Acclaimed biographer Jimmy McDonough's new book Gary Stewart: I Am From The Honky-Tonks goes deep into the rough-and-tumble life of Stewart, one of country music's unsung greats. My own first exposure to Stewart came via an incredible cover of his song "She's Actin' Single (I'm Drinkin' Doubles)" on Wednesday's 2022 album Mowing The Leaves Instead Of Piling 'Em Up. The cover quickly became one of my all-time favorites, and it piqued my interest about the source material. So I'm excited to share this new essay from Wednesday's Karly Hartzman discussing her love of Stewart's music and reflecting on McDonough's book. —Chris DeVille
“I’d like to take country and kick it in the ass.” - Gary Stewart
At 2 a.m. on a Tuesday in 2021, surrounded by empty $2 wine bottles and beer cans on our porch in Asheville, slouching on a suede couch we deemed inappropriate for indoors, my roommate played Gary Stewart’s “She’s Actin’ Single (And I’m Drinking Doubles)” off his iPhone. We’d been queuing tunes back and forth, talking about what a song was capable of, about the things we dreamed of our own music being able to communicate. Worshipping the music that made our hearts wince.
Our usual suspects played on through, our songwriting luminaries: Jason Molina, Will Oldham, John Prine, Neil Young, Lucinda Williams, Richard Buckner, Sparklehorse, Silver Jews, the Truckers… me and my roommates had our canon pretty much dialed in. We studied this music, drunk and high, every night in between playing each other our own songs we’d been writing.
When “She’s Actin’ Single” played, that pang any music lover is familiar with, obliterated me. A pedal steel riff that instantly holds you hostage. A goaty throaty voice that’s seen love and war and given up the fight in both. Lyricism so instantly iconic that it pisses you off. “I hide my pain/ I drown my troubles/ My heart is breaking/ Like the tiny bubbles.” It was all over.
If you could burn a hole into a song from listening to it too much, you could see clear through “She’s Actin’ Single” from the times I played it in the car to and from work alone after first hearing it that night.
In his own words: “a three minute soap opera, that’s what a country song is.” Gary and his band had cracked the code of the perfect country tune with this song two decades before I was born.
A few months later when we were given the opportunity to record some covers at a fancy studio in Carrboro, NC, I knew “She’s Actin’ Single” had to be one of the songs we tracked. I was happy with how it turned out, but it was intimidating as hell to put out a version of a song that you’d worshipped so intensely and think you’d done it any justice at all.
I had no idea, of course, that our band would be playing sold-out shows to big ass rooms years later, and that people would be screamin’ at us from the crowd, begging us to play it.
There is so much I didn’t know about Gary Stewart until I read I Am From The Honky-Tonks. There was so much I couldn’t have ever known if I tried anyways, because to truly get to him you’d’ve had to talk to his family, and the many musicians, producers, venue bookers, and record label employees that knew Gary personally.
Luckily, southern people are some of the most obsessed types of history keepers. They hoard family information and stories and keep signifiers of everything dear to them. Only problem is, they are protective as hell over their memories, and to be let in you have to build a trust with them that rivals being a family member yourself.
Jimmy McDonough put in years and years of that care and work to piece Gary’s life together in this book. As a result, the stories he pried out from the floorboards of the family homes, tour buses, and honky-tonks are exceedingly intimate in their detail. They are treated with a loyalty to their tellers, often delivered in their own words. They are outrageous.
McDonough eulogizes so much of Kentucky and Florida panhandle southern life that threatens to become obsolete, as the mining towns and rural communities that created their culture whittle down to no one. Thank goodness that in the process of telling Gary’s story, he builds a shrine to the gossip turned myth of the people that populate Gary’s turf and their ways of speaking. I myself can’t wait to use the phrase “He got more ass than a toilet seat” in regards to the next womanizer I come across.
Gary’s family runs the risk of outshining his eccentricities at times, which comes as no surprise to anyone with mental illness and addiction running in their own family. When people that are doing anything to get by cross over with the world of fame and access to any number of illegal substances, you’re likely to get plenty of stories of unruly goings on, infidelities, suicides, and violence.
Gary himself got married at age 17, while his parents were on vacation, to the woman he was married to til the day he died, Mary Lou. She and him had bribed a doctor into giving him blood tests that pronounced him 21, of legal marrying age. This is somehow one of the tamest family stories in the book.
McDonough collects these anecdotes from Gary’s early life and validates the scrappy honky-tonk attitude that many of Nashville’s pretty boys wore as a costume. Gary “spills his guts out… and walks around in them” on stage, and it’s not theatrics… his life demanded these songs to be sung.
McDonough’s worship of Gary’s music doesn’t turn away from his sorrier moments and recordings. Heck, halfway through the book is Gary’s peak in fame and talent. The rest details his succumbing to pills, mediocre records, and the loss that perforated his life culminating in his eventual suicide. Collaborating and fraternizing with his heroes in the Allman Brothers band did not save him, the music did not save him, his children could not save him. It’s a frustrating story of a musical genius becoming completely disenchanted by life, and it’s surely a cautionary tale for my own musical career. It’s no puff piece.
Reading Honky-Tonks helped me discover tracks from the middle of Gary's career that I’d ignored for whatever reason, maybe just out of solidarity to his debut. McDonough convinces you quickly that these albums often put on a much shorter pedestal (Steppin’ Out and Your Place Or Mine) are worth dropping everything to listen to.
By telling these stories, McDonough more than proves that Gary Stewart deserves to be held in the same regard as Waylon, Willie, and all the other highly mythologized outlaw country greats. It’s a crime that the guy doesn’t have his own wing in the country music hall of fame, a memorial highway, a biopic, a theme park, and a breakfast cereal.
McDonough accomplishes in this biography what any true fan of a songwriter and performer yearns for, creating a hunger in its readers for more of their music. He says outright that he hopes this book will lead to the unshackling of more of Stewart’s unreleased tracks.
There are many recordings discussed in this book that I am desperate to hear, because of their context in Gary’s life of grandeur and pain, but also because of McDonough’s compelling descriptions after being lucky enough to hear them himself (lucky son of a bitch). What I’d do to hear the Motown covers that got Gary signed to RCA, or a collection of all the songs he wrote with his buddy Bill Eldridge, Roy Dea recordings penned by Stewart (such as “The Ballad Of Corsia And John,” “4th Of July,” or “Stella Mae”) that were lost to time, the shelved Red Ash label recordings, or the many live performances McDonough describes over Gary’s tumultuous years on the road.
The hunger for this music will surely spread once people read Stewart’s story. It’s the same hunger I hope to instill in our audiences as they scream along the chorus of Gary’s song when we perform it.
