MARTY STUART
AND HIS FABULOUS SUPERLATIVES
MEMORIAL HALL | FRIDAY, MARCH 7, 2025
Tickets On Sale Friday, September 13 at 10am
Cincinnati, OH (9/10/2024) – Country Music Hall of Famer, five-time Grammy Award-winner, and AMA Lifetime Achievement honoree, Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives will return to Cincinnati, OH in 2025 for a performance at Memorial Hall on Friday, March 7.
Tickets to the Longworth-Anderson Series concert go on sale to the public beginning at 10am on Friday, September 13 at MemorialHallOTR.com, or charge by phone at 513-977-8838.
Recorded in Nashville with his longtime band, The Fabulous Superlatives, Altitude, Stuart’s exhilarating new album, finds Stuart picking up where he left off on 2017’s Way Out West, exploring a cosmic country landscape populated by dreamers and drifters, misfits and angels, honky-tonk heroes and lonesome lovers. It would be easy for an artist as accomplished as Stuart to rest on his laurels at this point in his career, but Altitude instead showcases the work of a searcher with an insatiable appetite for growth and reflection, one whose ambition, much like his keen wit and rich imagination, only seems to grow with each and every release.
A Country Music Hall of Famer, five-time Grammy Award-winner, and AMA Lifetime Achievement honoree, Stuart knows a thing or two about standing the test of time. Born and raised in Philadelphia, Mississippi, he landed his first big gig in Lester Flatts’ band at the tender age of thirteen, and by twenty-one, he was working on the road and in the studio with Johnny Cash. Though Stuart built his early reputation backing up country and bluegrass royalty, it wasn’t long before Nashville recognized him as a star in his own right, and over the course of forty-plus years as a solo artist, he would go on to release more than twenty major label albums, scoring platinum sales, hit singles, and just about every honor the industry could bestow along the way.
“If country music had a president, it would be Marty Stuart,” famed documentarian Ken Burns once proclaimed. “He is the embodiment of the culture.”
Stuart emerged as an unofficial caretaker of the culture, too, spending much of his career rescuing and collecting country music artifacts from throughout the genre’s history. The first piece he picked up? Patsy Cline’s makeup kit, which he bought from a junk shop for $75. These days, Stuart, who Rolling Stone calls “one of the world’s foremost country experts and archivists,” has roughly 20,000 pieces in his collection, including a handwritten copy of Hank Williams’ “I Saw The Light” and Johnny Cash’s first black performance suit. While select items have been exhibited everywhere from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame to the Louvre, Stuart is hard at work building a dedicated arts and cultural center to preserve and display it all in his hometown of Philadelphia.
“I’m calling it The Congress of Country Music, and I want it to serve as an inspirational spot,” says Stuart, “I want it to be a touchstone where younger generations can learn about this stuff and figure out who they are and embark on their own musical journeys.”
It’s that last part that particularly excites Stuart, whose musical journey came full circle on Altitude. Written primarily on the road, the collection was inspired in large part by Stuart’s 2018 tour supporting Byrds co-founders Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman, who reunited for the 50th anniversary of their seminal Sweetheart Of The Rodeo album.
“I bought my first copy of Sweetheart Of The Rodeo for $2.99 at the discount bin in a shopping mall record store in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, and it became the blueprint for my musical life,” Stuart recalls. “Revisiting it on the road with Roger and Chris put me back under its spell all over again. I was writing songs in dressing rooms and soundchecks and on the bus, and then one day, I looked up and there was enough to make an album.”
Stuart and his band spent much of 2019 breaking in the new material live, and by 2020, they were raring to get into the studio. COVID, however, had other plans. Not wanting to lose any momentum, Stuart moved the sessions from the temporarily shuttered Capitol Studios in Hollywood, CA to East Iris Studios in Nashville, TN, where he and his bandmates were still able to perform live on the floor (albeit masked and six feet apart).
“We knew if we didn’t find a way to make the record in that moment, we might never recapture the same circle of fire around the songs we had going for us,” Stuart explains. “If we waited for COVID to pass, the album might very well have passed us by, too.”
“I like to say that the most outlaw thing you can possibly do in Nashville right now is play country music,” Stuart says with a laugh. “This album is a reminder to me, and to anyone else out there who’s interested, that there’s still a few of us left who know how to do it. This music is in our hearts.”
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ABOUT THE LONGWORTH-ANDERSON SERIES
Launched in early 2017 by the Cincinnati Memorial Hall Society, the Longworth-Anderson Series (LAS) features GRAMMY Award-winning and other nationally recognized performers and bands at beautiful, intimate Memorial Hall. This annual series showcases artists from a variety of contemporary music genres including Americana, bluegrass, blues, country, folk, gospel, hip hop, indie rock, jazz, pop, R&B, reggae, soul, and world music. Events that are part of the series provide an entire evening of entertainment including pre-concert receptions with live local music, light bites, and beer & wine tastings from popular regional restaurants, craft beer brewers, and wine distributors.
