![]() He was an eager musical student, soaking up information from Flatt, Roland White, and others he met at bluegrass festivals, at the Grand Ole Opry, and in recording studios. The move made for a painful separation from his parents and from sister Jennifer, but Marty possessed a precocious sense of destiny. Not long after meeting Smith, Stuart made his fateful trip to Nashville. At eleven, Stuart went to the Choctaw Indian Fair, and his mother snapped a photo of him with RCA recording artist Connie Smith. He listened to the Grand Ole Opry each weekend, and he paid attention to local guitarist Lethal Jackson (father of Stuart’s childhood friend Carl Jackson, who went on to become a Grammy-winning producer and musician). Raised in Mississippi by parents-John and Hilda-who encouraged his early love of music, Stuart learned to play mandolin and guitar as a small boy. He has done so with a preacher’s fervor, a deacon’s reverence, and a musical skill set that allows him to contribute mightily onstage and in the studio with artists of varying sounds and styles. The child who told his high school teacher that he would rather make history than learn about it has spent his life making history, often alongside those Stuart calls country music’s “Old Testament masters,” including Flatt, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Bill Monroe, Porter Wagoner, Doc Watson, and Mac Wiseman. It was a gift placed in my hands to use at will.” ![]() “The one that set me on my way and marked the true downbeat of my journey. “It seemed like a divine appointment,” Stuart wrote. At the conclusion of the weekend, Flatt asked Stuart to join his band, to play with him on the Grand Ole Opry, and, in essence, to commit his life to country music. Thus was Stuart’s entry into a Nashville music community that he has enriched over the past forty-nine years. Minutes later, bluegrass veteran Roland White picked up the thirteen-year-old in a 1965 Chevy Impala and took him to safety, and the next day White and Stuart boarded Lester Flatt’s tour bus at Higgins’s Gulf Station in Hendersonville and rode to Delaware to play a music festival. He gazed at the venerable Mother Church of Country Music and knew he had found a home, a mecca, and a mission. History books tell us that John Marty Stuart was born September 30, 1958, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, but in many ways he was born on August 3, 1972, when he got off a Greyhound bus in downtown Nashville in the early morning hours and walked the hushed city streets to the Ryman Auditorium. After apprenticing in the bands of Johnny Cash, Lester Flatt, and Doc Watson, Marty Stuart forged a career carrying forward country’s traditions, finding success as a recording artist, songwriter, and multimedia emissary for country music.
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