Marty Stuart finds redemption on ‘Soul’s Chapel’
|
Will people think it disingenuous of him to release a collection of spiritual songs a year after being charged with his second DUI?
“I watched Johnny Cash go through the same thing,” says Stuart, who was married to Cash’s daughter Cindy and played in Cash’s band during the 1980s. “Where better for people like me and Johnny Cash to get our lives right than in the church house?
“I had two DUIs. But thanks to the church I had another chance to get it right. Some of my greatest Bible heroes were incredible knuckleheads. If you don’t believe it, check in on David, check in on the apostle Paul. You can start there.”
He pauses a moment, nods and asks, “Fair enough?”
Fair enough.
Stuart’s new album “Souls’ Chapel” is an ambitious, inspiring piece of work. Don’t look for yet another reading of “I’ll Fly Away” or “Amazing Grace”; these 12 songs are an amalgamation of black gospel, Delta blues, country and early rock n’ roll. The vocals, at times a lush four-part harmony, rise in sudden swells, the electric guitars echo swampy and dark.
“It’s all about dynamics,” says Stuart, whose disheveled pile of dark, graying hair rivals Lyle Lovett’s for the most distinctive ‘do in country music. “When the vocals go up, the music comes down. When the vocals aren’t there, the music comes up.
“I caught the dynamics one day in a visit to Preservation Hall in New Orleans. There were no microphones, but you could hear every note played. I said ‘Someday I’m going to apply that to a record.’ Ten years later I found a place to do it.”
Stuart, 46, says the sound is largely a reconstruction of what he remembers hearing in the piney flats around Philadelphia, Miss., when he was a kid.
Half the tunes are covers, two of them — “Somebody Saved Me” and “Move Along Train” — are by fellow Mississippian Roebuck “Pops” Staples of the Staple Singers.
“Everybody equates me with Lester Flatt or Johnny Cash,” says Stuart, who began playing in Flatt’s bluegrass band when he was only 13. “But Pops Staples was one of the most meaningful, inspirational mentors I ever had. We were very close. I was a pallbearer at his funeral.
“I thought that hands down he was the coolest human being I’d ever seen. I’ve been around them all, and Pops had more cool factor than James Dean, Bob Dylan, Marlon Brando and Johnny Cash all wrapped into one.”
Staples’ daughter Mavis adds her soulful voice to the slow, bluesy groove “Move Along Train.” But it’s the six other songs on “Souls’ Chapel” that show Stuart’s grasp of the idiom. He wrote or co-wrote all of them, and they blend seamlessly with the standards. Stuart and his Fabulous Superlatives — drummer Harry Stinson, bassist Brian Glenn, and guitarist Kenny Vaughan — worked them up on the road and began including them in their shows.
“We were booked to play in my church one morning, and I said, ‘Let’s do two or three of these songs and see how they work.’ Somebody sang ‘How Great Thou Art’ and ‘Let Us Ever Walk with Jesus’ and then we got up and sang a couple of these and they felt like they all came from the same book,” he says.
The album closes with the title track, a moody, atmospheric instrumental that recalls the early rumblings of rock ‘n’ roll in Memphis.
Stuart’s musical pedigree, one of the most extraordinary in Nashville, has enabled him to explore many different American musical styles with an air of authenticity. Besides Cash and Flatt, he’s worked with folk great Doc Watson and gospel group the Sullivans. He’s done sessions with everyone from George Jones and Merle Haggard to Neil Young and B.B King.
As a solo act, he’s had a half dozen Top 10 hits, including “Hillbilly Rock” and “The Whiskey Ain’t Workin'” with Travis Tritt. But he hasn’t had one in several years, and Stuart seems satisfied that — as a solo artist at least — his hitmaking days are probably over.
“It’s like a pardon artistically,” he says. “I see so many people still scrambling to re-achieve what they might have had 10 years ago and that just doesn’t appeal to me. It’s about evolution.”
“Souls’ Chapel” is the first in a trilogy of albums he’s releasing on his new Superlatone Records imprint with Universal South. The others are a bluegrass record and a tribute to native American culture called “Badlands.” The latter is co-produced by Cash’s only son, John Carter Cash, and scheduled for a January or February release.
Stuart, who’s also an avid photographer and memorabilia collector, says he’s been looking to jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald for inspiration.
“There was a point in her career when she just kind of set two bookends down and filled it up with the American songbook — ‘Ella sings Hoagy Carmichael’ or ‘Ella does swing,'” Stuart says. “I always knew that at the end of the country music bubble … I thought ‘Man, if I could just get around to making a gospel record, an Indian record and coal mining record, and a cowboy record and a mariners record, I’d have something to be proud of.'”