Marty Stuart, Glasgow, Kentucky, 2/1/2008

I've heard of people feeling like a performer was singing right to them, but I've never had the experience of feeling like someone was playing an entire show just for me. But that's exactly what happened last Friday night when I saw Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives play the Plaza Theater in Glasgow, Kentucky.

My father's from Glasgow, about 80 miles north of Nashville, and my 86-year-old grandmother still lives there. When I was little, I used to occasionally see movies at the Plaza, which sits near one corner of the town square, but it had been shuttered since the ’90s. That abandoned movie house haunted me for years: Often, I asked my grandmother to introduce me to the person who owned the property, hoping I'd be able to convince him to let me have the ticket kiosk, or at least talk my way into an afternoon scavenging the property.

A renovated Plaza re-opened a couple years back, but I hadn't had a chance to visit it. I figured a concert by Marty Stuart - whom I'd often seen perform at the Grand Ole Opry but had never seen do a full show of his own - would be the perfect excuse. So I took my grandmother, my wife, and two of our kids.

Marty couldn't have played a better show for me if he'd let me pick the set list myself. He played the two songs my 6-year-old daughter, Gracelyn, had latched onto during the drive from Nashville - "Hillbilly Rock" and "Tempted." He played "Dark as a Dungeon," a song I've head him do at the Opry but which I don't think he's ever recorded. A coal mining song by the late Merle Travis, "Dark as a Dungeon" was Gracelyn's lullaby as a baby. Marty's performacne put her right to sleep.

Marty also performed his "Dark Bird," which uses the crows that favor the property Marty bought from the Cash estate as a metaphor for the Man in Black's soul. "I like crows," Marty said. "They're really weird birds, and they dress like Johnny Cash."

I'd never heard "Dark Bird" before, but I've associated Cash with crows since the last time I interviewed him, when we sat on the porch of his house and listened to the birds.

"Every time I sit out here and talk to somebody," Cash told me, "crows start up. I have a crow caller. I'll start calling them, and they'll start circling over here to see where the crow is. Because I make it sound like a wounded crow." Cash loved messing with the crows.

Cash tied into Marty's show in another personal way for me when Marty played Bill Monroe's "My Last Days on Earth." It's a relatively obscure instrumental, one of my favorite Monroe tunes, and Johnny Cash is the person who introduced it to me. I'd never heard it performed live.

Marty knew that I was at the concert and in his encore, he gave me a shout out from the stage and dedicated a song to me - "Me & Hank & Jumpin' Jack Flash," which segued into Ola Belle Reed's "High on a Mountain Top." Now, "High on a Mountain Top" may not have been the first Marty Stuart record I ever wrote about, but it was the one that made me a lifelong fan some 15 years ago. If Marty knew that, I'm astonished at his memory. If he didn't, then I'm a little bit spooked.

Marty not only did my favorite hits, he did some of my favorites that he'd never recorded, one my favorites that I didn't even know he played, and a new favorite that I didn't even know he had written. Before the show, I noticed a set list on the audio console and took a peek. Some of the songs he performed that meant the most to me weren't on it. So I think I'm a little bit spooked anyway.