, The Fabulous Johnny Cash and Flatten Scrugs greatest hits, and the Beatles entertained my feet. The other two entertained my heart. And I gave my Beatles record away, wow. And I always liked their songs, but I never went deep. And there's all three of the guys in the superlatives are Beatles officionados, and so they kind of drew me in in the last four or five years. Actually, right, actually, and so and I started listening to the Beatles channel on the satellite radio, and what I noticed immediately was the quality of the songs, just the power and the timelessness of the songs. And the other thing I noticed. You mentioned the drum sound on this new record was the sound of Ringo's drums, and I was astounded to find out that there are people out there that didn't think Ringo was a great drummer. It's like, come on, give me a break. He played the song. He is a brilliant drummer. And we worked really hard on this record. I think the song was sitting alone. I said, make it sound like Ringo's drums, and we're there, and I think Harry Stintson accomplished that with it. With the engineer Nick Yeah, Well, Ringo's left handed playing a right handed set, so there's always he's always a little late, like he plays late on the beat because he's got to hit his right hand out of the way, which just makes that sound. You know. Certainly, when I hear something like don't leave her lonely or thanks to You, I hear a real kind of Beatles thing. So I'm amazed. That's it. If it got on me, it was just again because of the volume of their work and the intensity of their work throughout the universe. But again, I truly became a Beatles fan in the past five years. And I loved the film Get Back. Was that the name of the documentary. I watched the whole thing and just again to see the process of the songs come together so fast and the amount of work they put into it. And I tell you what else drew me into the Beatles. I had a night off we were on the road in Vegas. I went to see love that production out there and the way they used Beatles songs and Giles Martin's remixing of those songs and just the way they brought it in and I left there again it was just another layer of wonder going, how did those boys do that? I look at their body of work, Hank Williams's body of work, and those kind of guys, Jimmy Hendrix, they weren't here very long, and what they left behind. I don't know how you live up to that kind of work that comes that fast, and it is that profound. Your music came fast. You were like a prodigy when you were a kid. What started first? The mandolin of the guitar, guitar? I love the guitar, I just I mean my hero was Luther Perkins, who played in Johnny Cash's band, Roy Nichols who played in Merle Haggard's band, Ralph Mooney who played the steel guitar out there at those times. Those were the guys that I kind of kept my eye on as a kid. I loved the ventures, love surf music, Don Rich who played with Buck Owens. Those were telecaster cowboys, and I liked what they were up to. And then when I was twelve years old, I bought a seventy eight RPM record at a junk store of Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys Quartet, and I fell in love with the mandolin, and my guitar went under the stereo for two or three years, and I went to the mandolin, But that part of it seemed to kind of come naturally. But as here comes the songwriting layer, then here comes you have to learn to sing layer, then produce records if you're going to do it. So it's been a lifelong process. Was your family musical what led you to the guitar. My grandpa, Stuart was a scratchy old Mississippi backwoods fiddle player, and my mom played a little pianot church, and everybody loved music at our house more than they played it. But our home on Saturday nights, when I I already playing, people in the community would come by and we would play country music, you know, sing those kind of songs. And after church on Sunday night, sometimes people would come to our house for coffee and there was a piano and they would sing gospel songs. So there was always music floating around the house. And then how did you end up touring with Lester Flatt? I went on the road in the summer of nineteen seventy two. I was twelve years old, and there was a regional band called the Sullivan Family Gospel Singers who were bluegrass gospel singers, and they had a television broadcast that came from Jackson, Mississippi, and they were cool looking people and they played spirited music and I just kind of liked the Sullivan's thing. And my buddy Carl Jackson, who was a professional musician in that part of the Mississippi, I was playing some shows with him and they played a church about a mile from our house and I call Carl said, do you think mister Sullivan would let me get up and play a song on the mandolin? Lot? Ask him, and the word came back, yeah, come on. So I played that night and people applauded and stomped their feet for me, and I got the bug. And as the summer approached, Carl said, I said, what are you doing this summer? I'm gonna go out and play shows with the Sullivan family. They were playing camp meeting revivals and bluegrass festivals and George Wallace campaign rallies. And I said, he's all right, Yeah, I said, do you think that I could go along as well? I'll ask And so that was my stepping off place into the world, going on the road. So I was twelve years old and that summer I toured with the Sullivan family gospel singers throughout the back roads of the South, and we played those places I just talked about and I discovered applause, the spotlight. You can talk about music twenty four hours a day. You can wear your hair and your clothes any way you want to, and be around bohemian people that know nothing other than music, music, music, music. And I fell in love with all that that summer and probably made twenty one dollars I don't know. And you were on the bus every night, well, they were in a car. There were six of us cent a station wagon with the bass fiddle in there and the records and the costumes. Wow. And I thought it was wonderful, absolutely wonderful. I would have paid him be in there. And so at the end of that summer I had to go back home and go to school, and it was like being dropped off by the circus at the edge of town. And it killed me. It killed me because I knew that the band was out there playing. There was applause and girls and needed autographs signed, you know, the big things of life. And about two weeks into the ninth grade, I was falling apart. I just I was a pitiful excuse for a student. I took a country music song Roundup, which is a popular publication at the time, stuck it in the middle of my history book and I was reading it, and my history teacher snuck up behind me or just kind of eased that behind me and knocked it out of my hands. She said, if you get your mind off that garbage and get your mind onto history, you might make something of yourself, to which the genius replied, I'd rather make history than learn about it. Dismissed. Pretty good, Yeah, pretty good, dismissed. So I went home and called my mom, and I called a buddy of mine who worked with Lester Flat at the Grand Obberry, who I had met on the circuit the previous summer. He said, call me sometimes, maybe you could ride the bus with us, and so I begged. Lester said yes, and I begged for one weekend, one weekend to go up to Nashville. And I went on the bus with Leicester Flat and his guys to Glasgow, Delaware, to a bluegrass festival for two days. And Lester heard me play it in the back of the bus, and he put me on the show and the crowd liked it, and I could see his wheels turning, the old businessman going a new kid, new energy, you know. And at the end of the weekend he offered me a job, and next thing I know, I was gone. That was it, That was it. That was that day in history class, your last day of school. I was supposed to take a correspondence course, which was pretty useless. So I've since become a road scholar. Bruce, what were you playing? Were you soloing back down at the mandolin? Were you doing we singing? I was playing mandolin and guitar. I played guitar because Roland White played the mandolin, and they would hand me the mandlin and feature me on a couple of tunes. And I think what sealed the deal is Lester played at the Grand ol Opry and I begged my parents to let me stay one more weekend and Leicester said I could play at the Grand Old Opry with him. He had offered me this job. And they were going, no, no, no, you have come up and go to school. But no self respecting family in the South would deny their child a place on the Grand Old Opry, you know. So they let me play and at the end of the song. The crowd just kept applauding and just kept applauding, and I thought I'd done something wrong on Electric Lester. So what do I do? He said, do it again. So we on court and my family met with him the next weekend and they worked out all the arrangements and I went to work. I man, what kind of guy was he? Lester was like a country preacher. Perhaps he was cool as Miles Davis laid back again. One of the master architects of the whole culture, one of the pioneers of it all. He's been there, seeing it, done it all. And I don't think my mom and dad would let me go on the road with a metal band, But with him, it was a different set of circumstances. And he and his wife welcomed me into their home because my folks still lived in Mississippi and continued to do so for a couple of years, and they made me feel welcome when I was looked after and taken care of. And you know, business was business. Moneyment went back home to my mom. I got to keep a little bit every week to buy records and eat with But that was, you know, it was it was a structured deal. He taught me the business of the music business. What did you learn about the business? He and Eal Scrugs when they were partners. And you have to remember this is at a time when the country music industry was played in schoolhouses and fairgrounds and you know, grange halls and civic auditoriums. There was none of the stuff that's happening now. There was nothing corporate about the country music world. It was an industry by all means, and it was a well organized industry, but it was a mom and pop industry. But Lester was one of those guys that taught me, if I owe you a nickel, you know, you pay me. But if he owes me and nickel, he's going to come across town to give it to. He gave me a great piece of advice on the day hired me. He said, it's not about coming to this town or anybody's town and being the most popular person and taking all the money and all the awards and being forgotten in two years. He said, what you really want to work on is being welcome every January the first and being a part of the whole story. I went, yes, sir, and I knew what he was talking about. But whether it was money or that kind of advice, or just how to run a show, how to make records, whatever, Lester was at the forefront of a lot of things, and he was just one of it. It was I would think it would be a little luck hanging out with Louis Armstrong. He could tell you about anything you needed to know from a hard earned perspective. Yea, did he ever talk about his days with Earl Scrugs all the time? All the time they had a bitter breakup in nineteen sixty nine, unless there was one of those guys. When he told a story, it was word for word. If he told it forty times, I go, here comes the comma, here comes the next word. He verbate him, so you could hang your hat on it. And I knew that he and Earl just creative differences. It had run its course. They had been partners since the forties. They started together in bill Monrose Bend, and they emerged from there and became flatten Strokes, arguably the most successful bluegrass do in history. And said all the standards that we still follow. But the times ran their course. But I knew that they were basically the same guy in a lot of ways. I knew that they had helped invent each other's persona. I knew that they had helped write the rules to show business. So I knew there was a lot in common. And Lester got sick when he was sixty three sixty. He died when he was sixty four, and Bob Dylan came through town. I went to see him, and he said, did Lester and I will ever talk anymore? I went, They're always going to get around to it, but that never quite happens. And Bob said, that's sad. Haven't costellover that way? The little fact guy was going to go see the other guy. That never happened. And this feeling came in and Lester was in the hospital, and this feeling came up in my stomach when Bob said that, and I said, I gotta go, and I went outside to a payphone and I got Earl Scruggs number. And I did not know Earl Scruggs. I had never met him. It was the other camp. It was the enemy camp, right, But I called in Earl's wife, Louise, who was the manager, and a really cold act on the telephone. I said, Louise, this is Marty Stewart. I'd like to talk to her. What about? I said, it's personal. Earl came on the fine I said, Earl, this is Marty's to it. He said, I know who you are. He said, I like your play. I listened to you. I went, thank you, sir. I said, I really need to come talk to you. So I left Bob's show and went to see Earl Louise and it was like sitting in a museum because they were just sitting there viewing a painting. And I said, Luster's dying. I said, I don't know that he'll make it through the weekend. I said, I think the last thing in this world that needs to happen is for him to leave this earth without you guys see him by. And I was shaking, like I mean, I was told you I was maybe seventeen eighteen, and I was shaking. I mean, I was shaking. And I said, if you need the halls cleared, I'll go to work on it. Whatever you need. I said, but if you would see fit to go see him, I think it's great. He said, I'll think about it. And I wrote down the room number and the Lester's band. We had to go out and play three concerts that the promoter wouldn't let us out at. We went as Lester's band. So when we pulled back in the parking lot, Lester's manager was standing there waiting on the bus three days later, and he had tears in his asses with Earlwin and saw Lester and they settled up on the way out. And so that was a good story. That was a good, good, good ending to that story. I'm glad I got to be a small part of that. That's a great story. After that, you played, You played with a couple of people. He played with Vaster Clemens, who's this sort of fascinating character. Can you tell me a little bit about him. I fell in love with Vasser by way of that nitty gritty dirt band record, Circle Be Unbroken, Volume one. He just played this bluesy style fiddle that I had never heard before. And coming from Mississippi, you know, everything starts with the blues, and he put the blues and blue grass to me, very soulful. And I met him and he was easy to hang out with. But Vassar was off into this. He had been playing some with the grateful dead. He'd been playing some with the Circle Record made him a star with all these you know, younger bands and cool bands, and anybody would welcome Vassar to come hang out and play with him. But he had this country jazz fusion thing going. And I wanted to get away from bluegrass and started spreading my wings and so, but vasser still understood bluegrass because that's where he came from. So I bought an electric guitar and did not know how to play it, but he gave me a job. I don't know why, but I worked with him for a few minutes, and we crossed paths with doctor Merle Watson on the road that summer, and I asked Merle Watson if I could come hang out. So I worked with them for a while. You sold your electric guitar. No, I can't put him, and still still went back under the back, under the stereo, that's where it always goes. Then Johnny Cash's gig came along, So those really Lester and Johnny Cash. With only two steady gigs I ever had, which goes back to the first two records ever owned. And how did that come about? With Johnny Cash? I had one day left with Doc and Merroll Watson. We were in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It was a two show day and I went back to the and I had no idea after I flew back to Nashville where I was going to head, what I was going to do. There was a guitar player, great guy named Lonnie Mack could call me about maybe talking to Rush, and I said yeah. And I was flirting with going to California to see if Bob Dilan would hire me as a band member. And all those were just blue sky ideals. But I went back to the hotel after the first show in Cedar Rapid, and remember when hotel phones had red lights on them, like. There was a message at the front desk and it was from my mom and she said, Johnny Cash is guitar player Bob Wooton is looking for you. And I had met John a few weeks to that at Cowboy Jack Clement's studio. A buddy of mine had built him a guitar, and I kept up with the progress of the guitar and went with him to deliver it, just to meet my old hero, and so we hit it off. John and I absolutely hit it off that first first handshake, he just kept shaking my hand and go, where are you being? I went, getting ready? He said where are you from? I went Mississippi when I thought so, and lightning kind of struck and it just we were pals immediately, and back to the doctor roll Watson thing. So by called Bob woot and he says, John wants to know if you'd be interested in going to work in our band. I went absolutely. I said, what are you thinking about me? Starting? He went, how about tomorrow? He said where are you? I went Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I said where are you guys? He went Des Moines, Iowa. So it was a two hour rental car ride and I went over there to the hotel, showed up. He said we have a matinee show. So I'm going to the lobby and Bob Wuoten met me, got me settled in. He said we leave here at one o'clock or whatever the deal was. I went and sat down in the restaurant and the major d came and said, mister Cash is on the phone for you. I went, all right, so I got it. He said, hello, son, how are you fine? Glad to be here? He said, We're glad to have you. He said, do you have anything black to where? I went probably, And he said do you know all my songs? I went probably? Do you do still do them in the same key? And he went probably? And he says, well lot good. He says, I'm probably going to take a nap and I'll probably see it a few minutes. Click, and that was it. And the next thing I know, I'm on stage and he walked out and said hello, I'm Johnny Cash and we went I was in. That was the whole deal. Were you playing the lead parts? No, Bob Wuten was playing the lead and I took a mandolin and I had my acoustic guitar and my electric guitar with me, and he asked me if I played the fiddle. I went, oh, yeah, that was a total lie. But I wasn't played the fiddle barely barely barely same tuning as amandolin. Yeah, but still it's as you know, it's another world. Yeah. But he played this song called Arne Blossom Special and it's always played the key of E, but he does it in the key of C because he played the harmonicas on it. But somehow a fiddle appeared, and I mean when I started playing it. It was awful. It was god awful. And he looked at me like he's I could see it thinking, I thought, you said you could play a fiddle. But I wasn't going to lose the job because I couldn't play a fiddle. But the best part about it, at the end of that first tour, I get this check in the mail for you know, the work, and a letter their son, thank you, glad you're with us. You know you add life and vibrancy to the show. Blah blah blah. But at the end, love j R. And then it says PS two, all fiddles, squeaker, just yours. Now I heard his story once that you lost the fiddle Jerry Lee to Jerry Lee Lewis. Yeah, how did that happen? We were on tour in Paris and I decided it was Carl Perkins, John and Jerry Lee Lewis. The tour was called the Survivors. So we go around Europe and all you know, playing all these shows, and their fans are coming out and I just I called Jerry Lee uncle Gerald. So I decided somewhere along the way that I was going to see if I could keep up with Uncle Gerald roaring and I made it about two days and we were in some hotel in France, and I remember thinking the world started going round and round, and I started seeing four of everything where there was only one. I thought, I have to surrender Uncle, Uncle, I have to go to bed. He says, well, all right, he was still going room full of people, and I went to my room, and maybe an hour later or something, there was a knock on the door and he comes to the door and he has no shirt on and he has covered in chocolate cake. He says, can I borrow your fiddle? Sure? So I called, you know the guy who looked over the gear, and I said, would you deliver my fiddle to Jerry Lee's room? And I have not seen it since. You never asked him. No, I knew better than to ask. But I tell you what I did see recently. I was going through Jerry Lee Lewis pictures on Google and I saw a picture of him playing my fiddle. And that's the last time I saw it. I have no idea beyond that. So what happened. What kind of guy was he? Well, to me, he was Uncle Gerald, and he was one of the greatest stylists and musicians and singers and interpreters of all time. But it would have been a big ride to, you know, have to manage all the ducks in his wheelhouse every day. I think he would have been an Levon says, an adult sized portion of putting up with things. He was just I think it would he I don't think he knew what was going to happen when he woke up in the morning. It just got up and he went about being Jerry Lee and things crossed his path. But there are people that I know that were with him for many, many, many many years and they loved him, respected him, and you know, I think that Jerry Lee persona was one thing, but when you get into the realm of family was what he was. To me, it was a different guy. What kind of guy was he in that context? I think he was. He was spiritual, very spiritual, very soulful, humble. Believe it or not, he was. He was a mild person at heart, He truly was. When it got into his family, he had a big heart. We have to take a quick break and then we back with more from Bruce had Them and Marty Stewart. We're back with more from Marty Stewart. I watched an interview with your great guitar player Kenny Vaughan, and he talked about starting on the electric, how that's different than people who start with acoustic and then crossover. What was it like for you to learn the electric guitar, Well, it's an ongoing process. It's a completely different feel, a completely different language. The notes are the same, but how you touch it and approach it. And I think there's so many gifted guitar players out there. I mean I and I love the guitar because you can truly express when you figure out who you are and what you want to say was It's a great way to as its own language. The electric does the electric it does. I mean, I listened to people like Pop Staples, who's one of my favorite guitar players. Pops was so basic, but he used that tremolo and his guitar and it was like Moses spoke. When you heard the Staples singers come on the air, it was just again back to less is more. Pops was a very minimal guitar player, but his guitar playing was so vast and profound. Then he's ear guy, like I saw a clip the other day of Eddie Van Halen doing sound check out here on the street in Manhattan, somewhere before they played, and people hanging out the windows because it was so loud and thrilling, all those notes flying by. It must have been like forty fighter jets flying by. It's the same time or something. And Kenny's another one of those. He just he started as an electric player, and I've watched him grow as an acoustic player, and I know that he would say the same thing about my electric playing as we But we work at it. We work at it all the time. You practice every day, No, I doodle, Kenny practices. I doodle, right, Yeah, well you dodle pretty well. Your guitar player is a better than others. You've got Pop Staples guitar. I do. And it's in town tomorrow night. I'm doing a song with Wynton Marcell Jazz and Lincolnsider on a show that he's doing. And he asked me to do will the Circle Being Broken? That old war Horse anthem. But beyond the Carter Family's original recording, the Staple Singer's version is my favorite song. It is my favorite version. And I brought Pop's guitar with me. It's actually it's in this very room. It's here with us today. What kind of it was Defender Rosewood telecaster. And it's the one. If you look at the at the movie the Last Waltz, the band did the song to Wait with the staple singers, that's the one. And he's got such a I mean, you know, people say, well, he only knew the e chord. He didn't need to know anything. It sounds when he went, that's Pops. And is it all gospel playing or is it? Well, it sounds like rock and roll to me, but it's it's he called it gospel guitar, but it's it's just soulful. It's a soul guitar. It's got such a beautiful sound. It's just using the tremolo. What's he doing? I called him one time to come to Nashville, and he says, and he agreed to do it. He says, now I'm on need two things. I said, well you need Pops. He says, I need me a a Fender amplifier with some shake on it and a stretch out car. I went, no problem, and I called Mayvis. I said, Mayvas helped me. What is a Fender sixty five amp with some shake on He said, Oh, Marty, that's trimmelo. I went okay, I said, man, what is a stretch out car? Shit? Oh, that's one of them limousines. Pops like limousines. We got it, no problem. You didn't know a Fender amp. Well, I didn't understand what shake mean. Oh. I thought that I did, but I didn't want to take any chances. So I found that was Pop's word for tremolo, and it was a sixty five sixty five with some shake on it. Wow, okay, did it sound good? Oh? Of course it did. Pops was one of those guys that could play forty guitars and forty different amps, but they all sounded the same. It was in his hands. Are you that kind of player? I don't think so. I don't think so, not to that level. No, you also got Carl Parkins guitar. Is that right? Yeah? Tell me the story about that hunt. At the end of the Johnny Cash Band member days, there was a happening in Memphis called the Class of fifty five Sessions. Record producer named Chips Moman was trying to light a fire under Memphis. Memphis was trying to re establish itself and freshen its image up and step out in the eighties, and so Chips put together this series of recording sessions with Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, and Jerry Lee, And of course I was right in the middle of that because I was in John's band and I wanted to see that I was in it. Played on those sessions, and the word was out that I was looking for a pathway forward and to try to be a recording artist and to try to be a country western singing sensation. First person that heard about it was Sam Phillips, and he came to me said are you Is that what you have on your mind? I went yes, unc and he says, does Johnny know about this? I one, absolutely, he supports it. He says, okay. He gave me his blessing, and then Karl heard about it, and he says, this is what you're going to do. I went yeah. So at the end of the sessions, he walked up and handed me his Fender stratocaster that he had been playing and autographed it on the back. He said to me, it was like being knighted or something. It was a rite of passage. It was like all those guys surrounded me and gave me their support, and that tipped me off. Wow, what was it like being in those sessions? Well, it was the one question that kept being asked was wouldn't it be great if Elvis was here? I mean, the journalists descended from all over on those sessions. I mean, I wish you could. The best part of the sessions, in reality, Bruce, was the press conference. They held the press conference at the Peabody Hotel. And to see those four guys, along with cowboys Jack Clement and Sam Phillips, walking to the Peabody Hotel and take a seat behind the conference table for a press conference, it was a mighty thing to see those guys that left town as young princes come back as these kings. I mean, it was an electric thing. But the question that kept coming up that week was you know, wouldn't told be great if Elvis could be here? And of course Roy Orbison had a very eloquent answer, and you know, well in spirit he still is. And John had a wonderful answer, you know, and Carl would get a tear in his eye and tell this to leave it to Jerry Lee and Jerry said, well, he would be. He had an overshot runway. But there was a renegade spirit about that wig that never quite made it into the grus of that record. It didn't have the sass that the Sun records that do you and I probably grew up listening to had. But still Dick Clark and his team came in from California to document all that stuff, but still just to be a fly on the wall and turn the volume down just to watch it was worth it, worth its weight in gold. Yeah, where was Johnny Cash in his career at that point? We know is kind of you know, Rick Rubin, who's a partner in the podcast, had his moment with Johnny Cash, which is a bit later. Because of that, people have reinterpreted his later career as well. He was struggling or his record label is going to drop him. How was he as a performer then? What was he like? He was a master performer that never wavered. He was a master showman, and he was a man of integrity. He left this earth looking for one more song. Those things never varied. What I was taken by on the first night in Des Moines, Iowa. The Johnny Cash that I adored as a kid, and it became my hero. Was the guy that made the Fulsome Prison record, and the guy that defied authority, and the guy that made the Bitter Tears record to bring light to the Native American plight, the San Quentin record, all those edgy things, the concept records that he did, Ballance of the True West, Johnny Cash visits to Holy Land. You never knew what he was going to do next, and it was so interesting. But the night of des Moines, Iowa, when I signed on and went to the hotel that night, I had to have a talk with myself because I really had not seen his concerts since nineteen seventy when I was a kid, and I thought, I think I just signed on to the Lawrence Walk Show. It was a really broad family atmosphere. The guy that was my hero from those records passed. He was down in there somewhere, but I didn't see much evidence of him. But I still even his spare change was better than most everybody else's stuff, and I knew that it was the best opportunity that I ever had in my life, and I knew that I was going to go ahead and go for this and take it hook line and sinker. But I was really surprised at how mild it had become. He was Patriot cash. He could still fill up performing arts centers, he could still fill up state fairs grandstands, but that edgy guy was gone. And I didn't see that edgy guy until we went to Europe the first time. He still did a lot of business in Europe. But in Europe I went, Okay, I see there is another there's another wave out there somewhere for John Rcash because it was kids. He was still a pop star over there, and it was these rockabillies and tattoos, kids and punks, along with the servicemen who were a long way from home, and the audience that had grown up with him since the fifties. There was an edge to that audience, and I thought, one of these days that's going to make it back to the States. But we would go back over there and I could see what was coming, and from day one I went in as an advocate. We need to go back to the original sound. I went to him one day said you need to fire me. You don't need me. You don't need two horn players, you don't need a synthesizer. Player. You don't need a piano on stage. You need you and three guys on stage. He said, a lot of people depend on me. I said, well, there's your problem. I said, get it back to the music. And I think it hurt his feelings and took him back a little bit. But I was always honest about that, and I don't need to play on this. But one day, long after I had left his band, I went out with his blessing and got started, had a false start, and got my band started and we started having hits and things started going in the right direction for me. But he called me and said, can you come out to the House of Cash in the morning. Oh yeah. So I went out there and he opened up a little six and a half ounce bottle of Coca Cola, said it in front of me. He said, don't talk to me for twenty one and a half minutes. I went all right, and he sang me ten or twelve songs, just him and his guitar, And when he got through, I could tell he was kind of looked at me, like, what do you think? I said, what did I just hear? He said, my new album? I said, you mean just you and your guitar. He said, yeah, what do you think? I said, I think it's brilliant. It goes beyond what you've ever done. And you're the best storyteller that's ever lived. You and a guitar and a three minute song that says the right thing. Nobody can deny that and walk away from it unchanged. And then he told me about Rick Rubin and what he was up to, and I went, absolutely brilliant, Absolutely brilliant. You have some story songs, and you've had some story albums. Is there something you could get from the way other than he was Johnny Cash? How did he tell that story? How did he pull people in so well? In his case? I think it was they trusted the messenger. We all trusted the messenger. Hank Williams had that, Merle Haggard had that. There's Bruce Springsteen has it. When Bob Dylan wants to, He's one of the greatest that ever was at it. That's part of the fan artist dance is finding somebody you trust with your heart. And at the end of the whole episodic thing that we worked on with Ken Burns for the Country Music series for PBS, Ken and I agreed that beyond everything else we talked about, it's the stories. It's the stories that matter the most, and John just happened to have that gift. His voice was like, you know, thunder coming from the middle of the Earth, and his three chord treatment of most of those songs was like anybody could look at him and relate to what he was saying, even if you didn't like his singing or appreciate what he was up to. He was one of those He had a presence about him that you had to at least consider it, and if you did, it usually made a difference in your heart. Wow, when you said he was in Europe and the audiences were different and they were responsive in a different way, did it change his performance at all? Yeah. He went back and did older songs that I longed to hear him sing as a Johnny Cash fan, like, oh, look here he's doing the legend of John Henry's Hammer. He's doing I was there when it happened, so I guess I don't know. He's doing gray Stone Chapel, he's doing Delia, He's doing you know, sing it pretty soon. He's doing all those kind of songs that he would never do in the States for some reason. But and they'd get around all those old Sun records like, yeah, come on, amazing, When did you know you wanted to go out and be a solo artist. One of my best friends in the world was Fluke. Colin Fluke was drummer, the Johnny Cashman. Fluke's great distinction was that he started out playing with Carl Perkins. He didn't own a set of drums. He borret a set of drums and they used him to drive to Memphis to Carl Perkins best because he had a car. By the way, that's the secret to all drummers. Absolutely have the car. But check this out. So Fluke's first recording session and the first song he ever played in his life was Blue Suede Shoes by Carl Purkas. And you know the Tennessee Three, Luther Perkins, Marshall Grant and Fluke Holland they were my stones, they were my beatles and Fluke. When I joined Cash's band, I mean it took me two seconds to go, Fluke, You're my best friend, and I want to know everything there is to know about you and hang out with you. You're cool. But Fluke was one of those that had been in that show for twenty something years at that time. He joined in nineteen sixty one, so this would be nineteen eighty, whatever that is. And he would would sit in the coffee shop and talk about, you know, music and careers and things, and Fluke would always say, if you want to be me, you can stay here for the rest of your life and one day you won't have a job, but at some point you need to go out there and see what it's all about. And I knew he was right, and he encouraged me. And the Johnny Cash Show was a spawning ground and a launching pad for other stars, people that went on to become stars. And I knew that it wasn't a foreign concept, and so John was behind it. He knew that look in my eye. And there came a point where it was the hardest thing in the world to go, I gotta go try this, but I did it with his blessing. The way it kind of worked out is that show hadn't had a hit in a lot of years, and I took a song called the Highwaymen to sessions that John and Willie were going to do a record, and it wasn't quite clicking, and We had just come from Switzerland where John, Willie Whalen and Christofferson had done a show together and they wound up in hotel room after the filming passing the guitar round and it was magic. So we got back to the States. Johnny Willy was going to make a record and it wasn't really magic. And I went to my cousin who worked at Glenn Campbell's publishing company, and I was aware of a song called the Highwayman that Jimmy Webb had written, but I did not know the song. I just liked the title, and he played it for me on a break from the sessions. I went four verses, no harmony required, This could work. I took it back to the studio and I played it for John and Chip's moment and John said play it again. I said, no harmony needed, and John on the second plase says owned up verse about Starship. Of course, the fourth verse, that's when Marlon Brando comes up out of the river right right, Master chauven Yah, And next thing I know, there's a hit in the house. Well, Columbia Records took notice, and John was very adamant about pointing me out to the Columbia record Peoples, This is the kid that brought that song, and I just happened to have a tape to start putting on people's desk at that time. So you know, when you're those are your Columbia records. Your big records started with MCA. And it seemed as though you came out and Dwight Yoakum and some other people. But your sound sounded like you've been thinking about this your whole life. Was that the sound you were looking for? Is that what you were trying to find or were you still looking around trying to find I was kind of feeling my way through the dark a little bit. At the very first of the MCA sessions, there had been a misfire at Columbia. I did a record. In the second record I put out, I turned it in and said this is too country. I went what? And it threw me for a curve. And you know, when you're young and trying to find your way, a lick like that can shake your confidence, and it shook my vision for a second. But the MCA stuff Hillbilly Rock was a song that I didn't think was a hit, but it went on to be a hit and It gave me a reason to get a bust in a band and some cowboy clothes. I used that first year to just keep exploring. And there was a song that Paul kit on it and I wrote called Tempted, and I felt like Tempted we finally found something that was a sonic identity and something that I could I was proud of and could build on. And that was to me, the downbeat of the journey was Tempted. The second record, that's really where you felt. It's got a Buddy Howlly Ville. Well, let me tell you this. They didn't think it was a hit, they being the promotion department at MCA, And we played a concert in Lubbock, Texas, and I had the song in my pocket and the speakers will tell you, yeah, your name a lot of times, right. So I went to a radio station in Lubbock and did a pre show interview and on the way out of the room, the DJ was cool. I said, would you do me a favor? I said, my record, I have a song in my pocket that I think is a hit, that is a little bit I can I can feel Buddy or Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison and me and all of us in there. I said, would you play it so I could listen to it on the way back to the hotel. He said, sure, no problem, and the DJ played the song and I turned it up really loud in the vehicle I was in, and it sounded like a hit, and I knew it was a hit. And at the end of it, the DJ said, I think that song would make Buddy Holly proud, and I thought, I'm going to go fight for this song, and I'm glad I did. Wow, what was it like working for the for MCA or any record company? Then you must have you know, you grew up with these guys like Johnny Cash who seemed like such rebels, who seemed to be doing what they wanted, or at least had somebody like Sam Phillips who was as hardheaded and as rebellious as they are. Are you sitting in a boardroom and you've got somebody from marketing saying we don't think it's a hit. I think there's always been that at record levels. But MCA in the early nineties in Nashville was run by Bruce Hinton and Tony Brown, and Bruce was a guy that had had as a young executive, had worked under a fellow named Goddard Lieberson here in New York City. And Gotterson, in my mind, is still the coolest record guy that ever lived because he he would sign Flatt and Scrugs. But he had also worked with Dave brew Becken and didn hed do a Broadway show, and he just was a world class musical citizen and cool. I think he was jazz cool in his heart. But Gotterson understood, and so Bruce Hinton brought a lot of that with him. And Tony Brown, the A and R guy had trained with the Oakrage Boys and gospel quartets. Then he got a job with Emmy Lou Harris, then he played with Elvis, and then he stepped out and became a record guy. So you have these two extra cool guys running this label in Nashville, and for a moment in time, MCA Records was the spot on planet Earth to be. They were so cool, the doors were opened, creativity was pouring in. They had mainstream stars like George Strait and Reeba McIntyre up and coming side. They had Lyle Lovett and Vince Gill and me and Patty Loveless and Steve Earle. Those kind of acts and it was just a perfect cool scenario and it lasted for a long time. And then, you know, as as the country music the world started becoming more corporate and more great great you know, entity started by I end Up record label. I think Seagrim's bought that into things, and so everything changed. But for a moment of time, we had it right. Country music always seems to be going through these ebbs and flows where it gets very corporate and then suddenly and it's it's you were considered a very traditional player. A lot of those people were love it wasn't but people sort of bring the older qualities of country music back. Well, It's funny to me because I started out going back to those first Light Columbia records. They were loud, and they were rock and roll, and were my job was to throw boxes of dynamite into audiences and to shake things up. And the further I got into it, I thought, no, let me turn around and rethink this, because a lot of people started responding. But when it started clicking, Dwight Yoakum, Steve Rold and myself we were kind of at the forefront of taking it to a different plays add but there was a threat of tradition in there, but there was still a fresh edge on it, I thought. But everything runs its course. When you look at country music, now, what kind of state is country radio in now? Well, I don't hardly listen. I don't listen to country radio much. I listened to satellite radio, and I'm work inside a good band and we're pretty good radio to listen to ourselves. But I think, I think the thing that is amazing to me, that is absolutely amazing to me, is that people that you didn't know two years ago, three years ago can fill up stadiums two nights in a row now with contemporary country music. And my hat's off to that is awesome. We need that end of things. That's big, big, big, big business by anybody's standards. But the heart and soul factor is what you know. Starting about nineteen ninety nine with the Pilgrim moment, you know what, I had one hundred and fifty bucks in two different banks. I'm married to the girl I love. I got a Cadillac that's old, with some gas money in my pocket, the world's best telecaster, some cowboy clothes, and a cool set of cowboy boots. How about I live like I believe now, and so I have friends in every denomination of country music, but the foundational qualities of country music, the timeless place. That's where I finally put my flag in the dirt went until further notice, you can find me here. H Was that a hard decision? No, the other stuff had run its course. I remember being it. We played Foxwood's Big Old Crowd in at the end of the nineties. Couldn't have been we couldn't have been riding any higher commercially, and I whirled around to do a guitar solo and I looked at the music I was playing. I heard it, and I saw the effect it was having, and I thought, I'm so sick of this. This became a gag that worked. You know the worst guind know the worst guy, and I thought, I need to find my way back to who I am, to my heart soul, and that led me to a record called The Pilgrim, which ultimately cost me my record deal, but it also put me on the path that I've been on ever since. It was the richest years of my life. I want to go through all those things you had one by one, but I'm going to start with the guitar. Is this the famous Clarence White b bender? Yeah, So tell me about that guitar. I read in something this morning that forty years ago today, Johnny Cash hosted Saturday Night Live and Elton John was the musical guest, and John dressed up in some flamboyant outfit and introduced Elton John. They switched costume. They switched costume. That was forty years ago today. Well, what that means to me is forty years ago today was the first time that I played Clarence White's guitar publicly. It was on Saturday Night Live. On that show. It looked like I jumping bean back there. But I bought that guitar from his wife, Susie, and I couldn't believe I had it in my hands. I still can't believe I have it in my hands. But yeah, but that's the guitar. Is that the guitar you play every night? And so as I understand it right, the guitar has a mechanism that bends the bat string, Is that right? Clarence and Jeene Parsons, the drummer, they were in The Birds together. Clarence was an adventurous thinker musically, and so is Gene. And Clarence was trying to play all these still guitar licks, you know, and he said, why can't we come up with a device that I feel like you pulled down on the strap. It just raises it like a still guitar pedal, So instead of doing it with your fingers, you pulled down on the strap. And he goes that, Now does it allow you to do if you don't have to bend it, then can you do other things? Can you make other sounds with it? It just allows you more flexibility, then yeah, it bends and you can do other things around a whole different vocabulary. If you listen to songs like Bad Day at Whiskey on Doctor Bird's and Mister Hyde record, they were experimenting with, you know, psychedelia, and Clarence like had like a fuzz pedal and all these things he was doing. I promise you, if Jimmy Hendricks heard, he would go, wow, I can't do that. But it was the pedal on that guitar that allowed him to do that. And so we'd pull it. It was attached to the strap. He just pulled the guitar down and he would get it would be a full tone. Yeah, amazing, because most people when they want that to steal sound, they do what you do. They just bend. Yeah. How long did it take you to learn how to play that? Oh? I'm still learning. I just want to. Just when i think I'm really getting something going on that guitar, somebody would present me with a a live show from the birds or something clarience plot. I went back to the Woodshit. It would be as if if you gave a classical penis, she said. The piano is the same, except we just reversed all the keys in one octave. But other than that, it's the same. It would it would just mess with you. I would think it's a different thing. Yeah. Notice, can you ever play it? Kenny actually got it's called a bender, a B bender, right, Kenny actually got a B bender put on his guitar, and he's getting pretty good at it. Yeah. Yeah, but you've got the original, You've got the I think the prototype wasn't it be first one? Yeah, well you've got some guitars. Oh, it's an amazing guitar. We have to pause quickly for a break, and then we'll be back with more from Marty Stewart and Bruce Headler. We're back with the rest of Bruce Headlm's conversation with Marty Stewart. So tell me about the Pilgrim. Then you had you had it with stardom, You'd had it with that, You'd run that race in Nashville back in the early seventies. Probably the sweetest spot creatively that I've ever known in Nashville was the early nineteen seventies. And the only comparison I think I could throw out is it must have been like Paris. In the twenties, the old world of country music was kind of fading away, and the outlaw movement was taking place. Willie and Whalen and all those great writers that came around. There was a street called Elliston Place in Nashville, and you were either kind of of the old opry crowd or a part of this new world order that was kind of set in the woods on fire. But due to my age and the way I looked in what I thought about as soon as I get through with the ground old opry, you know, I changed clothes and head to Elliston Place and hang out with the outlaws, and so I saw into a different level of stone them there. I saw into a different level of creativity that wasn't offered even as precious as that old Oprey scene and those people were to me. So I just started dialing my way through that, thinking I'm gonna be a star someday, and pretty much decided I'd do whatever it took to get there. And I remember taking a piece of my soul literally and putting it under a rock, going, you know, I'll come back to this someday who you really are. But just go out there by way of craft, ingenuity and just perseverance and get it done, get the job done, become a starmaking machine. And so from the early seventies forward till about that day in Foxwood's we talked about that's the way I lived. And then one day I thought, I am so sick of this. I have enough money now that I can think the way I want to, I can breathe. And a friend of mine told me that about somewhere along the way during those days, you said, you know, you're getting to the age now you should never sign up for anything you don't believe in anymore. You got to probably stand by what you believe in. And in my heart of hearts and I was I was fried. It was time to call time out and go to the woods. But I remember in my heart going back to that rock that put myself under and let me reconnect with that guy. And the result of that was The Pilgrim. It was a return to you heart and soul and storytelling and storytelling and all of the classic themes, all of the timeless aspects of the music that I love. And it put me into the land of shadows. I was under the shadows of some mighty figures. Who were those figures? Thanks on the Pilgrim. When I would write a song, I had an invisible committee in my mind. I thought, if I had Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard and Jimmy Rogers, Flat Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and Hank Williams at the table and I would sing this song to them without Winston, I know I have a song there. So they became my cloud of witnesses that I've kind of again carried around in my mind when I was making The Pilgrim writing songs. Were you all conscious of the group that Steve Earle had come out of, of Guy Clark and Townsvan's Aunt. Was that part of your thinking or it was older than that, a little different side of the street. Yeah, they were the Texas Boys, and I'm a Mississippi boy, so that I mean. I loved him, admired him, played music with him. Throw John Prian in that pile too. They wrote a little bit different kind of song than I was looking for at that time, but you know, we were all after the Rodney Crowell put him in there, but I was aware of him, and it back to the fire out of their work. But it was a different kind of song I was writing. And then it's almost as though you cast that album you had different characters. Pam Tillis is on that record. You talked about Emi lud George Jones sings on that record, doesn't he? Yeah? What was that? Had you known him before? Uh? Huh? I saw The Pilgrim was basically my love letter to country music. I wanted to create a story that was told with the soundtrack of country music's past, present, and future, starting with the Mountain Sounds of Ralph Stanley, and that's as deep as you can go to George Jones, Honky talnk Sounds, Emmy Lou to wind up in contemporary country music land with songs like Dragon around these chains of love, with all these vignettes of people. I just saw it as an opera and with people coming and going vignettes. And it was a complicated process, but once I finally got it kind of sliced and diced. The biggest problem I had with that project was the ending. I couldn't come up with an ending. And I was in Austin one day and I bought a piece of stained glass that I carried home on the bus with me and just stuck it in my basement. And one day I was in the basement when I was really trying to figure out this ending, and I saw words at the bottom of the glass, and I brushed it off and it was a poem by Tennyson. Then move the trees, the copses, nod, wings, fluttered, voices, hover near old justin faithful night of God. Right on the prize is near. So pass I hostile, hauling grains by bridge, by forward, by park, by pail, all armed. I ride whatever betide until I find the holy Grail. And I thought, how about it at the end that you say, said the lonesome pilgrim far from home, And I thought, I need to call it eight two two five six one and see if John our Cash will answer me, because he needs to be the voice end this record. And that's how I found the ending to the Pilgrim in the bottom of a stained glass. Wow, Tennis and cowboy poet. Mm hm, your next wasn't your next big project, but another big project which I loved is ghost Train. And tell me how that came about. Well, in the Superlatis and I formed, we set ourselves some standards. First and foremost, I shut. I shut the rehearsal down fifteen minutes honestly into the to the first to the first rehearsal, and I knew that this was a band unlike anything I'd ever I started my first band when I was nine, but I knew this band was unlike anything else I had ever done. And I thought, okay, well, we're musical missionaries or mercenaries however you wanted to pin it. This is bigger than chasing three minute songs that are disposable up and down music row. Let's take our the people, let's figure out who we are out in the woods and then bring it back to town with us. And everybody jumped on board us that if we believe in it, We'll pay to get there. If we don't you can afford us, we'll never play it. So with those lofty standards in mind, we didn't have very many people in the book, but we set forth and I noticed like the first record was one more attempt at country radio. It was called Country Music on Columbia. Then I got an imprint deal and we started doing records like Soul's Chapel, which was a tip of the hat to the vanishing sounds of Delta gospel music, Staple singer style, Badlands Ballads of the Lakota. We did a live record from the Ryman. But somewhere along the way, I remember saying, I feel like we're honored guests everywhere we go, but we still don't have our thing. We still don't have our mission statement. And one day, three words traditional country music, the vanishing of the culture came forth. I thought, Man, we have fifteen minutes left before Kitty Wells and Ray Price and Merle Haggard and all their contemporaries are gone, so let's do something about it. I always admired the Stones. When the Stones got really popular, they shined the light back on muddy Waters and Howland Wolf. Merle Haggard did that early in his career when he got White Hot, he shined the light back on Bob Wills and Jimmy Rogers. With that in mind, and I just said, let's make a thing out of traditional country music. And I found us a deal on a TV network called RFDTV, and we did one hundred and fifty six episodes of a TV show that celebrated that culture and what was left of it. Since the show's been off the air, forty three people encounting have gone. But Ghost Train was one of the records that was in the dead center of that mission. It was taken lost and forgotten, overlooked sounds from Nashville's Studio B great days and writing new songs around them, and you know, cutting a couple older songs. But it was about bringing Studio B back to life where all those hits had been cut, those sounds that had been disregarded due to the changing of times, which I knew were timeless. That became Studio B. That became Ghost Train in the Studio B sessions, and you got to sing with your wife, Connie. Yeah, Connie has made fifty five records and her first hit came in nineteen sixty four RCA record. It's a song called Once a Day. Huge hit got her started. But we were standing in the middle of Studio B making this record, and again, it's such a music box, and I thought I would love to hear Connie's voice in this studio one more time. And I wrote a song with her, and we did it as a duet and included it on that record, and then later we did a whole record on her in that studio, you know, a couple of years later. That went on to do great things for her, But it was it was about putting the real country music back in royalty, back in that studio, and it worked. Had she performed in that studio before, Has she ever recorded there? Oh, that's where she That's where the first you know, probably twenty records of her career was done. She loved that room. That was her home studio, but she hadn't been there in a lot of years because the studio had closed and it now operates as a classroom. But after hours we went in, after the tours were done and after the students were taught, we made it back into a studio and so, yeah, she she loved going back there and you one of your songs you co wrote with Johnny Cash is on that record, right and hanging Yeah, that's the last song here was a part of is that right? Yeah? I had been to Fulsom. We played Fulsom, California, the city, and I asked if I could go out to the prison and see where they made the record, and the governor of California got me a pass and they took me out there, and I wanted to see the cafeteria. I knew that's where the record was, and behind the back wall of the cafeteria they showed me it was. Now it served as the common band hall for all the bands that play at Fulsham Prisons, and the day I was there, it just happened to be the Fulsome country band and they let me set in with them and we played Mama Tride and Fallsome Prison. Yeah. But right off to that was the hanging gallows where they executed people, and that really got me all the way back to Nashville. I was thinking about that room and I thought, Okay, what if if you were the hangman, what do you do? You go home? Tell you why? If you did a great job today, that must be an awful job, an awful job. And I started this song and it says, obviously killed another man today. It's hard to believe I lost count at thirty. I've grown two numbed agrees. The bottle helps me cope when I laid down at night, and when the dope rolls through my veins. It all feeds out of same hangmen, hangman. That's my stock in trade, hangmen, hangmen sending bad men to their grieves. And that's all I had. And so John, we were next door neighbors, and I went by to see him before I went on the road, and I was telling him about my experience, and I just quoted those words. That's as far as I can get. And from his wheelchair he spoke up. He said, who killed who? I asked myself time and time again, God have mercy on the soul of a hangman. I went, well, that took care of that. You know. We wrote somebody recording this a second verse in about five minutes. I always had always left. He could name people really good. I said. I went, there's a woman down the street. I pointed him. He went, named Rosalie McFall. I went Rosalie McFall. She don't ask me any questions. When I come to call her arms was soft and warm, her words true and kind. I forget the last lines that if she holds me in her arms, that all fades out of sight, something like that. But we sit there and wrote that song. And he looked so beautiful that day. He was in his wheelchair, but he had on his black shirt and the afternoon light was kissing in the back of his shirt. He looked like an old president. I had my camera, said, Jarl, let me take your picture, and I knew he didn't want me to. He said, all right. So first two frames he was just kind of slumped. I said, I said, where's Johnny Cash? And he sat up straight and he looked like an old president. And I took the picture. On the way out of the room, I sang him a song, or I played him a song that I just recorded of his, called the Walls of a Prison. And I sat at his feet, held his ankles. He says, I've never heard you sing that way before. I said, I never felt that way before. He said, excellent, my son. So I stood up and I said I have to go to Washington. I said, playing East Coast show or two. I said, anything you want. He said no, and he looked around the room. He says, anything in this room you want? I said, just you love. He said you got it, and I said, I'll see you when I get home. I said, you got plenty of rope. He said, I got plenty of rope. How's your spirit? He's good? And four days later he was gone, wow, but we signed off on good terms. Yeah, that's very good. I'd love to talk about Way Out West and all your other records, but let's talk a little more about altitude. I haven't even asked you how you write? Are you the kind of guy? Do you always have a guitar nearby? Are you writing every day? Are you I go months and don't write sometimes. You know, I've also been guilty of getting out of the shower and taking a can of shaving cream and squirting it all over the mirror and writing with my finger because I knew it was a good line. I never know, you know, you write, so you never know when it's going to strike. Coming out of the whole traditional country music mission and doing all that, I thought that throughout that I looked at him and miss accomplished. I knew we needed to turn the wheels. So I called my buddy Mike Campbell. After writing a record a Way Out West, I went on to ma a cosmic country music record. It's time to go to the desert and let it fly. And so we did, and Way Out West Record did a lot of cool things for our band. I felt the needle turn, the wheel turn, And when it was time to start making music for a new record beyond Way Out West, these songs just kept coming that felt like they were kindred to an extension of Way Out West, and again just inspired by all those things we've been doing on the road and this song after songs started coming, and I write my best. I tend to love the right most on the road. I love writing on the bus going down the road looking out of America to the left and the right. I said earlier, A great sounding record. You know, it starts with your lost Bird's face instrumentals. There's two or three of them on the record. They sound great. Well. That goes back to scoring films, and the Pilgrim taught me a lot about that too, about pacing. Sometimes when there's two slow songs back to back and they don't quite flow. An instrumental helps, and I was me and my band, we all group listening to instrumentals, and there used to be a lot of instrumental records made in Nashville, so we can pick. So we write instrumentals. So it's nice to me in the journey, in the listening experience, if an instrumental can carry you forward. So that's what that's about, sitting alone. You may not have grown up with the Beatles. That sounds like a George Harrison song to me. That's got a great, great guitar piece, and space has a like a did you actually use a sitar on SPEs? Well, there's an electric gitar, yeah, but you use like an East Indian country in Eastern music. What do you think I'll be it? Well, because you use the country the East Indian scale too, so it's got that flat sixth. Some of the shows we were doing with Steve Miller, Steve had a beautiful song that he does called Wild Mountain Honey that features a gitar. I have to tell you, I went, I think I have one of those in my warehouse somewhere, and I found it probably hadn't seen it. Two times in twenty years, and I pulled it out and started goofing around and the next thing I hear comes space. Do you often switch instruments to try and get a new way of writing? Do you ever write in the mandolin? For example? And they all, I'm looking at two guitars in this room right now. Both guitars have personalities, and I think if you're trying to write a song, they would encourage you into a certain kind of lyric or melody. So there's stuff done in here. The last thing I do want to ask you about is The Angels Come Home, which is it's an album full of feedback and great sonic effects and suddenly you're playing the acoustic with a little bit of accompaniment at the end. Can you tell me about that song? I was at an awards show, and you know how those shows tend to go. Everybody tries to outdo everybody. They will, you know, if it's not pyrotechnics, it's a choir, it's just you know, it's just everybody. It's all about the three minutes your artist gets in your act, your eyes, an act you get. And I was at one of those and I was just beat to death about it. Had nothing to do with music uslely, you know. And in the midst of all this, this singer songwriter came out with a guitar, wearing a flannel shirt and sang a song and you could hear a pin drop in the room, and everybody's heart just melted. And it reminded me that the truth inside of a song, simply presented unadorned from the heart, has more power than everything else put together. And the Angels came down as one of those songs that I felt like, you know, this whole this whole record was about, you know, swirling around in the spirit world or you know, cosmic this, cosmic that, and the spirit world probably is the most cosmic of all places. And the angels if you believe in them, which I do. You know, I know there's times in my life that they I felt like I've had a hand and being rescued from dark moments and dark ways of life. And that song is probably the most autobiographical thing on the record. I thought, well, back to the guy in the flannel shirt at the end of all the hooplah, come out and tell the truth, see what happens. Was there a particular time in your life that song was about or just about that. Oh good lord. You know. I was a rock and roll knucklehead lifestyle from about nineteen seventy three when Lester Flatt started playing hippie shows. So I finally crashed and burned two or three times. I went, Okay, it's time to grow up, deal with this, get sober, and do something about it. And that became a way of life for me about twenty years ago, and I've enjoyed every second of it since. When I heard the song, it almost sounded like it was a song about death though, that the angels were coming down for you. Well, when that time comes and we all have that in common, that will happen to each and every one of us. You know, It's just fine with me if a herd of angels coming, take me by the hand and leave me on if you have to go, if you have to go. But I'm married to an angel, so there you go. All right, Well it's already it's happening every day. Then, yeah, you bet. Thank you so much. Thank you. Just a great treat and another great record. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for all you're doing. You're keeping the real stuff alive. I hope, so, I hope, so and thank you thanks to Marty Stewart for sharing all those great stories and memories from his illustrious career. We can hear all of our favorite Marty Stewart songs on a playlist at broken record podcast dot com. Subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash broken Record Podcast, where you can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced with help from Lea Rose and Eric Sandler. Our show is engineered by Echo Mountain. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad free listening for four to ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple podcast subscriptions. And if you like this show, please remember to share, rate and mo view us on your podcast app. Our theme musics by Kenny Beats. I'm Justin Richman.