Among the highlights from this year’s Bristol Rhythm & Roots Reunion were the Friday night set by The Mavericks and the Sunday afternoon set by Marty Stuart & the Fabulous Superlatives. Both acts have developed live shows more impressive than those during their hitmaking days in the last century. It’s those hits the fans still want to hear, however, and both groups obliged, but they transformed the old material with arrangements more muscular and virtuosic than those on the records.
“They opened my eyes to the notion that there was more to country music than just the Nashville formula, this vanilla, generic thing, more mediocrity than you could stomach. In the mid ’80s, when all those guys emerged, people were hungering for something different. I was hungering for something different. Music Row didn’t invite them in but took a lot of their ideas and turned it into a new formula thing.
“Tony always encouraged me,” Stuart remembers, “and even when my deal with Columbia Records fell apart, he kept coming around. He said, ‘Okay, it’s time for you to be a star.’ He hooked me up with Kostas and Emmylou Harris’s husband Paul Kennerley to write some songs. Paul called me and said, ‘I have a song I was going to give to the Judds, but after working with you, I think it belongs to you.’ I didn’t think so, but Tony did, and sometimes you have to rely on outside perspectives.
The same romanticism suffused a version of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” and such Malo originals as “There Goes My Heart,” “Dance in the Moonlight” and “Back in Your Arms Again.” Filling out the sound of the basic quartet were three horn players and button accordionist Percy Cardona. At times, it almost sounded like a big band that might have backed Sinatra in Havana.
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