are connie smith and marty stuart still married

#Are connie smith and marty stuart still married how to
#Are connie smith and marty stuart still married tv

And I’m sure Chet wanted me to have some Bill Anderson songs, because he was on Decca at the time, and he liked the idea of filtering some through RCA. He was just going through it because Chet (Atkins, then head of RCA Nashville) had asked him to write me some songs. And they sang me the song and asked me if I liked it, and he had started it three years prior, I think he told me, and hadn’t finished it. But the song was “Once a Day,” and he and his wife sang it to me-his wife Betty, at that time-since I was back at that park and we were both working there that day. What was he thinking back then? You were like polar opposites.Ĭonnie Smith: Yeah! With his whispering, definitely. And yet you have one of the most forceful, aggressive voices in country. Paste: It’s interesting that Whispering Bill Anderson heard you at that fair, so the story goes, and he wanted you to sing his demos. Uhh … other than feeling so lousy, that is!” “So for us to spend time together, just the two of us, was really great. “So we actually had wonderful times together, because Marty had worked almost solid for the two years prior, and I had been really busy, too,” she says.

#Are connie smith and marty stuart still married tv

Just relaxing around the house, watching TV with her significant other-with a record ready to be issued at the appropriate post-vaccine time-was a blessing in itself. So I’m plenty busy.” And that was the ultimate uplifting message she took from her long-hauling days. “And if Marty’s out very long on tour, sometimes I’ll go with him and we’ll go out each night and sing a song or two. “Plus, I’ve got lots of friends to stay in touch with, and I do the Grand Ole Opry a lot-I’m one of the hosts there,” she says. But time just flies, she says, with five kids, eight grandkids and a new grandchild that she has yet to meet, given the grave tenor of the times. Luckily, they’d wrapped Cry sessions before lockdown, she adds. He still oversees her work, even though she hasn’t released an album since 2011’s Long Line of Heartaches.

#Are connie smith and marty stuart still married how to

She’s also grateful for a long line of influential mentors, like Bill Anderson (who discovered her in 1963, when she won a talent contest at Frontier Ranch Country Music Park in Columbus, Ohio), Chet Atkins, Bob Ferguson (the producer who understood how to accent her bluesy trill), Weldon Myrick (the steel guitar player who helped create her sound) and Stuart, who helped revive her career at Warner Brothers and then married her in 1997. With youthful zeal, she storms through retro-clever co-writes with her husband (“Spare Me No Truth,” “Here Comes My Baby Back Again”) and covers of twangy cuts by Mel Tillis (“All the Time”), Merle Haggard (“Jesus Take a Hold”) and Dallas Frazier (“I Just Don’t Believe Me Anymore,” her 72nd catalog contribution from the songwriting titan).

To begin with, at 80, this Country Music Hall of Famer’s brassy powerhouse of a voice-first heard on her forlorn 1964 “Once a Day” debut single, and one of the most unique in Nashville-remains undiminished on Cry. And she has quite a few to be thankful for, all told. “I’m hanging in there, and I made it! That’s the really good thing,” she chirps, counting her blessings. I’m still in the long haulers’ clinic at Vanderbilt, where they’re still working on me.” It’s not the easiest way to start an interview about the singer’s latest Stuart-produced release, The Cry of the Heart, but she quickly brightens. “He and I both got it at the same time, but I wound up in the hospital for 11 days, and I’m still recovering from that.

And her case-as intimated by this deceptively-friendly new name-did not immediately resolve itself. “I’m one of the long-haulers,” sighs Connie Smith, one of country’s reigning queens, who-along with her equally royal tunesmith husband Marty Stuart-somehow contracted the dreaded coronavirus in January of this year.

In classic Music Row parlance, a “long-hauler” might once have designated a lonesome, sleep-deprived truck driver, doggedly driving cross-country with nothing in his cab for comfort but Red Sovine on the 8-track.