Bio : 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.