With His Impressive Collection of Guitars Previously Owned by Music Legends, Marty Stuart is Keeping Country's Rich Tradition Alive
 Marty Stuart's new double-album set, 'Saturday Night/Sunday Morning,' touches on the age-old tension between sin and salvation that lies at the very heart of country music. 'Saturday Night' is a rip-roarin,' hell-raisin,' honky-tonk romp packed with loving renditions of country classics by artists like Hank Williams, George Jones, and the Statler Brothers as well as Stuart's own flawlessly timeless, traditional compositions. 'Sunday Morning,' on the other hand, pays rousing homage to the plangent vocal harmonies and sanctified spirit that resides on the gospel side of country music's deep, wide river of song.
"It's a razor-thin line," Stuart says of the boundary between country's honky-tonk and gospel borders. "Country music has always shared a unique relationship with gospel. You can be falling off the stage drunk, and at some point all you have to do is take your hat off and start singing 'Will the Circle Be Unbroken,' and everybody else sings too. Doing that goes back a long way, and I'm right in the center of that."
Many of the songs on the album were originally written by Stuart as material for him and his ace band, the Fabulous Superlatives, to perform on 'The Marty Stuart Show,' his weekly country-music television program on RFD-TV.
"When I started the series," he says, "it became a kind of Saturday-night theater to stage traditional country music in the 21st century. And it wasn't just about preserving the music; it was about furthering it. Every new song that came through sounded like it could have been recorded 40 years ago. We want to see that the music is alive and well today and handed off to the next generation of people who think this way—great young artists like the Old Crow Medicine Show, Brandy Clark, and little Emi Sunshine, who is just nine years old and a killer. These are tradition-minded people."
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