“Connie was the act of 1970, and she was my mom’s favorite singer.”
That is how Marty Stuart starts one of his favorite stories. He told it to producer Dave Cobb on Apple Music Country’s “Southern Accents Radio,” EverythingNash reported in 2021.
This fall brought “Marty And Me,” five new songs he wrote with his old friend Vince Gill.
Marty is the Mississippi singer and mandolin player behind “Hillbilly Rock” and “Tempted.” He joined Lester Flatt’s band at 13, later played in Johnny Cash’s band and went into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2020.
Connie Smith was already a star in 1970. Her first single, “Once a Day,” went to No. 1 in 1964 and stayed there eight weeks. She joined the Grand Ole Opry the next year.
That summer, she was booked at the Choctaw Indian Fair in Philadelphia, Miss., Marty’s hometown. “I went tearing through the house, ‘Connie Smith is coming to town!'” he told Cobb.
For years, Marty said he was 12 that night. “I used to say I was 12 when I first met Connie, but Ken Burns proved to me that I was 11,” he told the Nashville Scene in 2021. Burns made the PBS series “Country Music.”
The boy had a plan. “I had my mom take me to the department store so I could get a new yellow shirt and maybe Connie would notice me,” he said.
Connie noticed the kid, all right. “I remember this little kid coming up on the stage,” she told the Nashville Scene. “I thought, ‘This kid doesn’t have a bashful bone in his body; he acts as if he already belongs up here.'”
After the show, Marty and his sister Jennifer got their picture made with Connie, and he got her autograph. Later he spotted her alone by her bus and borrowed his mother’s camera. “Miss Smith, is it OK if I take your picture?” he asked. “That was the first picture I ever made,” he told the Nashville Scene.
Then the family headed home, and Marty had something to tell his mom.
“On the way home, I told my mama that I was going to marry her,” he told The Boot.
He meant it. On July 8, 1997, Marty Stuart married Connie Smith on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. “It took 25 years to figure it out, but it worked!” he told The Boot. His math runs a little short. From the fair to the wedding was 27 years.
Marty tells the fair story himself in this clip from his official YouTube channel.
Marty tells how he met Connie at the 1970 fair
The road back to Connie ran through a recording studio. She came to his dressing room at the Grand Ole Opry, Marty told the Nashville Scene, “and said she was thinking about making a record and asked me if I would produce it.”
“There’s nothing like a good country shuffle to kick off a relationship,” he said of their first writing session. “I called it our first date.”
“It didn’t take long,” he told Cobb. “We started writing songs and here comes these love songs.”
So he went to the same woman who took him to the fair. “Mama, what do I do?” he asked. Hilda Stuart’s answer, as Marty tells it: “Five minutes of the right thing’s a whole lot better than 50 years of the wrong thing.”
Marty also talks about producing Connie’s records in this clip from his channel.
Marty talks about making records with Connie
This July, they marked 29 years of marriage. Connie turned 85 in August.
As for that first photo by the bus, “I must have put it right on her nose, because it was really close up,” Marty said, according to Saving Country Music. The boy in the yellow shirt had already made up his mind.