With all due respect to Margo Price and Sturgill Simpson, Kentucky-born singer Gary Stewart changed country music from the inside 50 years ago, when there was no Americana music to provide an exit route from commercialism. Stewart’s 1975 album Out of Hand combined his post-Jerry Lee Lewis vocals with the aural savvy of producer Roy Dea, who employed a crew of Nashville session players including pedal-steel master Pete Drake and guitarist Dale Sellers on indelible performances like “Drinkin’ Thing” and the title track. With Dea, Stewart recorded another classic, 1977’s Your Place or Mine, on which he transformed Guy Clark’s “Broken Hearted People (Take Me to a Barroom)” into stone-cold country. Stewart’s career declined after his 1980 collaboration with producer Chips Moman, Cactus and a Rose, failed to raise his profile, but he continued to perform and record until his death in 2003. Saturday at the Ford Theater, writer Jimmy McDonough discusses his new biography Gary Stewart: I Am From the Honky-Tonks, which lays out Stewart’s life in unsparing and sympathetic fashion. McDonough, who has also written superb biographies of Al Green and Tammy Wynette, will be joined by Stewart’s daughter Shannon Ashburn and interviewer RJ Smith.
2:30 p.m. at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s Ford Theater
222 Rep. John Lewis Way S.
