Marty Stuart Spreads The Gospel With New Album


This appeared on The Boot - November 2, 2014

Marty Stuart‘s long-awaited double gospel album, Saturday Night / Sunday Morning is finally available. The project, which he recorded with his own band, the Fabulous Superlatives, contains African-American influences, Southern Gospel sounds and everything in between.

“I went, ‘You know what? The blues and gospel music and country music and rock ‘n’ roll, it’s all the same thing down here. It is all fed by that same kind of spirit,’” he explains to CMT Edge. “So, color disappeared. It just became about the spirit.

“I simply tried to honor the songs with sonic surroundings that made sense to me, that spoke to me,” he continues. “More than any other time in my life, I think I stood upon my Mississippi musical legacy and just looked at all the different musical tributaries that flowed through Mississippi and that flowed into me when I was a kid.”

The 56-year-old says it was a natural fit for him to record an album of gospel tunes, especially considering his genre.

“If you go see Willie [Nelson] tonight, he does gospel music,” Stuart says. “And there’s something that’s always been very special to me about the kinship and relationship between country music and gospel music, especially at the audience level. Because they’re basically hard-working people who understand that way of life. They need hope. They need a promise.”

The first disc, ‘Saturday Night,’ covers “my life from 1987 to about 10 years ago … a hard-living honky-tonk musician lifestyle,” Stuart explains, while the ‘Sunday Morning’ record contains several gospel tunes and is a follow-up to his 2005 record, Souls Chapel.

By  Gayle Thompson


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