Marty Stuart – The party may come to an end, but the road goes on forever

“I called Harry Stinson and I said, ‘Here’s the deal right here: We need to develop a rock ‘n’ roll show to play country music and take it to the backwoods like it’s an old French circus troupe.’

“The first person that came to my mind was Haggard, and the more I thought about it, the more I talked about it, the more I thought, this is doable. We’re going to make a lot of mistakes, but it’s doable. So I got on the road and went to Louisville where Merle was playing, and set down and had a talk with him about it. He said, ‘I like it, we’re playing to the forgotten people.’ And I said, ‘That’s it.'”

With Haggard, Connie Smith, Rhonda Vincent & the Rage, BR-549 and the Old Crow Medicine Show on board, the Electric Barnyard tour skipped the big cities in favor of fairgrounds and other down-home venues in places such as Klamath Falls, Oregon; Middletown, Ohio; Marshall, Missouri; and Hutchinson, Kansas. Get to those, Stuart says, and you find “the truth of our nation, the truth of us as a culture. The truth just shows up. The American spirit, it’s pretty indelible in a lot of ways, but it’s pretty bent up in a lot of ways as well.

“But the thing that I know about America is that when you get out where you can smell the dirt — hear the trains, hear the cows, hear the church bells, and see what Wal-Mart has basically demolished — in a sense, you get to the remnants of Woody Guthrie’s message. You get to the seed of those people, and the seed that they produced. And that’s what country music was always for, to me. That was the message right there.”

During those shows, the conceptual framework for Souls’ Chapel began to emerge. “When I first put the band together, we were listening to everybody on the bus,” Stuart says. “We actually had a band school. We visited a lot of different bands we visited rock ‘n’ roll bands, and bluegrass bands, and old-time bands, and gospel quartets — and the Staple Singers were one of our bands and groups that we just got into as a group research thing. And the more I did, I realized that in Harry and Brian I had a harmony structure that would allow me to get into those kind of songs.”

Stuart had been a huge fan of the Staple Singers, and especially of guitarist/singer/songwriter Pop Staples, since seeing them play with The Band in the 1970s documentary film The Last Waltz. “I had never seen or heard the Staple Singers, and the camera panned around on the profile of this silver-haired guy with pork chop sideburns playing a rosewood Telecaster. I said, ‘Who is that guy? That may be the drop-dead coolest man I’ve ever seen in my life.’

“Well, it was the Staple Singers, and they were doing ‘The Weight’. I fell in love with them right there, but I didn’t know much more about them until the early ’90s. Don Was and Tony Brown were doing that Rhythm, Country & Blues record, and they asked me if I wanted to do a track, and I said, sure. [They asked] ‘Who with?’ And I said, the Staple Singers. So I did ‘The Weight’ with the Staples, and that’s when I fell in love with them as people. I mean, I walked in and it was like, where have you been all my life?”

“Doing this kind of album, Mississippi gospel, that was Marty’s deal,” Vaughan says. “He’s a big Staples man — Pops is his man. Just the other day, we were looking at this magazine, and there was a picture of Pops and Martin Luther King, and there was a picture of Bob Dylan. Myself, I’ve always been into him, and Marty and I are big Bob-ologists.

“But Marty pointed at Bob and said, ‘Now, that’s just a circus right there. Now this is the real thing.’ And he points at Pops and says, ‘Nobody’s touched him.’ And you know, he’s right. I saw the Staple Singers in 1969, and I didn’t even know who he was, but within 15 minutes I did, and you just knew that this guy’s got it more than anybody you’ve seen. He had that certain something, he was just one step cooler than anybody else — just one extra oomph of cool that nobody can touch.”

As the months rolled on, the album began to take shape. “At first it was just something we were doing in the back of a bus,” Stuart says, “and all of a sudden I started writing songs, and Harry and me and Kenny started writing songs, and I started finding songs, and the next thing I knew I had twelve songs that sounded real good, and it was time to make a spiritual record.”

It was nearly derailed when Stuart was arrested twice for drinking and driving. “I felt worthless,” press materials for the album quote him as saying. “How do you explain to yourself that you’re trying to live right and make a gospel record and live what you’re singing, and you’re in jail?”

Souls’ Chapel gained new life when, providentially, Yvonne and Mavis Staples came to a Fabulous Superlatives show in Chicago, the night after Stuart was released from jail (after the second arrest), and presented him with Pops Staples’ guitar.

The last piece fell into place when the group decided that, in order to get the live feel they wanted in recording, they would bring in a small group of outside musicians to handle many of the instrumental chores, rounding out the group’s sound (notably with Barry Beckett’s Hammond B-3 organ) and leaving Stinson and Glenn free to concentrate on singing. Stuart and Vaughan kept hold of their guitars, trading licks and filling in around the vocals with lines that recall a hundred classic African-American gospel records. But the focus was on the singing; even Vaughan takes a turn in front of the microphone for the chugging “Come Into The House Of The Lord”, co-written with Stuart.