Album Review: Marty Stuart – Ghost Train: The Studio B Sessions

In the liner notes for his new album, Marty Stuart beautifully describes a moving, virtually spiritual experience during Hurricane Katrina, when a train roared past where he stood, five miles outside of his southern boyhood home. “Every place I’ve ever been, most everything I’d ever done and seen seemed to have been ripped from inside of me and hauled off on a northbound, backwoods Mississippi ghost train.” It was his epiphany, when he knew that he was ready to write again, and “it was long past time to play some hard-hitting country music.” Thus was born the idea for his latest project, Ghost Train: The Studio B Sessions, on Sugar Hill Records–his first on the label since Busy Bee Café in 1982. And with traditional country music teetering on the precipice of extinction, Stuart–ever the music preservationist–feels even more so that the timing of this record is right: “It’s the music I most cherish…It’s too precious to let slip away.”

RCA’s Studio B in Nashville is hallowed ground, where so many legendary country greats laid down their tracks over the years. Now a museum, Stuart got special permission to record in the room–with its sought-after sonic warmth–where he first recorded when he performed with Lester Flatts at age 13. Choosing to make his record there graces the project with an historical authenticity that could be found nowhere else. His respectful reverence for those musicians that went before him is apparent, yet Ghost Train is not a hopeless re-hash of the past. Stuart’s twang-less vocals, coupled with the album’s energy, give a contemporary edge to his take on tradition. He’s Manuel and Nudie suits, but his hairstyle is all modern–gelled and spiked.

Stuart’s band, The Fabulous Superlatives, and guest performers like steel player-extraordinaire Ralph Mooney, add authentic seasoning throughout, helping to make the album work as a whole, durable quilt, as opposed to mismatched swatches of fabric loosely stitched together. The broader statement made by the master of vintage sound is, “honor thy roots music.”

Of the 14 tracks, clearly more than half are stand-out confections. A cover of the classic, “Country Boy Rock & Roll” features priceless, high-speed picking by both Stuart and Kenny Vaughn. “Hummingbyrd” is an original Stuart instrumental tribute to guitarist Clarence White, where he performs on White’s own B-Bender guitar. The nearly acoustic “Hard Working Man” is underscored by a most topical lyric: “What will become of the working man/With honest sweat on his brow/Is the nation that raised him to build it/Gonna turn its back on him now.”

All the ballads are co-written by Stuart with wife Connie Smith, who thankfully joins him in the duet, “I Run to You,” produced with a string arrangement and a sweet, music-box guitar outro. A Red Sovine-style original recitation song by Stuart, “Porter Wagoner’s Grave,” is a piece of theatre, and songs like “Little Heartbreaker” glisten with Mooney’s silvery, steel guitar stylings.

A starkly, stunning piece is “Hangman.” There’s no fancy guitar work or shimmer of rhinestone glitz; it’s simply a restrained delivery and production, allowing Stuart’s vocal to have the spotlight, and telling the story of a prison executioner’s tortured soul. The fact that it’s co-written with Johnny Cash, and is the last song ever written by the Man in Black, who died four days later, just adds to the solemn importance of the piece. This co-write meeting was the last time Stuart saw his one-time father-in-law and friend. And he sings the lyric with the dignity of a last performance: “I killed another man today/It’s hard to believe/Well I lost count at thirty–and I’ve grown too numb to grieve/The bottle helps me cope when I lay down at night/And when the dope rolls through my veins it all fades out of sight.”

It’s conceivable that Stuart recorded a bunch more, and had a hard time culling the pack. Determined to have a little bit of everything in an album, he’s got it covered, from Bakersfield to the Delta, from classic covers to newly-penned material, from iconic themes about trains and prison to blue collar workers. One less ballad with the lyric phrase “hard to bear” could have been managed; but being the musicologist that he is, he strives to put in one record an honest slice of his own traditional country for the annals of American music history–and he delivers.