Shore Fire Media Inc.
03/06/2026 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 03/06/2026 10:57
Jimmy McDonough Announces Live Events Celebrating The Release Of Gary Stewart: I Am From The Honky-Tonks (April 2 / Wolf+Salmon)
McDonough To Appear At The Country Music Hall of Fame On April 11
Tour Itinerary Includes Brooklyn (Powerhouse Arena), Los Angeles (Stories), Austin (Waterloo Records), + More
Pre-Order HERE
March 6, 2026 - Today, Wolf+Salmon and Jimmy McDonough have announced a slate of live events in celebration of McDonough's forthcoming book Gary Stewart: I Am From The Honky-Tonks, the definitive telling of the life of the late, great honky-tonk legend Gary Stewart. Beginning in Brooklyn on April 5, McDonough will be appearing at bookstores and venues across the country, including a special Gary Stewart tribute event at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville on April 11. He will be joined in conversation at that event by author RJ Smith and Stewart's daughter Shannon Ashburn. Tickets for this event can be purchased HERE .
McDonough will kick off the tour at Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn on April 5 alongside acclaimed singer/performance artist Tammy Faye Starlite, and will continue on to Louisville (Louisville Free Public Library), Nashville (Country Music Hall of Fame), Austin (Waterloo Records) w/ live music from local artist Jake Penrod, and Los Angeles (Stories Books and Cafe), featuring a special Stewart-inspired mini-set by legendary Detroit rocker Margaret Doll Rod. Additional events will be announced in the coming weeks. A full itinerary can be found below.
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."
Known to many country fans for his crazed 70s hits like " She's Actin' Single (I'm Drinkin' Doubles) ", " Draggin' Shackles ", and " Drinkin' Thing ", Stewart's showstopping vocals and clever wordplay earned him admiration from the likes of Bob Dylan, The Allman Brothers, The Clash, Tanya Tucker, and more. Within a few years of breaking through, he quickly faded from the spotlight and all but disappeared 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.
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, 2026 GRAMMY-winner Zach Top , and 2025 CMA Male Vocalist of the Year Cody Johnson , as well as indie musicians Ryan Davis and Wednesday . Stewart's music has over 400K monthly listeners on Spotify alone.
More information about Jimmy McDonough and Gary Stewart: I Am From The Honky-Tonks can be found HERE .
Full US Tour Itinerary
April 5 - Brooklyn, NY - Powerhouse Arena (w/ Tammy Faye Starlite)
April 9 - Louisville, KY - Louisville Free Public Library (w/ WFPK's Michael Young)
https://www.lfpl.org/lifelong-learning#148
April 11 - Nashville, TN - Country Music Hall of Fame (w/ RJ Smith + Shannon Ashburn)
April 14 - Austin, TX - Waterloo Records (w/ Joe Nick Patoski + Jake Penrod)
April 23 - Los Angeles, CA - Stories Books and Cafe (w/ Bill Bentley + Margaret Doll Rod)
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.
For more information on Gary Stewart: I Am From The Honky Tonks, please reach out to Matt Hanks ( [email protected] ), Greg Jakubik ( [email protected] ), and Henry Thomas ( [email protected] ) at Shore Fire Media.
For more information on Wolf+Salmon, please reach out to Chris Campion ( [email protected] ).
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