Nearly three decades after they married on the South Dakota plains, the 1970 Mississippi fairground Polaroid still remained in the home Marty Stuart shared with the woman standing beside the twelve year old boy in its frame.
I am going to marry the woman in that picture
The boy made that declaration on the ride home in 1970 after posing with Connie Smith in Philadelphia, Mississippi. He wore a brand new yellow shirt his mother Hilda had bought him so the Once a Day singer might notice him in the crowd, and he kept the snapshot for the next two decades through his teenage years playing mandolin in Lester Flatt band, his six years touring with Johnny Cash and his first marriage to Cindy Cash.
Smith knew nothing of that kept photograph when their collaboration began in 1994. They had reconnected backstage at the Grand Ole Opry and before a celebrity softball game in Nashville, and she asked Stuart to write for her comeback project. The musician seventeen years her junior later stepped into the studio when she signed with Warner Bros. Records in 1996 for her first studio album of new material in nearly twenty years, and he co-wrote nine of the ten tracks and produced the sessions.
By the time Stuart arrived at her house to write in 1994, the fifty-three year old Opry member had vowed never to marry again. Raised in Ohio with a violent father, she had survived a 1968 mental exhaustion breakdown at the peak of her RCA Victor fame and had walked away from full time touring to focus on her Christian faith and her four children.
She had also lived through three divorces. Her first marriage to steelworker Jerry Smith, the father of her son Darren, had ended, and her marriage to her road guitarist Jack Watkins had ended as well. Her early 1990s marriage to former televangelist Marshall Haynes, the father of her daughters Kerry, Julie and Jeanne, had also ended, and she had become convinced she was unsuited for marriage and planned to spend the rest of her life single.
During their first afternoon writing together, Stuart telephoned Hall of Fame songwriter Harlan Howard so Smith could work alongside one of her favorite composers. Over the next three years they wrote songs at her kitchen table, including Hearts Like Ours and You Canβt Take Back a Broken Heart and Looking for a Reason.
When Stuart began asking her out, Smith warned him she was too old, had four grown and teenage children and had closed the door on romance. Rather than pressing her, he spent more than three years showing up steadily in her routine, drinking coffee with her, praying with her, winning the trust of Darren, Kerry, Julie and Jeanne and setting aside his own hard living road habits.
In the studio control room with co-producer Justin Niebank, Stuart built the arrangements around her phrasing and turned down label suggestions for a commercial duets record so the October 1998 album Connie Smith would showcase her voice alone. Three months before that album reached stores, she agreed to become his wife.
On July 8, 1997, thirty-eight year old Stuart and fifty-five year old Smith traveled to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where Stuart had long been an adopted member of the Oglala Lakota community. Surrounded by their families and Lakota friends, they married in a four hour traditional Lakota Sioux ceremony presided over by a tribal holy man.
After the vows the newlyweds drove into the South Dakota badlands, parked near the edge of a cliff and danced together to a cassette of Buck Owens singing Your Tender Loving Care. Back in Nashville, Grand Ole Opry peer Bill Anderson joked with Smith about why she had never changed her last name to something more exotic, and she replied that she already had two or three times.
In the decades that followed, Stuart continued to frame his wife career as a national treasure and featured her weekly alongside his band the Fabulous Superlatives across all six seasons of The Marty Stuart Show on RFD-TV from 2008 to 2014. Together they co-wrote five more songs for her 2011 Sugar Hill album Long Line of Heartaches, which included her daughters Julie and Jeanne singing backup on the closing track, and Stuart later produced her 2021 LP The Cry of the Heart and her 2024 album Love, Prison, Wisdom and Heartaches.
The promise from that fairground ride home had become a marriage, a family and a musical partnership, and the Polaroid of the boy in the yellow shirt still connected the life they built to the day it began.