Cash is Stuart’s duet partner on three of the album’s tracks, predictably stealing the show with his distinctive baritone. The album was a perfect mirror of his life as a performer to that point, chock full of the kinds of legends he’d spent the first decade of his career learning from and playing alongside. “My original goal in life was inspired by what I witnessed at the Busy Bee.” Since, it’s become a mixed-use apartment building called the Busy Bee Suites - a piece of the redevelopment Stuart has been working to spark in Philadelphia, in part through the ongoing construction of a museum called the Marty Stuart Congress of Country Music, meant to house his vast personal collection. “The Busy Bee Cafe was the first place I heard rhythm and blues, saw people dancing to live music, and witnessed musicians dressed in their snappy outfits with personal style,” he said later, citing renditions of Tommy Tucker’s “Hi-Heel Sneakers” as especially memorable. The release was named, ironically (or not) enough for a blues venue in Stuart’s hometown that he remembers frequenting when he was young. While backing Cash, Stuart recorded Busy Bee Cafe - finally enough of a name on his own to garner a Billboard review of the album (though still with little of the attendant commercial appeal one might expect). In 1980, Johnny Cash recruited Stuart to join his backing band the Tennessee Three, initiating a creative relationship that would last the rest of Cash’s life - in spite of the fact that Stuart married and divorced Cash’s daughter Cindy in the interim. He played with Vassar Clements and Doc Watson while picking up session work piecemeal before an even bigger break came. Those performances helped put him on the radar of other greats of the genre much more than his recorded debut as a bandleader, an eclectic 1978 collection of covers called Marty (With A Little Help From My Friends), released by a small Fort Worth-based bluegrass label called Ridge Runner Records. On stages with men decades older than himself, Stuart played with ease and an almost smirking confidence - intoning harmonies in his still-boyish voice on The Porter Wagoner Show, or taking an otherworldly solo on some similar variety hour. There are a number of video clips from this period, disarming both for the fact that such staunchly old-time music (“Keep the drums out,” Flatt reportedly told his bandmates on his deathbed) had a place on national television, and for Stuart’s flawless, effortless, rapid-fire picking. Stuart played in Flatt’s band, The Nashville Grass, for the final years of the legend’s career, and briefly led the ensemble after Flatt’s passing in 1979. A year later, he was accompanying none other than perhaps bluegrass’s biggest name, Lester Flatt, after a chance encounter with his mandolin player. Originally from Philadelphia, Mississippi, a small town near the state’s center, Stuart learned guitar and mandolin young and, two years after a transformative experience seeing Bill Monroe live, was a professional at 12, playing alongside venerable gospel-bluegrass ensemble The Sullivans. The folksy release falls in line with a persistent strain of traditionalism even more than it does the commerce-minded revivals of Strait and Skaggs - a strain that endures today, fueled in part by inspiring performances like those captured on this album. Far from being an appetizer to Stuart’s eventual commercial success, Busy Bee instead showcases his deep reverence for his musical forebears, radio playability be damned. On 1982’s Busy Bee Cafe, widely received as Stuart’s debut despite technically being his second release, the singer and mandolin player flaunted his real country bona fides via both his prodigious picking and the gaudy talent among the album’s personnel - earned in the course of a career that had already, apocryphally, lasted a decade in spite of the fact that Stuart was just 24 years old when the album was released. But rather than start a trend, it seemed more like those artists tapped a latent current that was there all along - creating new opportunities for younger musicians who had been honing their skills at honky-tonks and obscure festivals all along. The release of George Strait’s Strait Country, John Anderson’s pair of self-titled albums and Ricky Skaggs’ Waitin’ for the Sun to Shine, as well as the emergence of Reba McEntire, helped encourage revivalist tendencies in 1981. The early 1980s were one of those moments when the pendulum started to swing back toward the acoustic and the vintage, a reaction to the glories and failures of disco country and Hollywood’s brief love affair with country music and culture (films like Urban Cowboy, 9 to 5, Honeysuckle Rose, etc.).
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