Arts
By Bill Friskics-Warren
With the death of Gary Stewart, of an apparent suicide last week, country music lost a honky-tonker who updated the hillbilly existentialism of Hank Williams for the rock ’n’ roll era. Stewart, who was 58, often gets pegged as a hard-country holdout along the lines of Mel Street and Gene Watson, the kind of singer who seemed like an endangered species as the Music Row bland-out of the ’70s gave way to the mechanical bull of Urban Cowboy. And to be sure, Stewart’s RCA debut Out of Hand, produced by the late Roy Dea and released in 1975, was the sawdust-and-steel long-player of that decade. Backed by a Harold Bradley-led edition of the Nashville A-Team, the Letcher County, Ky., native sings of drinking, scuffling and cheating in the Dickel-steeped quaver of someone who’d spent many a night stoned at the jukebox.
But Stewart was also an unreconstructed Southern rocker. His first single was a cover of “Ramblin’ Man”—not the Hank Williams touchstone, but rather the Allman Brothers’ pop hit from 1973. Stewart, who at times sounded like the country Jerry Lee, could convey tears-in-your-beer pathos with the best of them; it’s just that he often tempered his angst with an emotional distance and sense of irony that owed as much to Bob Dylan as it did to ol’ Hank. “I had to get drunk last night,” he rues on his steel-slaked recording of Rodney Crowell’s “I Had to Get Drunk,” only to follow hard with the laughing-to-keep-from-crying punch line, “when I should have been sleeping with you.”
Stewart’s only No. 1 country hit came with “She’s Actin’ Single (I’m Drinkin’ Doubles),” a record that casts him as a cuckold drowning his troubles in some dive while his wife is coming on to a stranger in a bar across town. The conceit of the title could pass for vintage Roger Miller, and with the Jordanaires and steel guitarist John Hughey crying in time, Stewart plays the self-pitying chump to the hilt. “I’m not weak, I tell myself, I stay because I’m strong / The truth is that I’m not man enough to stop her from doing me wrong,” he blubbers as he picks himself off the floor for a final run at the record’s over-the-top chorus. Struck by how pathetic he is, it’s as if Stewart is laughing at himself—almost, but not quite. The whole affair is killing him, and even if he were laughing, it would just be to disguise his real weakness: The whiskey’s going down too easily, and there, on the bar, stands another glass.
Despite decades of prodigious drinking and drugging—and despite co-writing “Ten Years of This,” about enduring another 10 years of marriage—Stewart stayed married to his teenage sweetheart, Mary Lou, for 42 years until her death last month. The circumstances surrounding his own death are unclear, though the timing suggests he simply couldn’t carry on any longer. It’d be a cliché to say he died of a broken heart, especially when, in that wraithlike vibrato, he used to sing, “I got this drinkin’ thing / To keep from thinkin’ things.” More than likely, the bottle finally let him down.
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