Stuart also cites Roger Miller’s Big River, the 1985 Tony Award-winning musical based on Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, as an early seed of inspiration. “I remember when Roger took me upstairs at his house in New Mexico and showed me his briefcase full of manuscripts,” says Stuart. “He truly was proud of that work…and I remember thinking, ‘Maybe someday I can do a project that has that sort of ambition.'” He also did some of the writing in his warehouse, surrounded by the Nudie suits and boots of those who walked before him.
Stuart’s story features a range of characters, including the jilted husband, a hobo, a waitress and an omniscient hipster crow. The Pilgrim himself is the unwitting “other man,” and the album tracks his attempts to flee the tragedy he set in motion. The story is told by many voices, including Ralph Stanley, Emmylou Harris and George Jones; thanks in part to the structure of the work, each artist’s contribution comes off less as a guest shot than the natural occupation of a role. When Ralph Stanley sings about “a tormented man,” his withered voice and ambling banjo foreshadow both the tragedy and the journey. When Johnny Cash appears near the end of the album to deliver an apparitional recitation of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Sir Galahad”, it is as if the grand quatrains are scudding across a lowering Welsh sky.
As a singer, Stuart has always relied more on phrasing and attitude than melodics, and although several cuts on The Pilgrim are straightforward hillbilly rockers a la 1991’s Tempted, he allows a song such as “Hobo’s Prayer” to unfold with unforced ease, giving story precedence over strut. “The Observations Of A Crow” is a laid-back piece of easy humor. And the title song, reappearing in three “acts” over the course of the record, is larger than life — at once glorious and humble, touched by gospel, filled with lonesome.
And then there are the instruments. Uncle Josh Graves leads out “The Greatest Love Of All Time” with a pinging dobro run. Gary Hogue’s steel guitar suffuses “Reasons” with an anguish that resurrects the instrument from its relegated status as token Music Row garnish and puts a perfectly straight face on the edgy resignation of the line, “It was the perfect excuse to buy bullets.” Conversely, on “Goin’ Nowhere Fast”, Hogue lets the steel skip along beneath the driving drums and big guitars, beep-beeping like a little red Nash delighted to be part of the convoy.
Throughout the album runs Stuart’s 1933 Lloyd Loar Gibson F-5 mandolin. Writers often describe the sound of a mandolin as “chiming,” but in Stuart’s hands, the instrument is most effective providing more contemplative accents — to wit, the delicate avian flutters on “The Pilgrim” and “The Greatest Love Of All Time”. “For me, the mandolin has been a magic wand,” says Stuart. “I can do ‘Burn Me Down’, and then pick up a mandolin and sing ‘Dark As A Dungeon’, and my credibility to myself comes back instantly.”
Marty Stuart got the pickin’ bug while growing up in the Deep South town of Philadelphia, Mississippi. “Daddy really liked string-band music, and the first record I ever got, when I was five, was Flatt & Scruggs,” he says. Shortly thereafter, the Flatt & Scruggs television show debuted. “It brought those songs to life in a new way. And for me and Daddy, that was our quality time. We’d sit and watch country music together.”
But there was a subplot. “This was when all the civil rights business was goin’ down,” he says. “Racial relations were horrible. The entire mood ’round our town was chaos. And the whole nation was breathin’ down our neck. Daddy took me and my sister down, we parked his truck, and Jennifer and me stood on the hood of the truck as Martin Luther King marched his Freedom March through town. This whole town was crazy. And in the middle of all that darkness, to sit down at the end of the week and have Flatt & Scruggs come on and pick some tunes for you, it was like the cloud lifted. There was a ray of light that came in with them. They were like your favorite country cousins.”
The final track on the new album, “Mr. John Henry, Steel Driving Man”, is a two-minute instrumental by Marty and Earl Scruggs. “I had no plan for that to be on the record,” says Stuart, “but it took me full circle, to when I was a kid standin’ in front of that television set. And it brought it back, in my opinion, to a point of pure art, pure enjoyment, pure fun, pure credibility. One microphone, sittin’ knee to knee, just goin’ for it. And it goes back to points in my life — whether I was going through a divorce, or getting’ my sanity back, or just road-fried, or whatever the situation, happy times or bad times — a trip to Earl’s house, and a good pickin’ over at Scruggs’, you just come out feelin’ different. It’s like goin’ to church or something.”
Stuart’s first real musical instruction came from a teenager named Carl Jackson. “He was a child prodigy,” says Stuart. “He played on the Grand Ole Opry with a group called Jim & Jesse & the Virginia Boys. When Carl would come back from Nashville to work on his schoolwork, he and his dad would come down to my hometown and play. And I heard about Carl Jackson, so I went and met him, and his dad — this was when I was 11 — and his dad recognized the fire in my eyes. And bein’ that he’d already raised one musical kid, he kinda took me under his wing and helped me, showed me my first little bits on the mandolin, taught me a couple of fiddle tunes and stuff. He got me started.” At home, Stuart tutored himself with an adjustable-speed phonograph. “I’d take records and slow ’em down, so I could get the licks, then speed it up and play along.”
At 12, Stuart met Bill Monroe, who handed him a pick and challenged him to go learn how to use it. A year later, the boy waylaid Lester Flatt backstage and asked for a job. He got it, and his education began in earnest. “Out there on the circuit, I just basically had access to anybody’s playin’ that I liked. They were usually the kind of guys that I could go up to. Vassar Clements, for instance: ‘Vassar, I love the way you play this, how do you do this?’ And country music musicians are really friendly that way for the most part; they’ll sit down and work it out with you.”
Even as a child, Stuart claims he never had any doubts about his career choice. In pictures from the era, he is a half-pint in a suit coat and a straw cowboy hat (“No matter what I did, I came out lookin’ like Eddie Munster,” he jokes), stepping right up front for his solos, respectful of his elders but hardly deferential.
The first time he played the Opry, he fell asleep as Lester drove him to town. “Lester thought I’d be uptight and nervous,” says Stuart, “but I never have been. It was totally what I prepared myself for. It was what I wanted to do; I knew who I was with, and I knew the importance of the gig. About two weeks in, on the way home from doing a Martha White radio show one day, I was thinkin’, ‘Hey man, you’re doin’ pretty good,’ and the next thing I heard in my head was, ‘Now see if you can keep the gig!'” He laughs. He kept the gig and got others, including work for Clements and Doc Watson.
