Quotes from Marty Stuart

My mother named me for Marty Robbins.

There was a junk store in Nashville on 8th Avenue, where I bought Patsy Cline's train case for $75.

I learned things by being in Lester Flatts' band, and I learned things by playing with Johnny Cash, and I learned from Pop Staples. I'm a sponge.

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.

To me, all music that is made under the umbrella of the United States of America is Americana music.

More than anybody in the music industry, the Staple Singers were like family to me.

I don't have many regrets in my life. But I have one. I would have stayed sober all along.

As a photographer, God's light in Southern California is something unlike I've ever seen on planet Earth. There's a beauty about it, especially in the afternoon that is so pretty.

When I started making some paychecks, I didn't invest in stocks and bonds - I invested in American culture.

I loved the Rolling Stones. I heard a little bit of country music creeping around the edges of some of their songs. Being a Mississippi kid, I could feel they had done their homework, even when I was a little boy. I could feel the Delta blues influence in a lot of their work.

One thing that I love about country music, probably more so than any other culture - maybe the blues rivals it - there are so many American folk heroes. There's the Coal Miner's Daughter, the Man in Black, the Red-Headed Stranger, and on and on.

Hillbilly Rock' was the song that opened the door and gave me a reason to get a bus and a band and cowboy clothes to go out there and figure it out in front of everybody. And the hits started coming.

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 believe in the future of country music, but a future without roots is like a kite with no string.

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.

Walking into the Ryman with Lester Flatt was the equivalent of walking into the Vatican with the pope.

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 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.

One of the people I heard early on in his career was Eric Church. I liked him and his music.

The stories in our music form a special viewpoint on the story of America in the 20th Century.