Gary Stewart: I Am From the Honky-Tonks

In the mid-seventies, Stewart’s crazed hits, including “She’s Actin’ Single (I’m Drinkin’ Doubles)” and “Drinkin’ Thing,” rocketed him to the top of the charts, earning him the admiration of Bob Dylan, the Allman Brothers, and Tanya Tucker. Within a few years, he had flamed out and all but vanished from the music scene. Until Jimmy McDonough barged his way into the spooky Florida double-wide Stewart was hiding out in, beginning a nearly forty-year obsession with the musician.

GARY STEWART: I AM FROM THE HONKY TONKS―the ninth and final biography from Jimmy McDonough, New York Times best-selling author of Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography and America’s greatest chronicler of the weird, the wild, and the wondrous―is the outrageous tale of a true country outlaw.

This is a story of sex, drugs, and honky-tonk, told in McDonough’s inimitable, two-fisted style, the unique combination of oral history, vivid prose, and personal experience. It’s an epic tale of a wild Kentucky family who surfed success and rearended disaster in drug-soaked, seventies Florida. At its core is the tempestuous, tragic love story of Gary Stewart and his wife, Mary Lou, that will leave you haunted long after you turn the last page.

This is the definitive telling of the life of the late, great honky-tonk legend, based on hundreds of hours of interviews with Gary, his wife Mary Lou, family members, band members, producers, cohorts, dealers, and fellow stars such as Tanya Tucker, Willie Nelson, Dickey Betts, Dean Dillon, and Charley Pride. This intense and exhaustive 544-page book, filled throughout with rare and unseen images collected by McDonough, and an exclusive cover image by Grandal Stewart, Gary’s brother, reveals the complete, untold, and torrid history of a man who lived life as if “the plane could crash tomorrow.”