Country Music on the Coast

Beachside BLUEGRASS

BY VICKIE MCINTYRE | PHOTOS SUPPLIED

MARTY FALLE TELLS STORIES THROUGH HIS MUSIC

American Country/Bluegrass singer-songwriter Marty Falle isn’t your typical country artist, though he does love his pickup truck.

There’s no manager, no touring. He’s strictly a Nashville recording artist who has owned a home on Hilton Head Island since 2003, a beautiful place to create his original music. Nevertheless, he boasts an international audience, all while maintaining a fulltime job with a Fortune 50 company.

His wife, Amber, and their 9-year-old son, Macklin, keep him grounded.

“Together is our favorite place to be,” said Falle, describing a plaque inside his home.

Falle’s soul, though, is firmly rooted in the “hollers” of Appalachia, evident in his latest album release, “Virgin on the Bluegrass.”

But that endeavor was an evolution.

Growing up in Cleveland, Falle’s parents listened to artists like Burt Bacharach and Frank Sinatra. They also expected him to play an instrument. In second grade, he chose the viola. By fourth grade he added tenor saxophone. Bass, guitar and piano came next.

“That viola’s still in my closet,” he says. “I can’t seem to part with it because it started everything.”

While serving detention in high school, Falle discovered his vocal talents after jumping to his feet when the music teacher announced amnesty to any male who wanted to join the choir.

“He was a really influential man in my life,” Falle says of his teacher. “Not only did I get an ‘A’ for showing up, but he taught us how to sing and harmonize.”

It opened a portal to a world Falle didn’t know existed.

“I became addicted to 3- and 4-part harmony,” he exclaims.

For years Falle’s focus was other people’s music. At Ohio University he sang in the a cappella choir and fronted a rock band that did covers — until a bandmate switched gears.

“We were headlining this outdoor festival when my bandmate suddenly asked the crowd of thousands, ‘Want to hear something Marty and I wrote together?’ I was petrified, but I sat at the end of the stage and started to play — and it had a pretty cool reaction,” he says.

Blue Eagle Music store in Athens, Ohio, where a group of guys hung out playing fiddle, banjo, and dobro, introduced him to bluegrass.

“It was something deeper,” he marvels. “It made my heart dance in a different way.”

The full force of Appalachian music hit him “like a lightning bolt” when he moved to Eastern Kentucky coal country for his first sales job. Traveling through “wild towns” like Harlin and Hazard, he remembers melodies that sprang from people affected by their surroundings.

It inspired Falle to write and record his first country album, “Ohio,” which created sparks of its own.

While making a video for the track, ‘Hoochie Coochie Gal from the Buckeye State,’ Falle met his future wife, who filled in last minute for the lead line dancer who’d quit. Then the video went viral with over three million views and CMT reached out about playing his song in prime time. “Nashville changed everything,” says Falle. That’s where he met Jonathan Yudkin, a studio musician and producer for A-listers like Rascal Flatts and Taylor Swift. “When I first met Marty,” says Yudkin, who once played with greats like John Hartford and The Dillards, “he was doing his own production and I was sending him things like fiddle and banjo tracks. I was instantly impressed and thought he was a full-time artist out there touring with a band.” Yudkin pushed Falle to start recording in Nashville, eventually becoming his producer. “Marty loves to tell stories. He’s a history buff and doesn’t write the usual kinds of songs. I think that’s what resonates with people — it’s fresh, exciting, and they don’t know where it’s going to go,” he adds.

When Falle suggested going “all in” on a bluegrass album, Yudkin was happy to collaborate, as was George Strait’s backup singer, Marty Slayton.

From the title song Grandma Needs Her Whiskey (inspired by Falle’s mother’s penchant for Canadian Club) to the moving lyrics of Bloody Coal (a tribute to coal miners) to the lively Superman Jimmie (about NASCAR’s Jimmie Johnson), “Virgin on the Bluegrass” is a vivid snapshot of Appalachian music and life.

It’s also a reflection of a man who never stops fine-tuning his own creativity.

BLUFFTON’S STAN ROGERS LEADS GRAY’S REEF NATIONAL MARINE SANCTUARY

PROTECTOR OF THE ‘UNDERWATER’ Park

BY CLAY BONNYMAN EVANS | PHOTO SUPPLIED

Growing up in the small Lowcountry town of Estill, Stan Rogers lived an hour inland from the broad, flat Atlantic beaches along South Carolina’s coast. But Hilton Head Island always felt like part of the neighborhood.

“We were always going to the beach, down to Coligny when I was growing up,” he says. “I wasn’t born on Hilton Head, but my backyard was the beach.”

Following in the footsteps of his father, a longtime manager for the South Carolina Department of Resources’ Webb Wildlife Center, Rogers earned a degree in aquaculture, fisheries and wildlife biology from Clemson University. He then embarked on a career as a public-lands manager for the

U.S. Department of Defense and regulator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Washington, D.C.

After a quarter of a century, Rogers has returned to his boyhood “backyard” to serve as superintendent of Gray’s Reef National Marine Sanctuary, which lies about 50 miles due south of Hilton Head and 20 miles off the Georgia coast.

The 50-year-old Bluffton resident took the reins in July 2019 after two years of interim leadership at the sanctuary. The staff was thrilled to have someone with such deep local roots, says Michelle Riley, spokesperson for Gray’s Reef.

“With his childhood experiences — he was actually in the ocean in our part of the country all the time — and going to Clemson, Stan really understands the unique characteristics of our part of the mighty Atlantic Ocean,” she said.

Gray’s Reef is one of 15 “underwater national parks” designated since Congress created the National Marine Sanctuaries System in 1972. The sanctuaries protect natural and cultural resources in some 600,000 square miles of U.S. waters, from the Pacific to the Atlantic, the Great Lakes to American Samoa.

Established in 1981, Gray’s Reef is the only such sanctuary between Cape Hatteras, N.C., and the Florida Keys. It protects some 22 square miles of “live bottom” habitat — rocky outcroppings, crevices and ledges that are home to some 900 species of crab, lobster, coral, sea star and other invertebrates, and 200 species of fish, including sea bass, mackerel, grouper and shark, as well as threatened loggerhead turtles. The 70-foot-deep reef also lies within the winter-calving grounds for critically endangered North Atlantic right whales.

As superintendent, Rogers oversees every aspect of Gray’s Reef, including education and outreach, research, policy and management.

“At Yosemite (National Park) there are rangers, biologists, interpreters. It’s the same at Gray’s Reef, and I’m the manager in charge of our staff of professionals,” he says.

One of the sanctuary’s key purposes is to monitor longterm conditions of the reef, its resident and transient species and the surrounding ocean environment.

“It’s a climate-change sentinel site for things like ocean acidification, which negatively impacts corals and other species that require calcium,” Rogers says. To collect data the sanctuary deploys two research vessels, three acoustic hydrophones to monitor human and natural sounds and a seafloormounted telemetry receiver array to study movements of resident fish as well as migrating species. Gray’s Reef is also a recreation destination. Two-thirds of the sanctuary is open to fishing, and despite variable visibility conditions, it’s an increasingly popular spot for scuba diving. “Some days you’ve got clear blue water with 30 to 40 feet visibility. On other days, you can only see as far as the end of your arm,” Rogers says. Rogers was just getting his feet wet as superintendent when the COVID-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, resulting in the suspension of almost all field activities. The relative lull provided an opportunity to think about the future, he says.

“Had COVID not come around, the sanctuary would have continued on very much the same trajectory, without much down time or pause to think about what we aspired to be,” he says. “In having those conversations, things came about that may not have come about otherwise.”

Among those things are the anticipated launch of a new, larger research vessel in 2023 and the 2022 opening of a new visitor center in Savannah, which will host the U.S. National Marine Sanctuaries System’s 50th-anniversary celebration next summer.

“It’s going to be a great party,” Rogers says.