Marty Stuart: The forgotten mandolin artist that Johnny Cash called a “great guitar player”
There are a few things that we, as music fans, often misinterpret, and one of them is the guitar player.
When we talk about great guitar players, we often talk about those who do what six-stringed aficionados call ‘shredding’. This essentially means that they are playing music which is beyond comprehension. They play at a speed, at a high rate, and with such emotion that it becomes impossible for onlookers to understand how they have managed to achieve the sound they have.
One such musician is Eddie Van Halen. Eddie was able to take the guitar and invent a new form of playing that in some way made him different from other musicians around. The days of merely plucking and strumming were done; Eddie introduced a new approach, one that advanced the speed at which people were able to perform, with the ability to keep melody as clear as day.
Tony Iommi once complimented Eddie’s guitar-playing style because of how much it opened up the instrument and what it was capable of. “I just don’t know how he could play like that,” said Iommi. “Nobody can play like him.”
There is no escaping the fact that guitarists like Eddie Van Halen are deeply talented, but it does seem to have obscured what people refer to as good and bad guitar players. Listeners desperately pine for fast-fingered fret threaders and overlook any other style of playing. This doesn’t seem right, as just because a guitarist isn’t dancing up and down the fretboard doesn’t mean they’re playing something bad.
Plenty of guitarists who operate in the worlds of folk and country are phenomenal guitarists, but they don’t get recognised as such because their style of playing is much more subtle. Joni Mitchell, for instance, is arguably one of the greatest guitar players on the planet, as the way she tunes her guitar and the different rhythms she adopts when playing are completely unfounded. However, because her style isn’t as in your face, she doesn’t get the credit she deserves.
“When I play guitar, I hear it as an orchestra,” said Mitchell. “The top three strings being the horn section, the bottom three being cello, viola, and bass – the bass being indicated but not rooted.” It was her own personal vision for her instrument that made her such a great talent, but not as many talk about it.
Johnny Cash had an equally good guitarist, Marty Stuart. Stuart was a mandolin player before he was a guitarist, and his experience elsewhere seemed to bleed into his guitar playing. It allowed him to operate on a completely different level, implementing different kinds of rhythm and playing techniques into his work, all of which gave Cash’s music a different feel to it when compared to other country songs. Cash said in an interview he feels as though Stuart is often overlooked, given he is one of the best musicians he’s ever worked with.
“He’s really good. He’s one of the best. He did a great job, and we had a lot of fun together,” said Cash when talking about his former guitarist. “He worked with me a long time. I really liked his playing. He’s a good all-around musician. His instrument is the mandolin, but he’s a great guitar player. He’s better than he thinks he is, and he thinks he’s pretty good.”
