Marty Stuart

“When I was 5 years old, I got my first record. It was 'Flatt & Scruggs' Greatest Hits.' The second was 'The Fabulous Johnny Cash.'”

“Country music has taken so many forms, and I've always contended that it does not matter if the casual listener falls in love with country music through Florida Georgia Line, Taylor Swift, Old Crow Medicine Show or whomever - just get in and start digging!”

“The first picture of me that I know of was me in the crib wearing a pair of cowboy boots.”

“Well, I was dedicated to God before I was born by Momma and Daddy, and I was raised in a very traditional Southern Baptist home.”

“American Odyssey' will be an amazing adventure inside the musical walls of our cities. It's theater, and radio has always been great theater to me.”

“I'm always on the prowl for the kinds of recordings that can inspire and potentially make a difference.”

“I don't know how it got around that I play a lot of instruments. I really don't. I play the guitar and the mandolin.”

“Going back to the Byrds and 'Sweetheart of the Rodeo,' when country was kind of getting away from the fiddle and steel aspect, it took some rock & rollers to introduce a new generation to it, and it kinda put some things straight.”

“The only two jobs I ever had were with Lester Flatt and Johnny Cash.”

“I went out on the road when I was 12 years old, playing with the Sullivan Family Gospel Singers. That was the summer of 1972. We played Pentecostal churches, camp meetings, George Wallace campaign rallies and bluegrass festivals. As a kid, I had grown up watching quartets that were very entertaining.”

“If you look at just right, there's not a nickel's worth of difference between what Buck Owens and the Buckaroos played on 'Buckaroo' and what the Ventures were playing. It's all that twangy instrumental stuff.”

“I used to watch those syndicated, black-and-white Country Music Television shows from the '60s with my dad. And all of those people that played on our television set, they just felt like family to me. And I believed in my heart, as a little kid, that I would be doing that someday and I would know all those people and we would be friends.”

“Well, it's hard not to love Hank Williams!”

“I have a low-tech camera with one lens that I've shot everything in my life on. My subjects and my subject matter sometimes really are powerful, and so my job is to get it into focus.”

“Like so many other people I was raised right, went crazy but I always knew God had His hand on me.”

“When I pick up Hank Williams' guitar or that first suit that Johnny Cash wore on stage, it empowers me.”

“Some things you can never get back.”

“He is irreplaceable. Even in death I have no doubt that Johnny Cash will continue to live on as an inspiration to musicians and songwriters and all of America.”

“It is great to know that the lives and careers of country music's artists are being documented through the Hall of Fame's expert archival and curatorial resources.”

“Shaft' is a great country song.”