Just relaxing around the house, watching TV with her significant other-with a record ready to be issued at the appropriate post-vaccine time-was a blessing in itself. So I’m plenty busy.” And that was the ultimate uplifting message she took from her long-hauling days. “And if Marty’s out very long on tour, sometimes I’ll go with him and we’ll go out each night and sing a song or two. “Plus, I’ve got lots of friends to stay in touch with, and I do the Grand Ole Opry a lot-I’m one of the hosts there,” she says. But time just flies, she says, with five kids, eight grandkids and a new grandchild that she has yet to meet, given the grave tenor of the times. Luckily, they’d wrapped Cry sessions before lockdown, she adds. He still oversees her work, even though she hasn’t released an album since 2011’s Long Line of Heartaches. She’s also grateful for a long line of influential mentors, like Bill Anderson (who discovered her in 1963, when she won a talent contest at Frontier Ranch Country Music Park in Columbus, Ohio), Chet Atkins, Bob Ferguson (the producer who understood how to accent her bluesy trill), Weldon Myrick (the steel guitar player who helped create her sound) and Stuart, who helped revive her career at Warner Brothers and then married her in 1997. With youthful zeal, she storms through retro-clever co-writes with her husband (“Spare Me No Truth,” “Here Comes My Baby Back Again”) and covers of twangy cuts by Mel Tillis (“All the Time”), Merle Haggard (“Jesus Take a Hold”) and Dallas Frazier (“I Just Don’t Believe Me Anymore,” her 72nd catalog contribution from the songwriting titan). To begin with, at 80, this Country Music Hall of Famer’s brassy powerhouse of a voice-first heard on her forlorn 1964 “Once a Day” debut single, and one of the most unique in Nashville-remains undiminished on Cry. And she has quite a few to be thankful for, all told. “I’m hanging in there, and I made it! That’s the really good thing,” she chirps, counting her blessings. I’m still in the long haulers’ clinic at Vanderbilt, where they’re still working on me.” It’s not the easiest way to start an interview about the singer’s latest Stuart-produced release, The Cry of the Heart, but she quickly brightens. “He and I both got it at the same time, but I wound up in the hospital for 11 days, and I’m still recovering from that. And her case-as intimated by this deceptively-friendly new name-did not immediately resolve itself. “I’m one of the long-haulers,” sighs Connie Smith, one of country’s reigning queens, who-along with her equally royal tunesmith husband Marty Stuart-somehow contracted the dreaded coronavirus in January of this year. In classic Music Row parlance, a “long-hauler” might once have designated a lonesome, sleep-deprived truck driver, doggedly driving cross-country with nothing in his cab for comfort but Red Sovine on the 8-track.
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