Marty Stuart and Connie Smith join Dave Cobb on Southern Accents Radio for an interview to talk about Connie’s new album ‘The Cry of the Heart,’ recorded at RCA Studio B in Nashville, TN. They also talk about how they met, their inspirations over the years, and their love for the traditional Nashville country sound. Tune in and listen to the episode in-full on-demand here.
Connie Smith on switching over to RCA Studio A and loving Studio B
Marty: The first session I ever worked in this town was at Studio B… It was just kind of home. And then as you know, the story when RCA stepped it up and responded to New York by coming up with this place. Tell Dave your first experience here. Come on.
Connie: Well, I cried. Yeah. I love studio B. It was small and I could sing and I could kind of gauge how my voice was going by the walls. It would come back to you. It was just the sound that was easier for me to control. And then when we got here, it felt so big that you would sing it and it would just dissipate, go on out there and stay. Where the other one, I could kind of control it better.
Marty: So you cried?
Connie: Yeah. Cause I didn’t want to be here.
Marty: In this room or out in your car?
Connie: No. Actually, when I found out I had to go to to Studio A.
Dave: Did you not have a choice in that?
Connie: No.
Dave: You’re like, “Okay, you’re going to be a studio A this day, you had no choice in it.”
Connie: Right.
Connie Smith on wanting to stay country and traditional over the years
Dave: It must’ve been interesting trying to all of a sudden you’re in the sixties, in the Nashville sound and everything starts to change. When did that change happen?
Connie: I don’t know really what brought about the change. I do believe Anita Kerr was from California as well. She brought that. That was the greatest vocal group that you could have. I think that it started for sure by the seventies, but even when not long after I got here, they kept wanting me to Middle of the Road was before the Nashville sound. And they wanted me to do this Middle of the Road, and I said, “No, I don’t want to.” “Well, you can do more than country.” I said, “I don’t want to do more than country.” So it was a pretty constant fight with me because I wanted to stay the traditional, which I still am. Because that’s who I am. That’s what I am. And I think I do my best there.
Marty Stuart on producing Connie’s new album in RCA Studio B
Dave: Marty produced your new album, which is kind of a nod back to where you started in a lot of ways with the Nashville sound. Talk about making that record and why the record has this sound and this vibe. What brought you to the place of making a new album?
Marty: The love of studio B. You hit it on the head a few minutes ago when you said “It sounded like it came down from the sky.” Of all the records that’s ever been made in this town, when one of those classic country recordings, early Charley Pride records, that Cowboy Jack Clement produced with that nucleus of guys in that $30,000 cinder block building that has no reason to sound the way it does. But when that combination of people, the tubes, the microphones, the times, and the songs and the singers and the personalities, the making of folk heroes, but right in front of the microphone. I fell in love with that 10 years ago. I met Carlene our engineer, we made a case study of Studio B. I had this suspicion that if you; right song, right singer, right band, that place would come alive, like throwing a match on dry wood. That’s what happened. We went down in and we studied Studio B, the records, and we made a record called ‘Studio B,’ the ‘Ghost Train’ sessions. One of the songs on there was a duet that Connie and I wrote called “I run to you” and I thought, “I want to hear her voice in this place again.” It happened, she came in there and the walls just woke up and the sky lit up, and I thought, “there’s the sound.” About working with Connie, the more I worked her… I had 156 episodes of a TV show to help figure this out, the more I thought she has never changed. Her heart of hearts is what it was in 1960s, 6, 7, 8, 9, whatever. And that really means Pig Robbins, a high third guitar, a lot of steel guitar, the right kind of reverb, a Norman microphone and stick it in the middle of Studio B and let’s see what happens. That was the formula. When I went back to the roadmap, found the right songs, Dallas Frazier is a big part of this.
Connie Smith and Marty Stuart on “A Million and One”
Connie: We had, as Marty said, we did six years of shows, and we did 26 shows a year and we just got to where it was just singing songs. Marty wrote a bunch of the songs on the show five minutes before he formed them part of the time. But I started singing. I always wanted to sing this song and I always wanted to sing this song. And I started just singing songs that I’d always wanted to sing. And I’ve always loved that Billy Walker record of “A “Million and One” and that’s why we did it. And we did it on the TV show. And you can tell him the rest of it.]
Marty: Pig Robbins was on the floor, we had strings on the floor. And we really went by the map of the old arrangement. And as we were in the middle of the song, I was breathing going, “Nobody mess up because it’s perfect.” And at the end of the performance, I walked shaking my head. At the end of the day, I walked by the [control room] and said, “Give me a copy of that.” And I listened to it and it was a perfect record except for the applause from the audience. So we took the applause out. So what you’re listing to is an on the floor performance from that TV show, we didn’t touch a thing.
Connie Smith on when she first met Marty Stuart
I met him when he was 11. When I went down, Bob Ferguson, my producer, married a Choctaw Indian lady. Just wonderful dear friend of ours to this day. And he went down there and he would help them. They’d had a Choctaw Indian fair every year in Philadelphia, Mississippi where Marty’s from. And so one year Bob asked me, he had the artists that he recorded asked him to come down and it was me and Weldon and Jerry Shook and Pig, just the whole bunch. We went down and did the show. And I remember this kid coming up on stage talking to Weldon about his steel and different things. And I thought, “He’s talking like an adult like he’s been in the business for years.” And that really surprised me. And that’s what I remember in meeting him. And he’s got a different story.
Marty Stuart on meeting and marrying Connie Smith
Marty: Connie was the act of 1970 and she was my mom’s favorite singer. And I went tearing through the house, “Connie Smith is coming to town.” And at the end of the concert, my sister, Jennifer and I, we got our picture made with Connie, I got her autograph, I met some of the guys in the band and all the way home and told my mom I was going to marry Connie Smith some day.
Connie: He told me about 25 years later.
Marty: And what was really funny about that when we got back together, it was really the right songs. Our first unofficial official date, I guess we wrote a shuffle with Harlan Howard.
Connie: Yeah. It wasn’t really a date, it was a songwriting session.
Dave: He said it was a date, you said it was a songwriting session.
Marty: Songwriting date. But it didn’t take long. We started writing songs and here comes these love songs and hearing Connie Smith sing them was like, “Oh my God,” my heart started flipping out and I couldn’t believe it, no. I wrote down the pros and cons on a piece of paper. It just looked ridiculous on paper. But I finally did what I ultimately have done many times in my life, gone to my greatest consultant who’s my mama Hilda Stuart. And I said, “Mama, what do I do?”
Dave: What was her advice?
Connie: 17 years difference.
Marty: And she didn’t ask me for a few minutes. And she says, “Well, five minutes of the right thing’s a whole lot better than 50 years of the wrong thing.”
Dave: And how have you not written that song yet?
Connie: We just celebrated our 24th wedding anniversary.
Dave: Congratulations, that is amazing!
