Marty Stuart
The first Nudie suits I bought were two hundred bucks.
After something has run its course, you either become a parody and keep doing it, or tear it down and know the truth about it, warts and all.
When I started making some paychecks, I didn't invest in stocks and bonds - I invested in American culture.
I don't have many regrets in my life. But I have one. I would have stayed sober all along.
One of the people I heard early on in his career was Eric Church. I liked him and his music.
Every time I hear a Garth Brooks record I tend to want to hear James Taylor.
I started out in gospel music. A lot of people don't know that I started out in gospel music, and I've never lost sight of it.
When I was 12 years old I discovered Bill Monroe and my dad got me a mandolin.
I used to watch those syndicated, black-and-white Country Music Television shows from the '60s with my dad. And all of those people that played on our television set, they just felt like family to me. And I believed in my heart, as a little kid, that I would be doing that someday and I would know all those people and we would be friends.
Growing up in Mississippi, the first song that I ever remember hearing, that captivated my mind and transported me from my bedroom out to the West, is a song called 'Don't Take Your Guns to Town' by Johnny Cash. That's when I was 5-years-old. And I played that song over and over again. I pantomimed it in school for show-and-tell.
I got to Nashville on Labor Day weekend in 1972. And the Grand Ole Opry is still there, the Country Music Hall of Fame is still there. And the roots of country music are still there. It's where the authenticity and the empowering force lies.
It's hard for a country performer to make a living in a Beatles society.
Walking into the Ryman with Lester Flatt was the equivalent of walking into the Vatican with the pope.
Country music as a genre, as an art form, is just as valid out there in the pantheon of the arts as classical, jazz, ballet, whatever.
I think the way country music is set up, we all came from a family background.
As big as the industry is now and as gargantuan and stretched out with as many buses and trucks as there are now, it is still a big old dysfunctional family in my mind.
I've always loved gospel music. Being raised in Mississippi, it was kind of part of the atmosphere down there.
I can't remember when I didn't have an instrument around.
Well, the first band was at nine, and I was on the road when I was 12 with the Sullivan Family Gospel Singers.
Like so many other people I was raised right, went crazy but I always knew God had His hand on me.
I love old-time music, I love country music and I love the American music that we have to offer the world. And any part of that is fine with me, as long as it's pure.
My main electric guitar belonged to Clarence White, the great guitarist for the Byrds.
In the middle of Mississippi, so many kinds of music came, but it was Nashville and country music that pulled my heart.
The only two jobs I ever had were with Lester Flatt and Johnny Cash.
When I was 5 years old, I got my first record. It was 'Flatt & Scruggs' Greatest Hits.' The second was 'The Fabulous Johnny Cash.'
I never claimed to be a great photographer.
I have a low-tech camera with one lens that I've shot everything in my life on. My subjects and my subject matter sometimes really are powerful, and so my job is to get it into focus.
Anybody that looks at my photography, it blows my mind because it's my last hobby.
I'm really taken by the fact that my photographs live on somebody's wall.
He is irreplaceable. Even in death I have no doubt that Johnny Cash will continue to live on as an inspiration to musicians and songwriters and all of America.
There's something cool about playing 'Tempted' and then picking up the mandolin and playing 'Dark as a Dungeon' and standing on the classics. It's nice to just let soul rule.
It is great to know that the lives and careers of country music's artists are being documented through the Hall of Fame's expert archival and curatorial resources.
The stories in our music form a special viewpoint on the story of America in the 20th Century.
Shaft' is a great country song.
Crazy Arms' is one of those songs that can get crushed beneath its own weight. It's kind of like 'Orange Blossom Special' or 'Rocky Top' or 'Crazy.' But when you go back to the original interpretation, you hear it in a new way.
American Odyssey' will be an amazing adventure inside the musical walls of our cities. It's theater, and radio has always been great theater to me.
We need all those divisions of country music, firing on all cylinders.
I haven't been to bed since 1972.
My mother named me for Marty Robbins.
If you look back into the Superlatives' body of work, we've always included instrumentals.
If you look at just right, there's not a nickel's worth of difference between what Buck Owens and the Buckaroos played on 'Buckaroo' and what the Ventures were playing. It's all that twangy instrumental stuff.
I swear, there is Capitol Studios and then there's every other studio on the planet Earth. It is the ultimate, paramount of sound in the United States of America. It is a magical place.
Some things you can never get back.
More than anybody in the music industry, the Staple Singers were like family to me.
Sun Studios was where so much of American music exploded from.
To me, all music that is made under the umbrella of the United States of America is Americana music.
My local radio station, WHOC, Philadelphia, Mississippi - '1490 on your radio dial, a thousand watts of pure pleasure' - it was a beautiful station. And I loved everything I heard. But it was country music that touched my heart.
Well, the things that country music is parodied for sometimes - trains, drinking, sin, cheating, redemption, jailhouses, rambling, hoboing, on and on, all those things - according to The New York Times, every one of those subject matters is still relevant.
Well, it's hard not to love Hank Williams!