January 21, 2026 - Today, Wolf+Salmon has officially announced the April 2 publication of Jimmy McDonough’s Gary Stewart: I Am From The Honky-Tonks,the definitive telling of the life of the late, great honky-tonk legend Gary Stewart. An epic tale of sex, drugs, and country music almost 40 years in the making, the book is the eighth and final biography by Jimmy McDonough (Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography, Tammy Wynette: Tragic Country Queen), and once again reaffirms his status as America’s greatest chronicler of popular culture. 

An unsung hero of 20th century American music, Gary Stewart is regarded as one of the most talented singers, songwriters, and vocalists of his generation. In the mid-1970s, crazed hits like "She’s Actin' Single (I'm Drinkin' Doubles)" and"Drinkin' Thing" rocketed Stewart up the charts and earned him the admiration of Bob Dylan, The Allman Brothers, Tanya Tucker, and more. 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 doublewide Stewart was hiding out in, beginning a four-decade obsession with the elusive musician. 

Utilizing the unique combination of oral history, vivid prose, and personal experience that made McDonough’s Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography a bestseller, Gary Stewart: I Am From The Honky-Tonks follows a feral Kentucky family who surfed success and rear-ended disaster in drug-soaked, 1970s Florida. At its core is the tempestuous, tragic love story of Gary Stewart and his wife, Mary Lou, that will leave readers haunted long after they turn the last page. Featuring 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.” 

“Gary Stewart stood at a weird intersection of country, rock, rockabilly, bluegrass, and blues, and melded them together like no one had ever done before—or since. You want to talk about country rock? No one did it better or took it further than Gary Stewart. Gary had fallen off the face of the earth and I became obsessed with finding him. Thirty-seven years in the making, this book is the result.” 

- Jimmy McDonough

While still enjoying a strong grassroots following with older country fans, there has been a resurgence of interest in Gary Stewart’s music in recent years that has found him been rediscovered, championed, and covered by the new wave of Nashville stars, including Ella Langley, Midland, 2025 CMA New Artist of the Year winner Zach Top, and Cody Johnson, as well as indie musicians Ryan Davis and Wednesday. Stewart’s music has over 400K monthly listeners on Spotify alone. 

McDonough will be hitting the road this spring for a run of in-person readings and discussions at notable bookstores and venues around the country, including a just-announced event at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, with CMHoF historian RJ Smith in conversation with McDonough and Gary’s daughter Shannon Stewart about the book and Gary Stewart’s musical legacy. More information can be found HERE.

Pre-order Gary Stewart: I Am From The Honky Tonks here: https://www.wolfandsalmon.com/product-page/gary-stewart-i-am-from-the-honky-tonks

About Jimmy McDonough

Jimmy McDonough is America’s greatest living biographer. A pop culture maven with a two-fisted style that reads more like pulp fiction, the larger-than-life subjects of McDonough’s books leap off the page and lodge themselves in the subconscious. 

McDonough has written eight biographies. They skew between cultural icons with massive worldwide appeal, and fascinating obscurities from the American underground; every one of them messy, complicated figures whose messy, complicated lives McDonough often embeds himself with, researches to death, and explores in all their unexpurgated, unvarnished glory. The first seven, in chronological order of publication: Neil Young, Andy Milligan, Russ Meyer, Tammy Wynette, Al Green, The Ormonds, Georgette Dante. 

His eighth, and latest, Gary Stewart: I Am From the Honky-Tonks, the jaw-dropping tale of the titular ’70s honky-tonk singer-songwriter, a true country music outlaw, gestated over almost 40 years. The book was born, like several others in his oeuvre, of a personal relationship with the subject that informs both its tone and the author’s trademark intrusion into the narrative. McDonough swears this will be the last biography he writes, concluding an expertly curated catalogue of work that doubles as a lifelong, obsessive, and very personal investigation into outsized outsider artists who all reflected and shaped American post-war culture.