Worshipped by everyone from Willie Nelson to Joe Strummer, the country star with the amazing voice imploded in a blaze of guns, knives, drugs and infidelities. What\u2019s behind his astonishing posthumous rediscovery?<\/p>\n
\u2018He sings like a man arguing with destiny. It sounds like the ache is real, that the ruin is real,\u201d Bob Dylan tells me. \u201cThere\u2019s a cracked truth there. What\u2019s unsettling about him is that he sounds like he\u2019s already living in the aftermath.\u201d Dylan is talking about the late US singer-songwriter Gary Stewart. I had approached him because he was one of the few people to speak highly of this country music maverick.<\/p>\n
Even while still alive, Stewart was a ghostlike figure. He had a period in the Nashville spotlight in the mid-1970s, but his death in December 2003 aged 59 barely registered. Stewart had been forgotten after he cast aside stardom in order to hunker down in a Florida trailer park where he and his wife Mary Lou consumed quaaludes, meth, marijuana and cocaine in industrial quantities.<\/p>\n
\u201cGrowing up with parents who were drug addicts meant I just took this as normal,\u201d says Shannon Ashburn, the couple\u2019s daughter. \u201cI loved them and they loved me and they never let any predators in, so I didn\u2019t feel unsafe. But, looking back, I realise it was an insane situation.\u201d A handful of aficionados \u2013 Dylan, Willie Nelson, John Waters, Tanya Tucker \u2013 maintained that Stewart was one of the 20th century\u2019s most expressive vocalists, but it seemed unlikely he would generate the exalted posthumous cult status of Nick Drake or Karen Dalton.<\/p>\n
But now, after his chaotic life and overlooked death, Stewart is finally getting rediscovered thanks to Gary Stewart: I Am from the Honky Tonks, a formidable biography that was an unexpected critical and commercial hit in the US when it was published last November. Its author Jimmy McDonough, whose biographies of Neil Young, Al Green, Tammy Wynette and Russ Meyer have marked him as a brilliantly unconventional commentator on American lives, chuckles at his good fortune when I call him at home in Portland, Oregon. \u201cOf all my books this one proved the most difficult to find a publisher for,\u201d he says, \u201cyet it\u2019s getting the best response of any of them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, reissue label Delmore Recording Society has just released One Track Mind, a mesmerising collection of Stewart\u2019s early-1970s demos, and rising country and indie-rock stars such as Ella Langley, Zach Top, Wednesday frontwoman Karly Hartzman, Charley Crockett and Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band now sing Stewart\u2019s praises \u2013 and songs.<\/p>\n
\u201cGary Stewart is a superhero,\u201d says Davis, the Kentucky-born singer-songwriter whose 2025 album New Threats from the Soul won wide acclaim. \u201cHe was, as his music still is and always will be, unfathomably real. And of near-ish my own geographic origins, making him simultaneously both realer and yet somehow even more fantastical.\u201d Davis compares Stewart to \u201ca natural disaster from an earlier time, one that the older folks still talk about outside of the bait shop\u201d.<\/p>\n
Stewart was born in Kentucky in 1944, one of 12 children, his family shifting to Florida in 1956 after his coal miner father suffered a debilitating injury at work. From his early teens Stewart, a prodigy who absorbed rockabilly, country and R&B, was playing in bands and writing songs. He moved to Nashville, playing piano in Charley Pride\u2019s band while seeking publishing and recording deals. Established singers sang Stewart\u2019s songs but solo success was elusive until Nashville producer Roy Dea convinced RCA to sign Stewart in 1973.<\/p>\n
Dea understood Stewart\u2019s strengths \u2013 \u201cI never knew anyone who blew me away like Gary,\u201d Dea told an interviewer, \u201cand I\u2019ve seen Elvis, Hank Williams, all of \u2019em\u201d \u2013 and in 1974 Stewart scored US hits with Drinkin\u2019 Thing and Out of Hand. His 1975 debut album, also titled Out of Hand, won critical accolades and She\u2019s Actin\u2019 Single (I\u2019m Drinkin\u2019 Doubles) topped the country charts in the same year.<\/p>\n
Stewart\u2019s albums over the next three years \u2013 Steppin\u2019 Out, Your Place or Mine, Little Junior \u2013 feature some of the most exciting American music of the 1970s. As a vocalist Stewart was without artifice; he would sing ballads Quits and Ten Years of This with intense emotional eloquence, then crank out Little Junior and Your Place or Mine with the gusto of a man hungry for the wild side of life. While punk rock made zero initial impact on Nashville, Stewart, with his raucous swagger and distaste for Music City\u2019s establishment, embodied punk\u2019s spirit; Joe Strummer was a fan.<\/p>\n
Often likened to Jerry Lee Lewis \u2013 the fierce intensity of his rockabilly-flavoured country numbers marked them out as kindred spirits \u2013 and Hank Williams, Stewart shared with Williams a warm yet self-destructive character, addiction flattening his talent and leading to his exile from the music business. Stewart\u2019s last quarter century was spent hiding from the world with Mary Lou in a Florida trailer home with blacked-out windows, taking drugs.<\/p>\n
Ashburn maintains that it didn\u2019t seen abnormal at the time. \u201cThe only thing I resented was not being allowed to have sleepovers. I did have one of my girlfriends over once, and then dad OD\u2019d. The ambulance was called and she started panicking and I was like: don\u2019t worry, this happens all the time! But she called her mom to come and collect her \u2026\u201d Ashburn laughs in disbelief at what was her daily reality. \u201cOnce when dad was on tour my mom OD\u2019d and I had to drive her to the hospital \u2013 I was only 12!\u201d<\/p>\n
Stewart and Mary Lou Taylor met when he was 16 and she 21. They shared an appetite for wild, destructive hedonism. As well as the drugs there were car wrecks, guns, knives, infidelities and mental illness. In his biography, McDonough sees the pair as exemplars of a white working class who swapped Kentucky\u2019s hills for Florida\u2019s coast \u2013 and moonshine for cocaine.<\/p>\n
Stewart\u2019s addictions ended his run on the country charts. He had an opportunity to start afresh after McDonough sought out the reclusive singer in 1987 and wrote an 11,000-word profile for the Village Voice. It briefly resurrected Stewart\u2019s career, and he signed to Californian indie label HighTone Records the following year and released three new albums. Yet these failed to match Stewart\u2019s best RCA recordings. His voice sounded worn-down, his energy dissipated \u2013 and the interest around his return soon faded.<\/p>\n
Why did a musician who once sounded so furiously alive choose to stupefy his senses? No one has an explanation, beyond the fact that Stewart just loved to get high. \u201cPeople were rooting for Gary to make a successful comeback,\u201d says McDonough, \u201cbut by then he didn\u2019t really care.\u201d Dea once wryly observed that \u201cyou get hooked on Stewart \u2026 he\u2019s like a damn drug\u201d \u2013 yet drugs snuffed out Stewart\u2019s own spark.<\/p>\n