Ellis Creative: PR/Marketing/Project Mgmt: Marty Stuart

Marty Stuart is country music's renaissance man. He has scored six top-ten hits, one platinum and five gold albums, and four Grammy Awards. But his success proves the difficulty of gauging a career in charts alone. He has made lasting music as a front man and in collaboration with virtually every major roots music figure of his era, from Lester Flatt to Bob Dylan. He has evangelized for country music around the world, eulogized the departed legends of the field, and identified and encouraged talents of the future. Stuart has produced records for some of the most distinguished artists working today, and many famous names have chosen to record his songs. Stuart's energetic enthusiasm has gone outside music, yielding impressive work as a photographer, writer, collector and arts executive.

With the launch of his Superlatone Records imprint backed by Universal South Entertainment, Marty Stuart opens the most ambitious chapter yet. Keen to broaden the scope of his life-long passion to uncover the depths and eccentricities of Southern culture, Stuart now finds himself in the opening stages of combining music and the arts to continue his ambitious story.

In addition to the first three Superlatone releases -- the gospel collection Souls' Chapel; the concert recording "Marty Stuart & His Fabulous Superlatives Live at the Ryman" and "Badlands," a group of songs about the lives of Native Americans -- Stuart will publish collections of his photography, as well as pursue associated work in other media. In all his endeavors -- much including his songwriting, singing, playing, and producing -- there is a storyteller at work, a man who listens to and translates the world he knows.

"From the first time I played with Lester Flatt, I sensed an extreme amount of history around me," he says. Accordingly, Stuart began to acquire the artifacts of this world. "I've always been a collector at heart," he says. "When it really exploded for me was in the early 1980s. I was in London touring with Johnny Cash. Isaac Tigrett had just started the Hard Rock Café. He took me to see his restaurant. Here was all these treasures from the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, Buddy Holly. I thought it was so cool that someone was archiving all this."

Stuart felt that the historic accoutrements of the country world merited similar attention. "The first thing I acquired was guitars and costumes," he says. "Nobody in Nashville was really paying attention to the old Nudie suits; people basically were ashamed of that image, and they were being sold and pawned. Then I went after the guitars, which accounted for so much of what made country music cool. All the glamour was being thrown away; most of the old guitars were being bought up by the Japanese collectors." Today Stuart owns the largest acknowledged private collection of its kind in the United States, with 20,000 different items. These include the original handwritten manuscripts of Hank Williams' songs such as "Your Cheatin' Heart," the last boots ever worn by Patsy Cline, and the first black stage outfit worn in the '50s by Johnny Cash.

Marty Stuart entered the business at the age of 12. Philadelphia, Mississippi, where he was born and raised, lies thirty-five miles northeast of Meridian, the hometown of Jimmie Rodgers. Locally, Stuart was known as a prodigy; by the age of twelve, his string-instrument playing had led him to a road gig playing mandolin with the Sullivan Family Singers. At a 1971 Indiana bluegrass festival, Stuart befriended Roland White, mandolinist with Lester Flatt's Nashville Grass. After Flatt -- who was one-half of Flatt & Scruggs, the most successful bluegrass duo in history -- heard Stuart play and sing, Flatt pulled the thirteen-year-old into his circle; not long thereafter, Flatt offered him a job as rhythm guitarist.

For six years, Stuart traveled with Flatt's band, where he played mandolin, having switched back to that instrument from rhythm guitar after White left the band. Stuart studied high school via correspondence classes. After Flatt died in 1979, Stuart stretched out stylistically, playing electric guitar with fiddle iconoclast Vassar Clements in the group Hillbilly Jazz, and acoustic guitar with the legendary Doc and Merle Watson. Then, before his twentieth birthday, Stuart was named a member of Johnny Cash's band.

Stuart recorded his first album as a bandleader in 1977 for the Ridge Runner label; it was called Marty, With a Little Help From My Friends. But, playing with Doc Watson and Earl Scruggs and Cash, Stuart's 1982 Sugar Hill debut Busy Bee Café announced his actual arrival. After recording 1986's Marty Stuart and its follow-up Let There Be Country for Sony, Stuart moved to MCA. There, producers Tony Brown and Richard Bennett joined to produce Stuart's commercial breakthrough, 1989's Hillbilly Rock. The album's stinging twang and propulsive rhythm section blended glamorous honky-tonk with bluegrass virtuosity, staking out Stuart's signature style. The title track went top-ten, and Stuart's 1991 follow-up delivered hits as well with "Burn Me Down" and the title song, "Tempted." One year later, Stuart was invited to become a member of the Grand Ole Opry

A strong composite of Stuart's passion for combining innovation with tradition may be The Pilgrim (1999), arguably his most mature recording of the ‘90s. The collection deals in the very sources of country: the fiddles and banjos, the trains and the churches, the blues and the gospel. The ideas in the songs are as absorbing and flamboyant as Stuart's broad-ranging talents. Somewhat frustrated by the direction of country radio and the never-ending pressure for producing hits, Stuart took a bold new approach in the recording studio when he conceived The Pilgrim. The concept album weaves honky-tonk, folk and hillbilly rock into a song cycle that traces a tragic love triangle. Artists such as Ralph Stanley, Emmylou Harris, George Jones, and Johnny Cash quoting Tennyson, yield a kind of country opera that nevertheless features its own kind of hit-worthy arias.

In the early 1990s, Stuart had struck up a friendship and working relationship with fellow rising star Travis Tritt. Stuart co-wrote and co-sang a deliciously plaintive honky-tonk lament called "The Whiskey Ain't Workin'," from Tritt's breakthrough It's All About To Change. The single soared to #2 and landed the pair a Grammy. A year later, Stuart and Tritt hit the road together on the sardonically named "No Hats" tour. Together, Stuart with his pompadour and Tritt with his mullet proved that Southern-fried, sanctified country music remained alive and popular. Tritt contributed blues-drenched vocals on Stuart's This One's Gonna Hurt You and Stuart contributed songs and searing guitar work on Tritt's three career-making albums.

In 1995, Stuart's first greatest hits package included the anthemic "Now That's Country," as well as his MCA chart-toppers, plus a duet version of "The Weight" with the Staple Singers. Originally recorded for the multi-platinum cross-genre collection Rhythm, Country Blues, Stuart's work with The Staple Singers on the Band's "The Weight," showed he could negotiate wide swaths of roots music. He would rely on this strength in the coming years. Stuart wrote, produced and performed on Same Old Train, the Grammy-winning grand finale to 1998's Tribute To Tradition various artists album.

Stuart began to pay tribute to tradition outside the recording studio. For six terms he served as president of the Country Music Hall of Fame & Museum's board of directors. He wrote about music and culture for publications such as the Oxford American, and his photographs -- including intimate images of his friends Bill Monroe, Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard -- were exhibited in New Orleans and Nashville. He also began to expand his collection of country music artifacts.

Stuart didn't record or tour during 2000, however the year proved no real hiatus. He worked harder than ever on a variety of creative projects. Pilgrims: Sinners, Saints and Prophets, a collection of his photographs, was published by Rutledge Hill Press. Stuart wrote songs for the Dixie Chicks, produced a recording for his friend Billy Bob Thornton and for his old colleagues the Sullivans, and an old-time country singer and showman named Leroy Troy. Stuart composed film scores including All the Pretty Horses which garnered a Golden Globe nomination. He arranged an exhibit by the painter Thomas B. Allen, who had contributed a number of Flatt & Scruggs album covers. Stuart continued his study of Native American culture, earning an honorary M. A. degree in Lakota Leadership from the Oglala Lakota College in South Dakota.

The country and its music, of course, soon called Stuart once again. After a respite at home in Mississippi, where he reconnected with the land and its people and his guitar, Stuart formed The Fabulous Superlatives starring guitarist Kenny Vaughan, drummer Harry Stinson, and bassist Brian Glenn. Stuart wrote a new collection of songs and released the bluntly, audaciously titled Country Music. The album recaptured Stuart's hillbilly rocking energy and plumbed new depths, as in "Farmer's Blues," a duet with Merle Haggard co-written with Stuart's wife, the legendary Connie Smith. The album and a tour brought Stuart back into touch with his old fans and made new ones and returned him to country music's thoroughbred bloodstream.

"I've followed the sound of music all around the world and it led me right back where I started from…home in Mississippi," says Stuart. "From the perspective of the Delta land it's not just about country music, the blues, gospel, or rock & roll. It's about all of it. Mississippi is the home of roots music and its royalty. It's a place where words and music drip from the trees. It feels good to create in an atmosphere where all things are possible."

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MARTY STUART REACHES OUT WITH BADLANDS
Second release for Superlatone trio of CDs
Street Date October 25

A while ago, when Marty Stuart started to consider music he might release on Superlatone Records, the label done in conjunction with Universal South Entertainment, his thoughts raced several places. One place was the Mississippi Delta, where the multi-faceted artist was born and grew up and of which the gospel collection 'Souls' Chapel' is a stirring product. Another place was the heritaged land of bluegrass music, a style with which Stuart had been deeply engaged since he was a teenager playing with Lester Flatt. Another place was the 244,000 acres in southwestern South Dakota known as the Badlands region, home of the Lakota Sioux, part of the Great Sioux Nation. It was a place Stuart first encountered from his days of playing with the late Johnny Cash.

"I've been going there for twenty years," Stuart says. "The Mississippi Delta and the Badlands region are two of the most impoverished zones in America. That's what the two places have in common. I think the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation County is the poorest county in the United States. For me, it was no marketing stretch to go to the poorest zones in America. One is where I happened to come from. The other is my second home."

Stuart calls Badlands, which he produced with John Carter Cash at The Cash Cabin in Hendersonville, TN, a "thematic collection." He believes that if the album "has a grandfather," it is Johnny Cash's 'Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian', from 1964. Badlands comprises thirteen Stuart originals, plus another somewhat little known song, "Big Foot," written by Johnny Cash. Each addresses the historic and contemporary lives of Native Americans.

"It is a collection of ballads, as well as a journey through the past, present, and future of the Native American people in and around Pine Ridge, South Dakota," Stuart says. "This includes the legends of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull and the tragedy of Wounded Knee, as well as the modern-day struggles of the original Americans. Crazy Horse, Red Cloud, Sitting Bull -- they are the superstars of this world."

The music on Badlands is performed by Stuart and his Fabulous Superlatives -- drummer Harry Stinson, bassist Brian Glenn, and guitarist Kenny Vaughn. Preparing for this music, Stuart immersed himself in recordings of Native American music. "The first thing I was met with was the beauty of the pan flute," he says. "But I realized that that's really not my thing. I decided that the best thing I could do was stand still, make the best music I could, and put the stories inside that." The music does include contributions from two of Stuart's friends, Marvin Helper, a medicine man, and his brother Everett, a drummer and singer. "They lent their presences and their voices to this," Stuart says. "For me, that gave it deeper authenticity."

One Badlands' song, "Hotchkiss Gunner's Lament," features the wordless vocal harmonizing of Connie Smith, Stuart's wife, whom he first saw perform at the Choctaw Indian Reservation in his Mississippi hometown of Philadelphia. Twenty-five years later, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, the two were married.

Stuart first visited Pine Ridge Reservation as a member of Johnny Cash's band; "I was adopted up there," he says. "We played a benefit at St. Frances Mission, in the early 1980s. As John was singing a song about broken treaties and injustices to the Lakota people, an elder of the tribe started coming down the aisle of the auditorium. John was almost through with the song, but the elder just looked at him, and John just kept playing. He walked slowly to the front of the stage. And when he finally arrived, he just simply raised his fist and said to him, 'That's America.'"

The effect that this event had upon Stuart was incalculable in its raw emotional power. "The Lakota people touched my heart," he says today. He recalls that that following the onstage encounter, he returned to his band's touring bus. "I understood why we were there," Stuart remembers. "It was on account of poverty. I walked out of the bus. A bunch of kids had followed me in. I had this big red suitcase then that was full of , custom cowboy clothes and boots, knives, rawhides – and money. I took the suitcase, unzipped it, and just dumped it on the ground, then threw the suitcase at them. I said, 'Take it.' All of this experience, the whole thing about the Badlands and Wounded Knee, all of it: It got in my heart."

This is where the Badlands songs come from. "I've tried to offer myself as a tour guide," Stuart says. 'I wanted to show people, many of whom may not know or have the patience to sit down and understand the whole story of Native Americans, some of the historic moments. But at the same time, "Hotchkiss Gunner's Lament" is from the perspective of the gunners who killed those people. Connie Smith's voice in there is the wail of everywoman. With 'Wounded Knee' being the centerpiece of the sequence, I still deal with more contemporary sides of the story. 'Casino', 'Broken Promise Land' are two of those kinds of songs."

For Stuart, there's bottomless grief and on-going grimness to this story. But sadness, he believes, is not the story's totality. "There is a silver lining to this record, and to this story," he maintains. "It feels pretty hopeless, at face value. But, three or four trips ago up there, an elder said to me, 'We have all this history that we've lived off, we have all of our elders to listen to, but it's really time to look the other way and listen to our children.' I sense a Native American pride that's coming. It seems to me that they are wiser, more worldly, more educated now, and that there are better opportunities. I see a ray of light coming out of someone on a playground, a leader in the making up there who I believe will lead the people on to better things."

For more information
Tamara Saviano / Saviano Media / 615-385-1233
Susan Levy / Universal South / 615-259-5310

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MARTY STUART: BADLANDS

From his earliest days as a picking prodigy with bluegrass greats Flatt & Scruggs, Marty Stuart has spent a lifetime learning from the very best. It was his close friend and mentor, American musical icon Johnny Cash, who introduced Stuart to the ancient culture and modern tragedy of the Sioux Indians. The proud history Stuart absorbed and the deep friendships he has formed over the years within the tribe come vividly to life on Badlands, Stuart's stirring musical tribute to Native America.

But don't be fooled: Badlands is not a dry history lesson. Alternately reverent, reflective and rocking, Badlands celebrates Native American culture as only Stuart could. Working with his best band ever - guitarist Kenny Vaughan, bassist Brian Glenn, and drummer Harry Stinson, collectively known as the Fabulous Superlatives - Stuart captures all the breadth, beauty, and sadness of Indian life through this incredible set of heartfelt songs.

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MARTY STUART: SOULS' CHAPEL

'Souls' Chapel', Marty Stuart's first gospel album, is also the first of a trilogy of diverse collections based in the richness of Southern culture that Stuart will release on his new Superlatone Records imprint with Universal South.

The music on 'Souls' Chapel' – in stores August 30th - hews purely, passionately, and closely to what Stuart terms Delta Gospel. "You know what this record sounds like to me?" he asks. "It sounds like everything I heard on the radio as a kid growing up in Mississippi."

A string-player prodigy, the Philadelphia, Mississippi native's first job found him on the road, playing mandolin with the Sullivan Family Singers, who sang bluegrass gospel music. "I began appearing with them when I was 12 years old," Stuart says. "We played Pentecostal churches, camp meetings, bluegrass festivals and George Wallace campaign rallies all throughout the South that summer. It was baptism by fire into a wonderfully archaic brand of church-house rock and roll. I always felt the presence of the truth inside that music."

"Gospel music should represent the truth," Stuart says. "The truth is, the creative process of this record was stalled when I got arrested and sent to jail for DUI, and it wasn't the first time it had ever happened to me. The press was all over it. I was so humiliated. I also felt powerless not being able to live out the message of what I was singing about here. In the midst of my personal failure, I lost sight of any faith or hope."

But then something awesome happened to Marty Stuart. "We were playing a show in Chicago the day after I got out of jail. Mavis and Yvonne Staples came to the concert that night. Without them knowing what had happened at all, they brought and gave me Pops Staples' guitar. It was the greatest confirmation I'd ever had to fight on. It was like being handed the Excalibur sword. It was like being knighted with an instrument of light."

"And," says Marty Stuart, "it gave me the inspiration to go on, get my life back on track, and make this record."

'Souls' Chapel' was recorded outside Nashville, in Hendersonville, Tennessee, at Stuart's home. The sessions employ his band the Fabulous Superlatives -- drummer Harry Stinson, bassist Brian Glenn, and guitarist Kenny Vaughan -- augmented by a handful of other musicians, such as the drummer Chad Cromwell and the great Muscle Shoals-sired keyboardist-producer Barry Beckett. Stinson, Glenn and Vaughan also contribute background and lead vocals instead of their usual instrumental work. And on the climactic song "Move Along Train," Mavis Staples of the legendary Staples Singers shows up and sings with Stuart. "I called Mavis," Stuart says, "and I said, 'Mavis, gotta have you on this one.'"

It was not just any call. As they played their customary live dates across the country, Stuart and his band had taken to singing gospel songs on their bus. Inescapably this meant, for Stuart, the brilliantly conceived and executed work of the Staple Singers, with whom Stuart had recorded a searing version of The Band's "The Weight" for the 1994 collection 'Rhythm, Country & Blues.'

"Pop Staples was always one of my closest friends," Stuart says. "To me, he was as much a force of light as Robert Johnson was a force of darkness. So Pops and I were real close; the Staples are like my family."

The eleven songs that comprise 'Souls' Chapel' are both old and new. The collection opens with "Somebody Saved Me," a Pops Staples composition that indicates at once how Stuart -- singing in a naturally strong voice that conveys both authority and intimacy -- and the harmonizing of his band will approach this material. And that involves, basically, the Staples' masterful idea of bringing off the most emotionally expansive music not with swelling choirs or organs, but the frequently funky allure of minimal front-porch instrumentation.

Going onward, on songs such as the more quickly-gaited obscure, Albert E. Brumley gem "Lord, Give Me Just a Little More Time" and the bluesy "Way Down," a Stuart-Stinson original, one hears the sort of music where, as in classic Jamaican reggae, every drum shuffle, every snaking guitar line, every empty space communicates deep universes of feeling, all which amplify the effect of the singing.

"To me, the Staples Singers, what they sounded like, from the first time I heard the way they sang 'Will the Circle Be Unbroken'," Stuart says, "was that they were like ghosts standing in a cotton field, quietly proclaiming, not shouting and screaming, without any kind of guilt thing. To me, the word that sums up gospel music above all is 'inspirational'. It should be inspirational music; it shouldn't condemn or threaten. It should inspire and inform."

This is exactly what the music on 'Souls' Chapel' does, from the easeful narrative flows of Stuart's "The Gospel Story of Noah's Ark" to the intense soulful loveliness of 1975's "I Can't Even Walk (Without You Holding my Hand)," and the double finale of Steve Cropper and William Bell's "Slow Train" preceding "Move Along Train," the deliberate, fiery Stuart -- Mavis Staples duet written by her father. "It's hard to beat standing in the middle of the Mississippi Delta, singing out," Stuart says.

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Universal South Entertainment introduces Superlatone Records imprint from Marty Stuart; first release is gospel collection Soul's Chapel

For Immediate Release: May 11, 2005

NASHVILLE --- Tony Brown and Tim DuBois of Universal South Records announce the launching of Superlatone Records, an imprint label to exist as an on-going home for musical and cultural offerings from the prolific artist Marty Stuart. The first fruit of the association will be the August 30, 2005, release of Soul's Chapel, a collection that Stuart terms "Mississippi gospel." Subsequent scheduled music releases shall include Marty Stuart & His Fabulous Superlatives Live at the Ryman, a live recording that documents a concert Stuart and his band gave in July 2003 at the original home of the Grand Ole Opry, and Badlands, which addresses Stuart's long-held interest in the lives of Native Americans.

Stuart is an accomplished photographer, historian, collector, storyteller, musician, songwriter and archivist; he always has been mindful of country music's place in American culture while at the same time he has operated as a Platinum-selling recording artist. Superlatone Records offers the deeply musical yet fully multi-media focus that the Philadelphia, Mississippi, native has long craved for his interests in southern culture. After a successful and acclaimed tour throughout the 1990's as a recording artist for MCA Records Nashville, Stuart now turns his attention to more expansive work.

"The '90s era of country music and my participation in it had run its course," he explains. "I was looking for broader terms, and I found it parallel to the arts, instead of just within the confines of the country music charts. I have reached a point in my life where I've asked myself, 'What do I need?' Another car, another pair of cowboy boots, another Telecaster?' It became a whole lot more important to me to be true to the art and the vision and the spirit of creativity than trying to chase a chart."

Now 46, Stuart, who released 14 albums between 1978 and 2003, is an unusually alert man with charisma to burn. To hear him talk about his concerns is to understand why Karen Schoemer, formerly of The New York Times, once wrote that Stuart "understands the heart of country music -- it's glitz and its grime, its roots, and its living traditions" as naturally as other people grasp the notion of getting up in the morning. He is not someone to lose sight of his passions, ever.

"Marty sees himself as carrying the torch for southern culture," Brown says. "He's a real music historian, and he can talk about music in depth. He probably knows more about the history of country music, next to critics, than anyone I know."

Stuart is not a newcomer in his relationships with Brown and DuBois. "Marty brings much to the table," DuBois says. "I have tremendous respect for him as an artist -- his taste, the fact that he is not only a great writer but also a great photographer and historian. Everyone who knows him is aware of his expertise and varied interests. Now people outside Marty's circle will have a chance to experience his work in a deeper way."

"In our industry," Brown says, "success is usually judged by immediate record sales. Yet it's interesting to watch the steady growth over the past 15-20 years of artists such as Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, and Alison Krauss. They don't necessarily always play the game but have made music on their own terms and enjoyed success. I'm glad labels still sign and put out records by artists of the caliber of Willie and Emmylou -- and I think Marty fits into that category. This label gives him an outlet to express himself fully."

UPCOMING SUPERLATONE RECORDS RELEASES:

Soul's Chapel: (release date: August 30, 2005). Recorded at The Arc in Hendersonville, Tennessee, outside Nashville, and produced by Stuart, this 11-song sacred collection of old classics and newly composed songs coalesces various music strains into a style that Stuart describes as "Mississippi gospel," inspired by the work of the Staple Singers and other Mississippi Delta artists. Stuart's band -- drummer Harry Stinson, bassist Brian Glenn, and guitarist Kenny Vaughan -- appear, with Stinson and Glenn forgoing their instruments to contribute vocals. Each of the three musicians contribute a lead vocal, as does guest Mavis Staples, who helps Stuart climax the set on "Move Along Train."

Marty Stuart & His Fabulous Superlatives Live at the Ryman: (release date to be announced). This July 24, 2003 concert of traditional bluegrass music was never intended to be released officially, and was recorded for routine archival purposes only. But the ultimate vitality of the performances argued otherwise. "With a natural pedigree in bluegrass music by way of my apprenticeship with Lester Flatt," Stuart says, "I finally made a bluegrass record. It was a happy accident, a one-off evening at the Ryman. Unrehearsed. Unplanned. At the end of the show, the sound man handed me a bootleg tape of the show, and that was what later became my first bluegrass recording." Banjoist Charlie Cushman and fiddle player Stuart Duncan join Stuart and his band, and the set includes as well a rare appearance by the veteran dobro legend Josh Graves.

Badlands: (release date to be announced). Stuart and John Carter Cash produced this 14-song collection of original compositions, including one obscure song written by Johnny Cash, at The Cash Cabin in Hendersonville. It addresses the historic and contemporary lives of Native Americans. The album is performed by Stuart and his band and, on one song, features Connie Smith's wordless vocal harmonizing. "This album," Stuart says, "is a collection of ballads, a journey through the past, present, and future of the Native American people in and around Pine Ridge, South Dakota. The songs range from the legends of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull to the tragedy of Wounded Knee to the modern day struggles of the original Americans."

NOTE: Marty Stuart is putting the finishing touches on six books, three of them photography collections, selections from which are on display today (Badlands, Signs Of Our Times and Blue Line Hotshots).