This Saturday, Nov. 3, the Sooke Folk Music Society is so pleased to welcome back perennial favourites Stacey Earle and Mark Stuart for our first official concert of the season. This will be their third visit to Sooke, all the way from Ashland, Tennessee and a show you will not want to miss. Check out their website at www.staceyandmark.com
Stacey Earle and Mark Stuart met for the first time 1992 at a songwriters night in Nashville. They knew that night it was one of them things that are just meant to be. They were married in 1993 while raising two children from Stacey’s first marriage.
“It would be quite a balancing act at that time raising a family and trying to make a living along with all the other stuff that came with getting by, “but we managed” Stacey said, she looks back at her first encounter with the world of touring.
Stacey Earle’s first show was on an arena stage in Sydney, playing rhythm guitar in her brother’s band, Steve Earle & the Dukes, on “The Hard Way” tour in 1990. She spent about a year and a half on tour with her brother, and then returned to Nashville to start a career of her own as a country/folk singer/songwriter. It was there she found she had a lot more to learn.
“I was 30 years old and asking seeking a recording deal in Nashville at that age was like asking God to turn back the world clock.”
Mark Stuart went to the finest of Music schools. Mark started his schooling listening and admiring his uncle’s guitar playing and his dad’s fiddling. Learning and listening to the greats, Chet Atkins, Merle Travis, John Fogerty, The Beatles and many more players and singers of all genres. He would find himself playing in the School of Honky Tonks and beer joints in and around Nashville by age 15 in his dad’s band.
Mark was in off the road when he met Stacey and that very night that he would play the first note of her music never leaving her side. Mark still somehow found the time to work on his own music recording his solo record and touring. And the love of his new family, Mark as well spent some time in the Dukes in the 1990s. Like Earle, he recalls it as a time of glamour: appearing on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” and MTV.
“I had someone tuning my guitar, strapping on my guitar,” he said. “Now we carry our stuff three flights up in the Red Roof Inn.”
Stacey and Mark over the years have lived and learned so much from each other. They have always found themselves inseparable from the beginning. Their Songs are the diaries of their life good times and bad, completing the love they have. They share the full load together of getting by day by day.
While, no doubt, each still remains an individual solo artist with solo release’s
(such as the new 2008 release of Mark Stuart “Left of Nashville” it is through the respect of each other’s work and years of playing together they have created their sound. And, that sound allows each individual to shine through. Stacey and Mark are no doubt together till death do they part.
Please join us this Saturday for an evening of truly memorable music from the extraordinary Stacey Earle and Mark Stuart. It all happens at Holy trinity Anglican Church, 1962 Murray Road. Doors open at 7:30 p.m. with the show commencing at 8.
Tickets at the door and in advance at Shoppers Drug Mart in Sooke.
Contributed by Dave Gallant