Gary Stewart’s ghost haunts the greatest living music biographer

If you like Neil Young, you read Jimmy McDonough. The guy’s Shakey biography is an unpleasant, drugged-out, heroic fever-dream recital of a blowhard rock and roll genius’s life. McDonough himself called the book a “shotgun blast of buckshot fired by a blind man. With Tourette’s.” In a Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz hurrying along a California highway, he found it choice to rake an already skeptical Neil over the coals for “Sugar Mountain.” I’d say it takes a real whacko to sketch out the ungodliest hours of an artist loved by millions. Writing any book is psychically demanding, let alone one about a complicated celebrity—especially the dead ones, like Tammy Wynette. Spending more than an hour with some of those loons would make any sane journalist put a gun in their mouth. Luckily for us, McDonough is certifiably deranged himself. He’s a raconteur with a colorful deadpan who talks like he’s half-giving a lifetime achievement award speech and half-spinning a yarn of folklore. Some readers may find him as infuriating as Neil, call him a crank or a perfectionist. The Times said he was a “literary terminator.” I’d reckon he’s all of that. Nonfiction breathes and buckles beneath his pen. 

For decades, McDonough has kept out of the public eye, turning up out of the blue now with a 500-page homily about the greatest country singer of his era: Gary Stewart. He wants as many people in the world to know about this story as he can, hence the interview agreements and podcast appearances. I’m thankful for an hour of his time, even if he did show up with a stack of research on my writing. But McDonough is a hound vomiting out snappy language and cross-eyed prose, which I admire. Out of respect for his subjects, he studies every detail about them before the tape recorder turns on. As a Lincoln-obsessed kid, he went to Ford’s Theatre and asked questions until the museum replaced his tour guide with someone who could answer them. McDonough sports a fedora and never takes off his sunglasses, even indoors. He says uncomfortable things that most people would fold in front of. 

An ex of McDonough’s called him “Mr. Good Ear” before she got sick of him. She thought he’d have made a good, if not great, detective. “I like listening to people,” McDonough agrees. “I could probably write a book about my mail carrier. I find life, in all of its various forms, utterly fascinating. Everybody’s got a story to tell.” He doesn’t write just to gig. His biographies are kamikaze missions, not epiphanic tabloids. Reading a Jimmy McDonough book is like watching someone thrash around a mosh pit with a bomb strapped to their chest. It’s life or death for the guy. He’s a character in the stories he writes too, ribbing Neil Young over the songwriter’s dogshit ‘80s records or getting accused of “peddling flesh” by Andy Milligan. I’m sure his use of “I” in biographies about other people drives the journalism school windbags plum psychotic. But that’s just the place McDonough comes from, which he assures me is a place of love. Most of the folks who’ve read his books would disagree, but McDonough is dead serious. That’s the kind of love he has to give, and it comes by way of affection and admiration for men and women swallowed by tragedy and synthetics. “I’m not kidding around,” he says, his words tightly-wound like a fist. 

His new book, Gary Stewart: I Am from the Honky-Tonks, is probably the last biography he’ll ever write. Someone along the way got the idea that it was McDonough’s “swan song.” He’s an old geezer now, no doubt about it, but he’s got a story or two left to tell. “Like many other fools, I’ve dreamt of writing a novel,” he tells me. “I want to do a collection of all the articles that I’ve had everywhere in one book. There’s still an autobiography to do.” The autobiography is about and written by Jack Nitzsche, who “trusted” McDonough with his life story. Nitzsche was Phil Spector’s rotten former right-hand-man who worked on the best Stones and Neil Young records, scored The Exorcist and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and was married to Buffy Sainte-Marie for a time.He also dated Neil’s old flame Carrie Snodgress and was charged with threatening to kill her and pistol-whipping her. McDonough doesn’t pick the easy ones. Unfortunately, the demand for a book about Nitzsche in 2026 simmers at a low hum.

In 1980 McDonough’s friend Dale Lawrence, who later played in the Gizmos, played him Gary Stewart’s “I Had to Get Drunk Last Night,” but the ‘70s production didn’t hit him all the way, though now he’d probably describe it as something like “a beer-stained telegraph from a honky-tonk foxhole.” McDonough was just a 20-year-old hooligan from Hoboken who claimed to “know a thing or two” then, and Lawrence took him to the Lone Star Cafe in New York City to see Stewart sing and strum. “I entered that show as a fan,” McDonough writes in I Am from the Honky-Tonks, “and left a cult member.” There are, as he puts it, “moments in life where you discover something and you want to find out everything about the person or thing.” There was something at the heart of Stewart’s music that spoke directly to him, pretentious as that may sound. Stewart tore off a real piece at Lone Star 45 years ago, regaling 13th Street patrons with brief chart hits and country-music fundamentals. Fast-forward a half-decade and McDonough was in Fort Pierce, Florida, knocking on Stewart’s trailer door, looking to write a profile on the reclusive country singer for the Village Voice.

Stewart grew up in a Kentucky cornfield, singing at talent shows and in church pews. His dad was disabled from a mining accident. His mother sold coke, cosmetics, and whatever else she could swindle just to make a buck for the family. In Fort Pierce, Stewart’s parents found “another Appalachia already there waiting.” His siblings married drug dealers and escaped the law. Gary himself would live and die on the Treasure Coast, in a blacked-out shanty of manatees, citrus trees, sabal palms, and lagoons, his Hawaiian shirt and ladies’ cowboy boots still on. He married his muse, the raven-haired Mary Lou Taylor, when she was 17. By the time McDonough found him, Stewart was an outlaw hiding out in hillbilly heaven with Mary Lou, snorting speed off album covers. “I have no limits in my mind,” he told McDonough. “I’ve done it all, y’know? I am everything.” 

But Stewart didn’t actually care about stardom or accomplishments. He was the only musician that McDonough has written about that just didn’t give a shit about publicity. Sure, it was nice when the money was flowing, but Nashville never got Stewart. He wasn’t “their guy,” as McDonough approximates it, though he’s a bit more colorful about it in the book, calling the city a “bland, generic, tasteless, pop-rock gumbo seasoned with whatever the popular flavors of the moment are.” Stewart was more bootlegger than Opry kissass. “He just wanted to make music, and Nashville has a lot of other ideas when you want to make music. And that’s fine, they’ve done it well. But Gary just didn’t fit into that.” It’s not like Stewart made it easy for others to understand him. He was a complete original in a weird timeframe, the type of guy you have to take on his own terms only. After working in Charley Pride’s touring band and opening for Dolly Parton, Stewart went solo and flamed out after a handful of records, including Out of Hand and Your Place or Mine back to back around the bicentennial. His vibrato, emotive like a pedal steel, was a link to the past, McDonough says, but wrapped in a brown-paneled rumpus room. “There were a lot of factors working for and against him, which I quickly latched onto once I saw him live and then, a little later, was on the prowl to meet him.” Out of Hand producer Roy Dea concurred a long time ago. “You get hooked on Stewart,” he said. “He’s like a damn drug.” 

MCDONOUGH HIMSELF WAS FULL of fire and brimstone when he muscled his way into Stewart’s double-wide with an obscure Wild Bill Emerson 45 single in-hand in 1986. Stewart had requested it in exchange for an interview, and McDonough’s buddy (and short-time Feelies percussionist) Charlie Beasley tracked it down for him in Pittsburgh at a store with “eight miles of records.” Back in that trailer, a feeling pierced the air. McDonough had never written a profile or interviewed anyone, let alone traveled a thousand miles to talk to a washed-up, skunk-drunk junkie singer. But I reckon Stewart was game for the adventure. Here was this Jersey spitfuck talking a good ol’ Kentucky boy’s ear off about bar songs long covered in dust. They connected over music, especially Gary’s own, and Stewart could tell that McDonough was serious as a heart attack about it, even if he couldn’t play an instrument himself. “That allowed him to forgive a lot of my bad behavior. It’s a wonder he didn’t clock me sometimes. Jesus Christ, the things I said to this guy…,” McDonough says. “He only threw a knife at you,” I say. “But it didn’t connect, you know?” he replies. 

Stewart, mercurial and high as a kite, had patience with the young journalist, because he was “far more sophisticated about human behavior” than McDonough at the time. Stewart let McDonough be irritating, because he recognized something in that kid’s soul. “I wanted to know about it all. I just loved it all. I loved hearing him talk about Kentucky. I gravitated to all this stuff that he represented, and he was sharing it with me. The generosity was just off the charts.” Drugs, comatose in his bedroom for days on end… Yeah, that was Gary Stewart. But when the tape machine was rolling, he was present with McDonough, thoughtful. Off the cuff. “Just lay it on me pal,” McDonough told him. Stewart reciprocated with the good, bad, and ugly. Pills, booze, death, sleeping around. Guitars and gigs in-between. A man from the honky-tonks. A man who loved his wife and daughter. A man always on the edge but never going over. A man who slipped through the cracks of country music and is still out of sight. 

Not even Gregg Allman and Dickey Betts could save Cactus and a Rose in 1980. Getting busted for coke around the same time didn’t help either. McDonough felt a responsibility to read Stewart the riot act over his bad albums, just as he would do with Neil Young over Trans and Everybody’s Rockin’. He dogged on Brand New and Battleground so much it made Out of Hand and Your Place or Mine sound like Rubber Soul and Revolver. Did McDonough cross a line? “I look back on that as folly,” he shares. “I wish I had spent more time investigating things I wasn’t aware of until he was already gone.” After the book was done, questions lingered and roiled around in McDonough’s brain. Did he convey how he really felt about Stewart? Did he do the man justice? Was he fair? Those answers are up to the readers. “But I loved the guy,” McDonough confirms, “and he moved me on a level that no artist did. I’m not saying he’s better or worse than this one or that one but, for me, he just got to me. He’s getting to me now, as I talk to you.” 

In 2003, Stewart put a bullet through his own neck less than a month after his beloved Mary Lou died of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. A toxicology report showed that Xanax, oxycodone, and highly disastrous amounts of the sleep medication doxepin were in her system. Stewart’s own autopsy showed similar levels of the latter. Doxepin, when consumed in higher quantities than the recommended therapeutic dose, can increase suicidal ideation. Gary and Mary Lou had a fatal love story: one was always meant to go after the other, with or without drugs. When they both passed away, everyone around them was left devastated. Those things always shake out that way, but these were two very special people who had dark corners. “You can’t be afraid to go to the dark corners,” McDonough assures me. “Gary was a lot about the dark corners. You hear it in the music, it’s unavoidable. I felt like, if I truly respected who he was, I had to present it all. I want you to be driving down the road in an old jalopy with them like I did, and for those feelings to be legit.” 

And in that, we feel Shannon more than anybody else. She is the best parts of Gary and Mary Lou made into one person, as McDonough puts it. The two of them grew close while he wrote I Am from the Honky-Tonks, because she got all of Gary’s living family members and friends in rooms with McDonough and his recorder. What first seemed impossible to McDonough became feasible  when Shannon entered the picture. She’s been a steward to her father’s legacy, carrying a torch for him and Mary Lou, doing whatever it takes for Gary to get his due. And McDonough is right there with her, calling her a couple times a week to catch up. Shannon was the only person McDonough worried about reading the book. After finishing the manuscript, she called McDonough and told him, gladly, that it was the “first whole book” she’d ever read. “There are no words I can manufacture to convey my love and respect for this person,” he gestures to me, all this time later, noticeably choked up. “She ain’t kidding around, and I think Gary would really appreciate that. She’s got it. I know we’ll be in each other’s lives for the rest of our time on Earth. When you do what I do, to have a person go  out on a limb for you that’s a rare event. And she never asked for anything in return. She knew how her parents felt about me.” On the back of a picture of herself she gave to McDonough, Mary Lou wrote: “Write a book about me and Gary. Love always, Mary Lou Stewart. You touch me where I live.” 

Despite Shannon’s best efforts, there’s not much stock in Gary Stewart these days. Roadhouse Band honcho Ryan Davis digs him, Wednesday put a cover of “She’s Actin’ Single (I’m Drinkin’ Double)” on their Mowing the Leaves Instead of Piling ‘em Up album, and that’s really about it. No one I know is wearing themselves out on “Drinkin’ Thing” or “Pretend I Never Happened.” But I grew up in the northwesternmost part of Appalachia, so I knew Gary Stewart not by name but by voice, when one of his tapes clattered many of my grandparents’ quietest rooms. In my fantasy, I’ve chalked that up to Appalachian telepathy. I don’t know if Kentucky-born hillbillies fading out in a shit-hot Florida tin can is out of vogue now, but McDonough thinks Stewart “might be a little too much for people, especially these days.” This isn’t an “old man yelling at cloud” moment, but a sincere survey of a strange honky-tonker’s mystique. Stewart, by my count, has more mysteries about him than one could solve, even McDonough, whose book untangles a couple of those pill-dusted, aluminum-covered webs. Most of the artifacts from his life, collected over time by family friend Tommy Schwartz, are “another rabbit always coming out the hat”—a lost recording, little bits of rope he liked to tie, whatever mystery he left by the side of the highway. 40 years and one book later and McDonough is still finding new things Gary touched or played or sang. “To me, his greatness is assured.” 

Stewart is a fuller person to McDonough now. The man wasn’t self-reflective, so McDonough had to find all of Stewart’s angles through recollections by his loved ones. McDonough wanted everybody else to flesh Gary out. I Am from the Honky-Tonks is an oral history recited by the Stewart family and souped up by McDonough, who approached Stewart’s life with empathy, kindness, wit, and a mess of footnotes. But that doesn’t mean theis book is a puff piece. Far from it. Following Gary’s daughter Shannon as she rids her parents’ house of OxyContin pills, which she says reeked like Cheetos, does not make for a flattering portrayal. McDonough paints a picture of truth at a time when no one has an honest map of the world. These books of his aren’t done lightly. When he wrote the Voice article, he left out a story about Stewart’s mother, guns, and death threats, because Stewart begged him to keep it out. “And then after the article came out, and I told him what wasn’t in there, he was pissed that I didn’t put it in,” McDonough laughs. He loses sleep over every detail, ugly or heartwarming. Stewart would have wanted the real thing, not some phony advertisement. “Maybe I accomplished it. Maybe I didn’t,” McDonough says. “You tell me.”

Between the time of the Village Voice article’s publication and Stewart’s death, McDonough still crossed paths with him here and there. Other projects were calling him instead: Tammy Wynette: Tragic Country Queen, and Soul Survivor: A Biography of Al Green, and especially Shakey, which got delayed, denounced by Neil Young, and even taken to court. Plus, he didn’t want to just replicate the Voice profile. Whatever book got written about Stewart was going to be a difficult story for the people he left behind. At some point, McDonough told himself, “I have to do this book, and I’m going to do it now.” What he came up with is not quite the “poison blow dart aimed at the heart” that his book about Andy Milligan was 25 years ago, but a redneck tableau about a “honky-tonk Dracula” born to sing and suffer. The tale of a man who could eat 20 tabs of acid at once, sing a perfect tune, and sleep for days in his “claustrophobic tomb” of memorabilia and Western bric-a-brac.

But McDonough has his regrets about where he and Stewart left things. Nothing sour, just gaps he could never fill in about Gary, or never thought to until after he passed. “You think there’s always going to be another chance, another time,” McDonough says. “And that wasn’t the case here. But I considered him a friend.” He thought those ghosts would disappear once the book was finished. When he was working through the pages, he couldn’t listen to anyone’s music but Gary’s. The story, he admits, feels strangely unfinished even after 500 pages. “It’s all around me all the time. I wish I could take a break, but I don’t know what it is about this one. It’s really got its claws in me.” Stewart, despite his irks and quirks, was kind to McDonough, bargaining with the young writer over his life story and throwing steak knives at his head. But I wonder if that kindness will be obvious to anyone who reads I Am from the Honky-Tonks. I imagine it will be, so long as no one gets lost in all the mayhem and “dime-store violence” that colored Gary Stewart, a man undone by his obsessions and put back together by McDonough’s. 

Gary Stewart: I Am from the Honky-Tonks is out now on Wolf+Salmon. 

Matt Mitchell is the editor of Paste. They live in Los Angeles.