That’s what you’ll think if you spend a few hours playing through the music Stuart has made over the past 20 years of his exile from the iHeartMedia, Cumulus Media, Audacy and Townsquare Media narrowly fenced-in landscape that only lets in the under-34, overproduced and overpaid whose images get more clicks than their tunes.
Tonight at Hempstead Hall, at 7:00 p.m. you have the chance to vote with your ticket buys, your clapping hands and your stomping feet for music fairly suffused with true craftsmanship, sublime guitar-playing, sincerity, grit and heavy rocking.
Stuart, who can properly be called a curator of country music as well as one of its leading artists, is making a stop in Hope on a tour that will take him and the Fabulous Superlatives to Eureka Springs, Germantown, Winston-Salem, Roanoke Rapids, Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry and 33 cities thereafter, including New Orleans for Jazz Fest in May.
He took on a role similar to the one Shelby Foote played in The Civil War and Brandon Marsalis in Jazz of Ken Burns’ great 2019 documentary Country Music, offering his descriptions and reactions to early country songs as well as his own eyewitness view of the greats he played with. These include unquestioned notables like Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, Johnny Cash as well as his wife Connie Smith, who he saw perform at Choctaw Central High School when he was a child, made his mind up to marry her, and then did so in 1997.
Stuart had his charting heyday in the late 1980s and 90s, and like his one-time father-in-law and good friend Johnny Cash, even had his own TV show, which ran from 2008 to 2014. Although country music radio, except the oldies stations, stopped playing his new work, he kept putting out album after album that embraced the diversity of subgenres, arrangements and subject matter that has always been in country music.
His most recently released work, a live reunion of members of The Byrds that featured Stuart’s vocals and playing and included the Fabulous Superlatives as well is well worth playing, especially for Stuart’s turn on “Satisfied Mind.” The man has a golden, supple voice and a way with guitar work that launches and floats you. Check his solo on “Time Between.”
Altitude, the 2023 album by Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives, is a foray into Laurel Canyon-tinged melodic rock. The most adventurous song in the collection is “Space,” which starts off with a sitar solo in the mold of George Harrison’s contribution to the Sergeant Pepper album “Within You Without You,” then veers into The Doors territory with the singer needing to get away from hard work, needing “space to be free.” His vanishing into the woodsy forests of the West is depicted as an enfolding into mists of sitar, bass, crooning background vocals and acoustic guitarism.
Against songs like this, his early work, songs like “The Whisky Ain’t Workin’,” “Burn Me Down,” and “This One’s Gonna Hurt You” feel hookier and more concentrated but more confining, too, of Stuart’s talents as an arranger, as a creator of atmospheres.
Stuart will be taking to the stage at Hempstead Hall starting at 7:00 p.m. Tickets can still be bought at the door.