A country music icon whose career overlapped with Bob Dylan’s died last week after battling a mysterious illness.
Tributes have poured in for Mary Martin, who was 85 and considered an unsung heroine of folk and rock music.
A gender-bending connector and catalyst of sorts, she died Thursday while receiving hospice care at Alive Hospice in Nashville.
She rubbed shoulders with Dylan from the early 1960s, before winning a Grammy for an album on which he appeared.
The manager and executive helped launch the careers of Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen and Keith Urban, and worked with big names like Janis Joplin. The cause of her death was not immediately provided, but news of her passing was confirmed on social media.
Mary Martin, a country music manager credited with bringing Keith Urban to the U.S., died last week after a battle with a mysterious illness. She was 85.
A gender-bending connector and catalyst, she died Thursday while receiving palliative care. The cause of death has not been given.
“Time and time again, Mary Martin discovered great talent and elevated their careers,” Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum CEO Kyle Young said in a statement posted to Instagram on Saturday, 17 years after the executive’s own induction.
“From the beginning, he connected Bob Dylan with his friends the Hawks, who became The Band,” Young recalled.
‘She directed Leonard Cohen in his early musical ventures, then guided the budding solo careers of Van Morrison, Rodney Crowell and Vince Gill.
At Warner Bros., he signed future Country Music Hall of Famer Emmylou Harris; at RCA he helped sign and develop Clint Black and Lorrie Morgan, and encouraged young Keith Urban to move from Australia to Nashville.
“Mary’s unerring sense of song and artistry was legendary, and she was a fierce ally to the artists she represented,” the historian concluded.
As mentioned, Martin spent his life in the country music industry, in a career that spanned more than 60 years.
Decades before encouraging Urban to move from his native Australia, he worked as an assistant to famed manager Albert Grossman, whose own group would eventually include Dylan, Joplin, Peter, Paul & Mary, Gordon Lightfoot and more.
He worked for him in New York for four years in the 1960s before striking out on his own, often drawing on the business connections he had made working for Grossman.
No cause of death was given, but news of his death circulated on social media.
Martin is seen talking to singer-songwriter Emmylou Harris before a show in Los Angeles in 1975, when she was working as a manager and personal advisor for Warner Bros.
The couple appeared together again in Nashville in 2018, for the debut of Emmylou’s exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.
His most famous performance in the music world was introducing Bob Dylan to the Hawks, who would later become The Band. The folk icon is pictured here with Martin’s former boss Albert Grossman in 1965 during work on Highway 61 Revisited
Martin’s group in the 1960s and 1970s included big names like Leonard Cohen and Van Morrison.
It was at this time that she became involved with Cohen, then a poet and novelist based in Canada, with no musical career to speak of.
Representing him alongside a rising Morrison, she would eventually achieve great success, joining Warner Bros Records as an executive in 1972.
He was Cohen’s manager until 1969, when he became Van Morrison’s manager.
Martin would later recruit a host of other stars, including Emmylou Harris, Leon Redbone and The Marshall Tucker Band, before moving to Los Angeles to continue his success.
At that time, he returned to artist management, working with country artists such as Rodney Crowell and Vince Gill.
He then moved to Nashville in 1985, where he worked in executive positions at a number of record labels.
As vice president of RCA, she worked with stars such as Gill, Clint Black, Paul Overstreet, Aaron Tippin and Lorrie Morgan.
She would take on the role of vice president of Mercury Records in 1999, before winning her first and only Grammy for her work as producer on the Hank Williams tribute album Timeless, which included a Dylan song.
She also managed Vince Gil, seen here performing in Nashville last December.
Martin is seen here giving an interview to Country Music Hall of Famer Jay Orr at Ford’s Theatre, the Country Music Hall of Fame, on November 17, 2009, after his own induction.
In 2009, she gave an interview to Country Music Hall of Fame inductee Jay Orr at Ford’s Theatre, Country Music Hall of Fame on November 17, 2009.
In it, he revealed how he had tried to get Dylan to sign with Warner Bros in 1973, but was ultimately unsuccessful.
“The first thing I do at the Warner Bros. stationery store is write a letter to Bob Dylan,” he recalled.
‘And the letter goes on for a while… I suggested to Bob that he could work with me at Warner Bros.
‘He was preparing to leave Columbia; it would be a good time for him to come work for Warner Bros.
She went on to slam the “damn gatekeepers” who presumably kept that letter away from the popular icon, which she said would become commonplace in the industry.
“That pissed me off,” he joked.
He also talked about spending time at the Grossmans’ house in Woodstock, swimming matches with Dylan that he said he won and the cat on the cover of “Bringing It All Back Home.”
She died at Alive Hospice in Nashville, after living in the city for nearly 40 years. Before that, she worked in New York and Los Angeles. She was an inspiration to countless people.
The iconic photo, taken on the property of his former boss Grossman, was difficult to get, he said, because the cat would not look directly into the camera lens.
He died in Nashville, where he had lived for the past 40 years.
She served as an inspiration to countless people in the music industry, particularly women.
