Marty Stuart: Outside of Nashville and Into the Cosmos

Meanwhile, behind the scenes he was quietly amassing the largest known private collection of country music memorabilia in the world—which, of course, includes more than a few cowboy hats alongside rhinestone-studded Nudie suits, handwritten song lyrics, classic musical instruments, and a century’s worth of ephemera.

And despite earning bulletproof bonafides by serving as a sideman to country-music pillars Lester Flatt and Johnny Cash, tours of duty that occupied more than a dozen years and turned him from a teenage prodigy to a touted major-label artist, his interests outside of Nashville have become a large part of his musical life.

On his first full album of instrumental songs, the new 20-tune collection Space Junk, recorded with his longtime co-conspirators the Fabulous Superlatives, Stuart shows exactly why he was never fully Nashville’s guy in the first place. “In my original record collection, there were several records by the Ventures and Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass,” Stuart says of his adventurous early musical loves, both of which left a sizable sonic imprint on Space Junk.

In the ’60s, instrumental groups were common on the charts, and Floyd Cramer’s wordless 1960 hit, “Last Date” was a mainstay in Stuart’s childhood home in Philadelphia, Mississippi, alongside the bluegrass he was devouring and quickly mastering. “Instrumentals were just part of the language that I grew up listening to,” he says.