Wednesday Apr 08, 2026
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
POWERHOUSE Arena
28 Adams Street (Corner of Adams & Water Street across from the Archway)
Brooklyn , NY
11201
About the Book.
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.”
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. 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.
Tammy Lang a/k/a Tammy Faye Starlite has come to be one of the brightest stars in the Downtown New York scene. She maintains a busy schedule of performances, guest appearances and benefits, not only in Manhattan but around the country including stints in Los Angeles, Palm Springs, Chicago, St Louis, Pittsburgh as well as the farthest reaches of New Jersey and New Hampshire.Her frequently sold-out shows – where she inhabits the spirits of both Nico and Marianne Faithfull – have garnered her rave reviews in the New York Times and elsewhere.