Chris Scruggs is here with me, and he brings to mind that it was meant to be tuned up to G. I have it in my hand as we speak, and it’s in standard tuning. My grandpa Stuart was a scratchy old-time Mississippi fiddle player, and my dad loved the sound of the mandolin, so it kind of became a thing Marty Stuart She’s pictured playing it on the cover of her album, If It Ain't Love and Other Great Dallas Frazier Songs. Connie bought it on tour in the early ’60s because Marty Robbins played one, and she liked carrying it along with her in the backseat of the car. It’s a 1953 Martin 5/18 that belongs to my wife, Connie Smith. What’s that little Martin you’re holding in Country Music at the start of episode seven? Stuart and the Fabulous Superlatives perform “Songs That Tell a Story” during his artist-in-residency at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, September 25, 2019. Then he had a D-18, but Lester’s main guitar down through the years was a D-28 that I actually owned and donated to the Country Music Hall of Fame for the Precious Jewels exhibit. But I promise you this: If Lester quit playing, a hole about the size of Oregon appeared in the band.įor a while he played the company guitar, which was Monroe’s herringbone. He played what I call “invisible rhythm” because it was overshadowed by all the lead playing going on between Earl, Uncle Josh and Paul Warren.
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He was a fingerpicker who used a thumb pick, so that set the stage for the whole Monroe sound. Clyde Moody preceded Lester on guitar in the Blue Grass Boys, and both were students of the Charlie Monroe school of guitar. The Monroe brothers with Charlie on guitar had set the sound before Bill went out on his own. Can you share some insights on the importance of Flatt’s guitar? Your career starts with Lester Flatt, who was the seminal guitar player in Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys before he broke away with banjo star Earl Scruggs. As Gene Autry once told me, “I wasn’t the best cowboy actor or cowboy singer, but I was pretty much the first, and the rest of it don’t matter.” Monroe has a similar claim.
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Players with perhaps more technical prowess have come and gone. Gene Autry once told me, 'I wasn’t the best cowboy actor or cowboy singer, but I was pretty much the first, and the rest of it don’t matter' Marty Stuart I may or may not have mentioned it in the film, but I believe Bill Monroe achieved that. Monroe put more of a fiddle tune aspect to it, and he revved it up.Ī lot of people have come through the gates of Nashville with hit songs and sounds, but hardly anyone had such a distinct brand that it developed into a new genre, a tributary off the mainstream of country music that has gone on to become kind of a national language. Until that point, the mandolin was associated with either an Italian Renaissance style played on a belly-back mandolin, or as part of a mandolin orchestra, which was kind of the rage in some regions of the nation during the early 20th century. Can you explain what Monroe did on mandolin that was so revolutionary?