![]() ![]() He scored a Hollywood film, coached the ailing Cash through the final chapter of his recording career and spent time with his second wife, 1960s country queen Connie Smith, whom he married in 1997. Nursing the rejection, Stuart retreated from the spotlight. I would check my songs by way of the people,” relates Stuart.īy the mid-Nineties, Stuart had his own major recording contract, but his dream of an entire album about Native Americans remained on hold in favor of his top-selling mainstream albums that imbricated playful hillbilly hits over country music anthems such as “Let There Be Country” and “The King of Dixie.” His momentum faltered in 1999 when The Pilgrim, a concept album that earnestly though awkwardly distilled country music’s themes and traditions, floundered on the charts. “I went back up there, and I would check my songs by way of the landscape. “Walking Through the Prayers,” one of the first songs he wrote for the album, grew out of a visit to the sacred Bear Butte in South Dakota. In 1995, after many visits to the reservation with Smith, he began forming the narrative that would become Badlands. Smith, the Cash discographer and friend and chronicler of the Lakota, who taught him about Native American culture and history. ![]() ![]() “That’s when I fell in love with the Lakota people,” says Stuart. Not long after Stuart’s first live show with the Man in Black, the band played a benefit at Pine Ridge. The heady new gig linked him to the gods of country music - Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings - not to mention Cash himself, whose well-known concept albums inspired him. Later in the year, Cash hired the young face with flashy talent to enliven his flagging road show. Upon Flatt’s death in 1979, Stuart joined Doc Watson’s band, but all the while kept his eye on Johnny Cash. A child prodigy on the mandolin when bluegrass legend Lester Flatt brought him to Nashville in 1972, the youngster unabashedly courted the men and women who defined country music. Indeed, the champion of traditional country is nothing if not ambitious. Our original people always wind up at the end of the line.”ĭespite the album’s almost certain commercial failure, Stuart intrepidly moved forward with Badlands‘ release. ![]() “If you and I were to get in our cars and drive out there we would find 14 people living in a house trailer, people without money for medicine and a lot of that kind of discouragement. “I can’t help but get angry,” Stuart tells Rolling Stone Country. “He brought with him from Washington/A bag filled with dreams and cake/To spread among the poor/In the poorest county in the whole United States,” sings Stuart. Stuart reimagined Johnny Cash‘s obscure “Big Foot” (the only cover on Badlands) to indict the Seventh Cavalry’s attack on the Lakota at Wounded Knee in 1890, but in “Broken Promised Land” - with its phantasmagorical instrumental prelude - he unleashes his own venom at President Bill Clinton, a modern great white father, who arrived in Pine Ridge in 1999 with retreaded solutions to the reservation’s problems. But “Casino,” a sobering track on Badlands, calls out those gaming halls and the empty salvation they offer Native Americans: “They built a casino out under the stars/With neon lights blinking on tired rusty cars/Card sharks take my money, whiskey puts me in jail/An oasis of misery, I know it so well.” Back then, country music’s closest visible connection to native peoples was the concerts its artists played at Indian-controlled casinos. ![]()
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