Two projects have arrived within a few months of each other to make the case for Gary Stewart, a singer whose commercial peak lasted a handful of years in the mid-1970s and whose reputation has since been carried mostly by other musicians.
The Delmore Recording Society released "One Track Mind" on July 17, a collection of previously unreleased recordings drawn from Stewart's late-1960s and early-1970s work as a songwriter, assembled from publishing archives. In April, the biographer Jimmy McDonough published "Gary Stewart: I Am From the Honky-Tonks," the result of research stretching back decades.
The voice
Stewart was born in Kentucky in 1944 and raised largely in Florida. What distinguished him was a hard, fast vibrato that sat somewhere between country singing and something closer to rock and roll, and which he used on material about drinking and marital wreckage without the wink that usually accompanied it.
His run began in earnest with "Drinkin' Thing" and reached its high point with "She's Actin' Single (I'm Drinkin' Doubles)," which topped the country chart in 1975. The album "Out of Hand" followed. Critics who paid little attention to Nashville paid attention to that record, and Stewart acquired the unusual status of a country singer with a rock critical following.
Why he disappeared
The conventional account is that Nashville rejected him. The more accurate one is that the relationship failed in both directions.
Stewart had limited appetite for the machinery around a country career in that era: the promotional circuit, the radio relationships, the requirement to keep producing to a formula. He returned to Florida, played small rooms, and spent long stretches unrecorded and unavailable. He also struggled with addiction over many years, which shaped both the work and the withdrawal from it.
The result is a discography with obvious gaps where a more compliant artist would have had albums, and a body of recorded work that circulated among enthusiasts more than it sold.
Stewart died in December 2003, at 59, weeks after the death of his wife Mary Lou, to whom he had been married since the early 1960s. He took his own life.
The case being made now
What the reissue adds is Stewart as a writer rather than only an interpreter. The recordings on "One Track Mind" are demos and early studio work from before the hits, and the argument implicit in releasing them is that the songwriting underneath the singing has been undervalued.
The biography makes a broader claim, which is that Stewart's refusal to cooperate with the industry was an artistic position rather than only a personal failure, and that the records are better than their commercial history suggests.
That argument is easier to make now than it was. The strain of country music that treats honky-tonk as a serious form rather than a nostalgia act has more currency than it did twenty years ago, and a number of contemporary artists have recorded his songs or cited him.
Whether this amounts to a rediscovery or another round of enthusiasm among people who already knew is not yet clear. What is clear is that there is now more Gary Stewart available to listen to than at any point since he was alive, which is the part that settles these questions eventually.
