The Kate: Marty Stuart and the Fabulous Superlatives (Connecticut Public Television, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles came home from work as the Death in Paradise episode was ending on Friday, January 9 and joined me to watch an hour-long TV music program on a series called The Kate, which was something like Live at the Belly Up except it came from the other end of the country. It was filmed “live” in 2020 at the Katharine Hepburn Cultural Center in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, Hepburn’s home town, which is housed in a 300-seat theatre adjacent to the Katharine Hepburn museum. The featured performer was Marty Stuart (b. 1958), whom I’d never heard of before but Charles had because one of his previous partners was a major fan of country music and liked Stuart’s records. Stuart was born in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a town most famous for the three civil-rights workers, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney, who were murdered by local law enforcement there in 1964. Stuart had a legendary career; he started playing electric guitar at age nine. At 12 he joined a white gospel band called The Sullivans, and his parents allowed him to go on tour with them. In 1972, when he was still just 13, Roland White, a mandolinist with Lester Flatt’s bluegrass band, heard Stuart and recommended him to Flatt. Flatt hired him and Stuart recalled walking into the main theatre at the Grand Ole Opry with Flatt and being acknowledged as if he were the crown prince of bluegrass. After Flatt died in 1979 Stuart briefly wondered what he would do next. He recalled hanging out at a party with Johnny Cash, who immediately offered him a job touring with his band. (Stuart noted the irony that the only two record albums he had owned as a child rather than just borrowing from his parents’ collection were by Johnny Cash and Lester Flatt with his original partner, Earl Scruggs.) Stuart left Cash’s band in 1985 and started a career as a solo artist, signing with Cash’s label, Columbia, but after a reasonably successful first album and some singles for them, they canceled his contract. In 1989 he signed with MCA Records and made albums called Hillbilly Rock, Tempted, This One’s Gonna Hurt You, and Love and Luck. Stuart’s albums were known for using guest stars both alive (Travis Tritt, Johnny Cash, Doc Watson, Earl Scruggs) and dead, via samples (Lester Flatt, Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb).

In 2002 he formed a band called The Fabulous Superlatives, which recorded for Stuart’s own label, Superlatone. The Fabulous Superlatives have been together ever since, with just one personnel change; Stuart, his cousin Kenny Vaughan on second guitar, and Harry Stinson on drums have been there from the beginning, and the current bassist, Chris Scruggs (Earn Scruggs’s grandson), joined in 2015. Though Stuart isn’t a particularly great singer (as he’s the first to admit), he is a virtuoso guitar and mandolin player and his voice is fine for his material. The band began their hour-long set on The Kate (like Live at the Belly Up, The Kate blessedly features chyrons giving the song titles) with “Graveyard,” an instrumental that blends country with 1960’s surf music (a combination I’ve heard from at least one band on Live at the Belly Up as well). Then Stuart did one of his biggest hits, “The Whiskey Ain’t Workin’,” which he co-wrote with Travis Tritt and was originally released as a duet between them on Tritt’s album It’s All About to Change (1991). After that he did the title song from Tempted, about a man who’s tempted to stray from his marriage vows and engage in extra-relational activity. Then Stuart performed a song from his country concept album The Pilgrim called “Old Mexico,” in which he played a fugitive from justice who flees across the border because nobody wants him there. After that song he turned over the vocal reins to Kenny Vaughan, who looks vaguely like mid-period Keith Richards, who sang a song called “Country Music Got a Hold On Me” that, ironically, was the least country-sounding song on the entire show: it sounded a lot more like 1950’s rock. Then Chris Scruggs, who looked strikingly like MS NOW host Chris Hayes, sang and played a Bob Wills cover called “Brain Cloudy Blues” that was in turn largely ripped off of Kokomo Arnold’s classic “Milk Cow Blues.” (Greil Marcus, in his reprehensible book Mystery Train, tried to claim that Elvis Presley took his cover of “Milk Cow Blues” from “Brain Cloudy Blues.” This was just part of Marcus’s bizarre and racist claim that Elvis owed nothing to Black music; in fact both Wills and Elvis took the song from Arnold, and Elvis’s original release of “Milk Cow Blues” on Sun properly credited Arnold as composer.)

Then drummer Harry Stinson, who spent much of the show playing the sort of snare drum seen in marching bands which has a neck strap so you can wear it, and using brushes instead of sticks throughout, took the vocal mike for a cover of Woody Guthrie’s “Pretty Boy Floyd.” He sang some spectacularly long held notes that were thrilling in ways Guthrie’s more matter-of-fact performances weren’t. The song was Guthrie’s attempt to rehabilitate the real Pretty Boy Floyd’s reputation and turn him into a sort of Robin Hood figure, robbing banks to help poor people ruined by the Depression, and it ends with the lines, “Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen,” and, “I ain’t never seen an outlaw drive a family from their home.” I remember when I first discovered Rose Maddox, the first woman country singer to project agency and independence instead of playing either the victim or the sex toy, being pleasantly surprised that she covered Guthrie’s “Philadelphia Lawyer” at a time when virtually nobody in the country-music world went near Guthrie because of his politics, but in 2020 that political era was gone (though Donald Trump and his minions are trying to bring it back). After another country-surf instrumental, Stuart retook the vocal mike for by far the best song on the program: “Six White Horses,” written by Larry Murray in 1969 as a memorial for John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert F. Kennedy, Sr. It was originally recorded by Tommy Cash, Johnny Cash’s younger (by eight years) brother, and Stuart introduced it with a stage rap about how it showed the evil guns can wreak in the wrong hands. (Country music has generally been solidly behind an extremist interpretation of the Second Amendment, a particular chicken that came home to roost on October 1, 2017, when a 64-year-old named Stephen Paddock took a room at the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas, brought an assault weapon, and fired into the crowd attending an outdoor country music festival, killing 60 people before taking his own life. The headliner at the show had been Jason Aldean, and one of the opening acts was Maren Morris, who was so appalled at the country music community’s lack of support for common-sense gun laws she officially left the genre and re-established herself as a pop singer.)

“Six White Horses” is a great song, far better than Dion’s “Abraham, Martin, and John” (the song I remember on the same theme from the same era), and a powerful statement against America’s continuing love affair with guns and the death toll it claims every year. Anything else after that would have been an anticlimax, though the next song, “Hobo’s Prayer,” was one Stuart wrote in honor of the hobo he met as a kid on one of the many trains that pass through Philadelphia and was so impressed by he told his parents, “When I grow up, I want to be a hobo.” (He’s done so much touring as a traveling musician he said he’s achieved that ambition, in a way.) The two songs that concluded his program were “Time Don’t Wait,” a country jam, and “Angels Rock Me to Sleep,” a Christian-themed song that offered a return to Stuart’s gospel-music past. All in all, Stuart’s performance on The Kate was mightily impressive and showed off the deep soul country music is capable of at its very best.