RFD-TV Show spotlights Bluegrass and Classic Country Music

By Larry Nager

A 14-year-old kid from Philadelphia, Miss., Marty Stuart found himself thrust into a bunch of new worlds after joining Lester Flatt’s Nashville Grass in 1972. One was the world of country music television. Back then, that didn’t mean multi-national corporate cable television like today’s CMT or GAC. It meant low-budget half-hour shows hosted by the likes of Porter Wagoner and the Wilburn Brothers.

Marty Stuart

“Going back to those first days with Lester, when we would do Porter’s show, I remember it was shoved into the corner of a studio at WSM,” says Stuart. They were done “on the cheap,” musicians standing on a bare linoleum floor, equipment cords running everywhere, with ramshackle rural-themed backdrops. But those $1.49 sets framed million-dollar talent, including a young Dolly Parton at the peak of her songwriting skills, along with guests from the golden age of bluegrass (Flatt, Bill Monroe, Jimmy Martin) and country music (Don Gibson, George Jones, Merle Haggard). “It was intimate, it was homespun, it was folk art, it was cultural,” Stuart recalls. “But, at the same time, it was just great country entertainment.”

Eight years ago, Stuart found himself once again glued to the TV, watching those old shows. This time it was on the Marty Stuart & the Fabulous Superlatives’ tour bus. “I saw The Porter Wagoner Show and I thought I was watching somebody’s DVD they brought from home. Then they went to commercial and I thought, ‘What am I watching?’”

It was RFD-TV, a cable channel aimed at rural America. Stuart, a fan of all things authentically country, was hooked. “I’d be on the bus after shows and say, ‘Turn back to the country channel.’ And we’d watch farm reports and FFA (Future Farmers of America) conventions, and I was thinking, ‘This man is on to something.’ He’s put his arms around a culture that’s been abandoned. And that’s the same thing that I’m doing with my music.”

RFD-TV founder and president Patrick Gottsch is a visionary former satellite dish installer from Omaha. Stuart says he set up a meeting with Gottsch. “And I said, ‘Why doesn’t somebody redo the old Porter Wagoner show? Why doesn’t somebody redo the Flatt & Scruggs show, the Wilburn Brothers show?’ There was a template that went along with those shows. And nobody at CMT or GAC or the CMA cared or understood. But, I still saw beauty in them; I still saw entertainment value. Country music, the corporate side of it, is so grand. The song and the performance—the real performances—sometimes get lost in all the grandiosity. I wanted to make a show that just walked away from all the rules that we abide by these days, and go back to what I know, what I know works.”

Gottsch didn’t need convincing. “I loved the idea from the first moment. You can tell Marty’s passion for what he wanted to do and that he had a clear idea for what he wanted to do. I’ve learned in the ten years that we’ve been operating RFD-TV, when you find talented people that are motivated and really want to do something, you give them the support they need and get out of the way.”

Cutting-Edge Traditionalism

That support will continue. RFD-TV has committed to The Marty Stuart Show for a third season. Even as the country music industry reports a 28 percent drop in sales in 2009—despite Taylor Swift’s massive success—the Marty Stuart industry is booming. He’s a cutting-edge traditionalist, his fans spanning demographics (old and young, rural and urban), drawn to his combination of deep roots and wide-open eclecticism. He has his own label, Superlatone, that releases his projects as well as his wife Connie Smith’s new albums. He recently published The Masters, a coffeetable book of the photos of country and bluegrass icons he’s been taking since his Nashville Grass days. There’s a new glossy souvenir photo book of the TV show, a throwback to the merch offered by first-generation country TV stars, which gets an additional historic spin due to the fact the pictures are by legendary Nashville photographer Les Leverett. Add to that a new four-DVD set of some of the best performances from the first season and plans to repeat that for the second season.

The numbers back up Stuart’s confidence, says RFD-TV spokesman Dan Kripke, who says The Marty Stuart Show drew 2,748,000 adult viewers in January (or almost 550,000 a week). RFD-TV’s January music programming accounted for 5,772,000 adult viewers weekly. The station has created an entire block of Saturday night music programming around that success, including new episodes of Reno’s Old-Time Music Festival, the bluegrass series hosted by Ronnie Reno.

Tune in once, and you’ll understand. The Marty Stuart Show moves faster than Stuart’s version of “Rawhide,” in a half-hour that both pays tribute to and reinvents classic country TV. It’s now in its second season (it premiered November 2008), with the first two episodes featuring living legends Earl Scruggs and Little Jimmy Dickens.

Since then, the show has featured bluegrass artists from Ralph Stanley to Dailey & Vincent, mainstream country stars such as Merle Haggard, Ray Price, and Dolly Parton, and such eclectic performers as Old Crow Medicine Show, Riders In The Sky, and the Quebe Sisters (a young western-swinging trio of harmonizing, fiddling siblings who sound like Bob Wills-meets-the Boswell Sisters).

Instead of the no-budget backdrops of old, Stuart fields what show announcer Eddie Stubbs jokes is television’s most expensive set. It looks like an explosion at the Country Music Hall of Fame; walls covered with a rhinestone rainbow of vintage stagewear by legendary country designers Nudie and Manuel, along with boots, hats, scarves, outsider art, Native American ceremonial costumes, Indian-blanketed hay bales and, of course, the vintage instruments Stuart plays, including his trademark Clarence White Telecaster, his autograph-covered F-5 and the priceless prewar Martin D-45 guitar given him by former boss (and ex-father-in-law) Johnny Cash.

The normally deadpan Eddie Stubbs, arguably the world’s most knowledgeable champion of traditional country and bluegrass, grins like a kid on Christmas as he talks about the show between tapings. “We’re all so blessed to be part of this. We know that this is something very special. We’re making history with what we’re doing,” Stubbs says. “The biggest complaint we hear is that the show is just not long enough. All of this fun is in 22 minutes. A lot of people don’t realize that. We pack a lot of music into 22 minutes worth of time.”

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