‘He sings like a man arguing with destiny. It sounds like the ache is real, that the ruin is real,” Bob Dylan tells me. “There’s a cracked truth there. What’s unsettling about him is that he sounds like he’s already living in the aftermath.” 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.
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.
“Growing up with parents who were drug addicts meant I just took this as normal,” says Shannon Ashburn, the couple’s daughter. “I loved them and they loved me and they never let any predators in, so I didn’t feel unsafe. But, looking back, I realise it was an insane situation.” A handful of aficionados – Dylan, Willie Nelson, John Waters, Tanya Tucker – maintained that Stewart was one of the 20th century’s most expressive vocalists, but it seemed unlikely he would generate the exalted posthumous cult status of Nick Drake or Karen Dalton.
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. “Of all my books this one proved the most difficult to find a publisher for,” he says, “yet it’s getting the best response of any of them.”
Meanwhile, reissue label Delmore Recording Society has just released One Track Mind, a mesmerising collection of Stewart’s 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’s praises – and songs.
“Gary Stewart is a superhero,” says Davis, the Kentucky-born singer-songwriter whose 2025 album New Threats from the Soul won wide acclaim. “He 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.” Davis compares Stewart to “a natural disaster from an earlier time, one that the older folks still talk about outside of the bait shop”.
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 band and writing songs. He moved to Nashville, playing piano in Charley Pride’s band while seeking publishing and recording deals. Established singers sang Stewart’s songs but solo success was elusive until Nashville producer Roy Dea convinced RCA to sign Stewart in 1973.
Dea understood Stewart’s strengths – “I never knew anyone who blew me away like Gary,” Dea told an interviewer, “and I’ve seen Elvis, Hank Williams, all of ’em” – and in 1974 Stewart scored US hits with Drinkin’ Thing and Out of Hand. His 1975 debut album, also titled Out of Hand, won critical accolades and She’s Actin’ Single (I’m Drinkin’ Doubles) topped the country charts in the same year.
Stewart’s albums over the next three years – Steppin’ Out, Your Place or Mine, Little Junior – 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’s establishment, embodied punk’s spirit; Joe Strummer was a fan.
Often likened to Jerry Lee Lewis – the fierce intensity of his rockabilly-flavoured country numbers marked them out as kindred spirits – 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’s last quarter century was spent hiding from the world with Mary Lou in a Florida trailer home with blacked-out windows, taking drugs.
Ashburn maintains that it didn’t seen abnormal at the time. “The only thing I resented was not being allowed to have sleepovers. I did have one of my girlfriends over once, and then dad OD’d. The ambulance was called and she started panicking and I was like: don’t worry, this happens all the time! But she called her mom to come and collect her …” Ashburn laughs in disbelief at what was her daily reality. “Once when dad was on tour my mom OD’d and I had to drive her to the hospital – I was only 12!”
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’s hills for Florida’s coast – and moonshine for cocaine.
Stewart’s 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’s career, and he signed to Californian indie label HighTone Records the following year and released three new albums. Yet these failed to match Stewart’s best RCA recordings. His voice sounded worn-down, his energy dissipated – and the interest around his return soon faded.
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. “People were rooting for Gary to make a successful comeback,” says McDonough, “but by then he didn’t really care.” Dea once wryly observed that “you get hooked on Stewart … he’s like a damn drug” – yet drugs snuffed out Stewart’s own spark.
The darkness that enmeshed Gary and Mary Lou would end up overwhelming their family with the couple’s son Joey taking his own life in 1988, aged 25, depression and family dysfunction having been contributing factors. Ashburn says that it was when her parents started taking the opioid painkiller OxyContin that “things really spun out of control”. She says: “Gary was first prescribed it after he broke his leg in a car crash, and they didn’t know it was so addictive.” After being raised by addicts, and later enduring her own struggle with addiction, Ashburn is now helping others who are dependent on drugs.
The necessity of earning a living occasionally forced Stewart to venture outside the trailer to perform, and on a good night he could still leave audiences howling. “Dad loved playing honky-tonks and juke joints,” says Ashburn, “down-home places where people came to dance to his music. He’d tasted stardom, played arenas and didn’t like it – he liked the funky, backwoods places. And people loved him. In Texas he was a legend, could pull 2,000 to Billy Bob’s in Fort Worth.”
Stewart also commanded a loyal following on Indian reservations; McDonough believes this is because “Native Americans live a hard life and, in Gary, they heard someone who sang of that life. There was nothing fake about him.”
Mary Lou died on 26 November 2003. A despondent Stewart killed himself three weeks later. “They were Bonnie and Clyde, Romeo and Juliet,” says Ashburn. “One couldn’t live without the other.” Few noted Stewart’s death at the time but Ashburn never stopped believing her father’s music would again be recognised. “I’m determined to get Gary into the Country Music Hall of Fame,” she says. “With Jimmy’s book, the Delmore album of his demos and Sony finally putting some of his RCA albums up on streaming services, things are looking up. I have so many great recordings of him that I’d love to share with the world, because Gary Stewart was unique.”
• Gary Stewart: I Am from the Honky Tonks is published by Wolf & Salmon, £34.99
• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123. In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
