Marty’s biggest connection to the West Coast scene is of course Clarence… Cut at Mike Campbell’s studio in California, the album is an eclectic celebration of Stuart’s love of the American West and its unique flavours of Bakersfield country and country rock. I left it alone.”Ĭlarence is all over Marty Stuart & His Fabulous Superlatives’ new record Way Out West. Other than that, it’s the same dirt on the guitar, the same decals, everything. I routed out a little hole on the back of the guitar so that I could run the strings through the body. Oh, and there’s just one more thing… “On the back of the guitar, if you change strings or you broke a string, you had to take seven or eight screws out and take the whole back of the guitar off. Ralph Mooney, the steel guitar player, he’s the one that did that. “The only other thing that I did to that guitar… there’s a little pedal, a palm pedal that lowers the E string down a half step. I moved the second Scruggs peg up to the bass string because I just don’t do much in Open G. “Clarence had the Scruggs peg on the high E string and on the A string, and he would tune it down, a bit like an open G tuning that he would play on songs like Nashville West. The first of these concerned the Scruggs banjo tuners that allow quick adjustment for alternate tunings. Stuart’s determination to keep the guitar in service led to some modifications of his own. The truth of whether the guitar was originally a Telecaster or Esquire has been forever buried by the sands of time but Clarence is so heavily-modified that it’s of little importance now. I know you’ll take care of it, and do the right thing with it’. “She said, ‘I want $1,450.’” White recalls “I said, ‘Susie, the E string on Clarence’s guitar is worth more than that.’ ‘I know what it’s worth,’ she replied. “Susie said, ‘That’s the guitar you really want, isn’t it?’ And I said, ‘Are you kidding!?’ I laid my chequebook on the table and said ‘Within reason, fill in any number you want to… and if I don’t have the money, my mom works at a bank!’”Īfter some deliberation, White came back with a price for him. I’d dreamed about just touching it for so long. You could put a thousand Telecasters in a row, I could close my eyes and tell you which one was ‘Clarence’. I didn’t have a clue what to feel other than it was like holding the ‘Grail’ of Telecaster guitars. There it is!’ I started playing it and just poking around. While Stuart was interested in the ’54 Strat and the Byrds stuff, he had another Clarence White artefact on his mind… “I said, ‘Is the pull-string here?’ She said, ‘That’s what you really want to see…’ and I said ‘Yep!’ She opened the case and there was like a string missing off it and I said ‘Oh man, look at that. “I drove up to her home in Kentucky and she wanted to sell a 1954 Stratocaster that they had used as a parts guitar for Clarence’s pull-string, and she wanted to sell some Nudie suits and some Byrds paraphernalia that had belonged to Clarence. Built in collaboration with fellow Byrd Gene Parsons, the Tele is the first ever ‘pull-string’ or B-Bender guitar. An archivist and collector of country music relics, he took possession of late Kentucky Colonels and Byrds guitarist Clarence White’s heavily-modified 50s Telecaster in the early 80s. Most recently, Stuart has been celebrating the release of his new concept album Way Out West, made flesh with his band the Fabulous Superlatives, and produced by Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell.Īnd, what of that “greatest Telecaster in the world” claim? Marty Stuart has long been known as ‘The Keeper of The Flame’ of real country music. It was a personal high in a life that professionally saw him join country guitarist and mandolinist Lester Flatt’s band at the age of 14, and later become Johnny Cash’s right hand man, co-composing The Man In Black’s final song Hangman. The “girl of his dreams” is country icon Connie Smith, the woman Stuart fell in love with when he was just 12 years old, and later married.
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