By Chuck Shuford

Marty Stuart Beats It Back to the Dirt Road

editor — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 09:14:47 -0700

Busy Bee Cafe (1982) -- Marty Stuart and a legion of country music legends
Photo: Amazon.com/Japan

Marty Stuart is a Renaissance good old boy. Most people know him as a country music performer with one platinum and five gold records and four Grammy awards. He’s that but a lot more. He’s also a producer, a writer, and accomplished photographer, and he's an historian and archivist of country music, with the largest private collection of country music memorabilia in existence. For my money, Marty Stuart is essentially a storyteller – an interpreter of life as he experiences it – and he uses all of the tools available to him to tell the story.

Stuart is a native of Philadelphia, Mississippi, a town best known for events during the civil rights struggles (incidents that its people, we imagine, would rather forget). Stuart was such a close friend of gospel/blues/r&b legend Pops Staples that when Pops died, his daughter Mavis gave Stuart Pops’ guitar. Another close friend was his ex father-in-law Johnny Cash, whom he honored with an album that may be the best tribute recording ever made (Kindred Spirits: A Tribute to the Music of Johnny Cash).

Stuart once initiated a booking on the WDVX Blue Plate Special, a live radio broadcast from Knoxville, with his band the Fabulous Superlatives. Curious as to what appeal a low-power radio station and a small audience might hold for a performer of Stuart's stature, the Yonder arranged for a phone interview. When asked how he had first heard about WDVX, Stuart said that it “came across the hillbilly grapevine that there was this station playing really cool music” in Knoxville. The station and the idea of the the Blue Plate Special were especially appealing to Stuart because he appreciates Knoxville’s vital role in country music history – a role that he believes is largely overlooked.

On WDVX, the Barndance Comes to Town

editor — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 08:54:50 -0700

Marty Stuart (second from right) plays with the Fabulous Superlatives on WDVX's Blue Plate Special, a live radio broadcast performed before a live audience in Knoxville
Photo: Jack Goodwin for the Boston Globe

A culture cannot be kept alive under a piece of glass in a museum
Dewey Balfa

Every weekday from noon until 1 PM a feisty, low-power, listener-supported radio station in downtown Knoxville, Tennessee, broadcasts and streams on the web a live music show before a live audience. The Blue Plate Special is produced at WDVX, which the Oxford American magazine has called “probably the best radio station in the world.” While that effusive endorsement may be open to debate, the creativity and passion of the people behind the station -- and the allegiance of its fans around the world -- are not. (With all four of the WDVX frequencies locked in to my truck's radio so that I can always drive within listening range, I'm completely partial.)

The format of live music before a live audience hearkens to a time when radio connected rural communities to the nation and helped develop what we now call country music. Before the advent of television when almost half the country was rural, Saturday night “barndances” were common on many of the 50,000 watt clear channel radio stations. In addition to WSM’s Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, weekly hillbilly/country shows were broadcast in Chicago, Atlanta, Charlotte, Fort Worth, Louisville, Richmond, Shreveport, Knoxville, and Wheeling, WV. The Opry is the only one still broadcasting. Locally, to revive live radio music before a live audience after a 50-year absence is significant for all east Tennessee, because Knoxville radio played such a sizeable role in finding and developing early country performers.

Tom Dula: The Murder That Sold 10,000 Guitars

editor — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 09:19:43 -0700

Tom Dooley's tale goes on haunting, even in French
Image: Courtesy of Steve Hill

In June 1865 a Confederate soldier just shy of his 21st birthday was released from a Union prison camp and began traveling back home to Reedy Branch, in mountainous Wilkes County, North Carolina. He probably thought himself mighty lucky to have survived since his only two brothers lost their lives to the war. Had he known what would transpire in three short years after he arrived back in the mountains, he would likely have chosen his brothers’ fate. It would have spared his neighbors a tragedy and been a nobler death for him.

May 1st marks the 140th anniversary of the hanging of Tom Dula for the murder of Laura Foster. Because of a ballad about this young man’s death, a song kept alive in the North Carolina mountains, the nation carries the event in its collective memory almost a century and a half later. That song, as recorded 90 years after the hanging by a little known folk group named the Kingston Trio, had an impact on American popular culture far beyond what the story alone -- or most any other story -- could have produced.

I tell this story having grown up in Statesville, N.C., where Tom was tried and hanged because it’s the biggest thing ever to happen there. It’s difficult to separate fact from myth 140 years out, but through the research of Dula historian John Foster West, court records, and witness testimonies, we have a pretty good grasp of the basic facts. Keep in mind, however, that good storytellers never let facts interfere with a true story, so there are many versions and discrepancies in the telling. To my mind, it’s the stories that mix historical fact and imagination that are most compelling and best illuminate the human condition.

What Happened to Poor Man's Pâté

editor — Tue, 6 Nov 2007 13:42:15 -0800

Now frying, the breakfast specialty of North Carolina's mill towns
Photo: Chuck Shuford

Everything in a pig is good. What ingratitude has permitted his name to become a term of opprobrium? Grimod de la Reynière (1758-1838)

Livermush. There, I’ve said it. As repugnant an appellation as that is, it’s about as accurate a description as can be packed into one word to describe this geographically challenged working class food. Unless you’ve lived in North Carolina at some point in your life, it’s unlikely you’ve ever heard of it, much less tasted it. The livermush story begins in the mid 1700’s when available land in the upper colonies grew scarce and German farmers, including my ancestors, hit the Great Wagon Road which ran down Virginia's Shenandoah Valley into the western Piedmont of North Carolina. They brought with them a type of pork mush made from hog scraps called scrapple that is still found in the mid Atlantic states. For the uninitiated, scrapple is a mixture of leftover meat parts and flour (frequently buckwheat flour) cooked in a meat stock until it thickens. It is then allowed to set and made into a loaf, like polenta. I grew up eating the better tasting, but unappetizingly named, descendant of that food.

What Happened to Poor Man's Pate?

editor — Tue, 9 Oct 2007 16:30:36 -0700

Now frying, the breakfast specialty of North Carolina's mill towns
Photo: Chuck Shuford

Everything in a pig is good. What ingratitude has permitted his name to become a term of opprobrium? Grimod de la Reynière (1758-1838)