Appalachian Figures Series
Country music fans remember Gary Stewart as the “king of honky tonks,” the high-voiced outlaw who turned barroom heartbreak into art. People in Letcher County remember something more specific. They remember the kid from the Dunham coal camp who grew up in Jenkins, the miner’s son whose name ended up on a Route 23 highway sign and on RCA record labels in the same lifetime.
Today, Stewart is a cult figure in roots-country circles, the subject of long essays and an upcoming full-length biography. Yet the basics of his story begin in familiar Appalachian territory: a coal town, a hurt miner, a family forced to move out in search of work, and a son who never quite left those hills behind.
Coal Camp Beginnings: Dunham And Jenkins
The paper trail for Gary Ronnie Stewart starts in Letcher County’s vital records. A Kentucky birth certificate for “Gary R Stewart,” volume 061, certificate number 30044, records his birth in 1944, not 1945, to parents George and Georgia Stewart in the Jenkins area of Letcher County.
Later reference books and even tourism materials sometimes shifted that date to 1945, but the birth record and the Social Security Death Index, which both list 28 May 1944, are primary sources. They anchor him firmly in the coal fields of eastern Kentucky and settle the birth-year debate on the side of 1944.
The Kentucky Music Hall of Fame’s inductee biography fills in the family story. Stewart was born in the coal mining town of Dunham, Letcher County, one of eleven children of miner George Robert Stewart and Georgia N. Niece. The family soon moved a few miles to Jenkins, settling in the Payne Gap area after Gary turned four.
He later summed up those early years in one plain sentence: “I was raised on a mother’s love, soup beans, corn bread and taters.”
In mid-century Jenkins, coal touched almost everything. The town was a classic company community, tied to Consolidation Coal and ringed by camps like Dunham and Payne Gap. Stewart’s father went underground to earn a living. His mother took Avon orders and wrangled a house full of children. Between the company script, the holler gossip, and the church-house singing, Gary absorbed the sounds and stories that would later surface in his songs.
From Payne Gap To Fort Pierce
Like many Appalachian families, the Stewarts left not because they wanted to, but because they had to. After George Stewart was injured in a mining accident, regular coal work dried up. In 1957 the family moved to Fort Pierce on Florida’s Atlantic coast, looking for safer and steadier wages.
Gary was about twelve. He carried with him a Kentucky accent, a coal-camp imagination, and a restlessness that did not always fit the classroom. As a teenager in Florida he taught himself guitar and piano, started a band called the Tomcats, and began working the Gulf and Glades honky tonks while holding down day jobs.
He married Mary Lou Taylor when he was seventeen. While he punched a clock at an airplane factory, he played country and rock in bars at night. It was on one of those stages, at the Wagon Wheel in Okeechobee, that he met country star Mel Tillis. Tillis told him plainly that the road forward was songwriting and Nashville. Stewart listened.
Songwriter, Sideman, And Finally A Star
By the mid-1960s Stewart was making those Nashville runs. He cut sides for small labels like Cory and Kapp and began writing with Okeechobee policeman Bill Eldridge. Their songs found homes with better-known artists. Stonewall Jackson recorded “Poor Red Georgia Dirt.” Billy Walker, Cal Smith, and Nat Stuckey cut Stewart and Eldridge tunes with titles like “She Goes Walking Through My Mind” and “You Can’t Housebreak A Tomcat.”
For a time he even played piano in Charley Pride’s band, the Pridesmen, and appears on Pride’s live double album In Person.
Yet Stewart’s own records on Kapp and Decca stalled. Tired of Music Row, he went back to Florida and to the harder bar sound he preferred. That could have been the end of the story if not for an RCA producer named Roy Dea, who heard Stewart’s demos and coaxed him back to Nashville in the early 1970s.
The result was Out of Hand (1975), a lean, loud honky tonk record that cut across the smoother “countrypolitan” sound dominating radio at the time. The album sent three songs up the charts: “Drinkin’ Thing,” “Out of Hand,” and “She’s Actin’ Single (I’m Drinkin’ Doubles),” which hit number one on the country singles chart.
Critics took notice. Time profiled him in 1976 under the headline “A Honky Tonk Man” and repeated what fans were already saying in Texas and Tennessee taverns: Gary Stewart was the king of honkytonk. Rolling Stone praised Out of Hand as proof that honky tonk and rockabilly “may not be dead yet.”
Music historian Bill Malone would later call Out of Hand “one of the greatest honky-tonk country albums ever recorded,” placing Stewart at the center of his landmark study of country music and the Southern working class.
Through the late 1970s he followed with albums like Steppin’ Out, Your Place or Mine, and Little Junior, backed by a road band that called itself the Honky Tonk Liberation Army. Onstage he was wiry and combustible, his ragged vibrato cutting through clouds of steel guitar and Telecaster twang. Fellow artists as different as Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Tanya Tucker, and the Clash became fans. Dylan in particular singled out Stewart’s “Ten Years of This” as a personal favorite.
Reading The Records: 1944 Or 1945?
For local historians, one of the more interesting footnotes in Stewart’s story is how often his basic facts were miscopied. Early fan-written bios and even professionally produced tourism materials along the U.S. 23 Country Music Highway sometimes gave 1945 as his birth year.
The Kentucky Music Hall of Fame induction and most recent reference works now follow the 1944 date, but the discrepancy lingers online.
Sorting this out is a small case study in how historians weigh sources. The Kentucky birth certificate and the Social Security Death Index are primary documents created close to the events they describe. Online family-history trees and compendiums like the Country Music Highway magazine are useful, but they are secondary or even tertiary. When those derivative sources disagree with the official records, the archivist’s rule is simple: trust the paper on file unless you have good reason not to.
In Stewart’s case, the vital records, a consistent 28 May 1944 birth date across multiple independent discographies, and institutional biographies from Kentucky-based organizations all line up on 1944.
“I’m Proud To Be From Letcher County”
Although Stewart spent almost his entire professional life based in Florida and on the road, he never ceased talking about where he came from. The Kentucky Music Hall of Fame biography quotes him saying, “I’m proud to be from Letcher County, Kentucky.”
That pride worked its way directly into his songs. Tracks like “Easy People” and “Harlan County Highway” draw on coalfield imagery and eastern Kentucky place names. In a set of “lost tapes” curated by writer Jimmy McDonough, Stewart talks about his love for an old gospel 78 recorded at the Letcher County courthouse, connecting his musical imagination back to courthouse steps and church pews at home.
When Kentucky designated U.S. 23 as the Country Music Highway, Stewart became one of Letcher County’s banner artists. A roadside marker near Jenkins names him alongside better-known stars like Loretta Lynn and Patty Loveless. Paintsville’s tourism materials echo that story for visitors to the Country Music Highway Museum, simply noting that “born in Jenkins in Letcher County, Gary Stewart is best known for his No. 1 hit ‘She’s Actin’ Single (I’m Drinkin’ Doubles).’”
Coming Home: Jenkins Days And Local Memory
For people who lived along Elkhorn Creek, the most vivid image of Gary Stewart is not the RCA publicity shot. It is the day he came back.
In September 1998 Stewart returned to Letcher County as guest of honor at the Jenkins Days or Jenkins Homecoming festival, serving as grand marshal of the parade and headlining the evening’s music. Local coverage in The Mountain Eagle and later reminiscences in Appalachian media remember how the streets filled and cars lined the road well out of town.
Real Appalachia, a regional media project, has recalled that homecoming as a touchstone moment. They describe fans crowding the park to see “country music’s most underrated singer” finally play a big show in the town that raised him.
A few years earlier, a benefit concert filmed for Headwaters Television captured a similar feeling. In that 1979 footage, “Letcher County native Gary Stewart” sits down with interviewer Jack Wright, playing songs and talking about his path from Jenkins to the national charts.
These local sources, along with festival programs and tourism blurbs that name Stewart as a “Jenkins native,” do more than confirm a birthplace. They show how the community has claimed him as one of its own.
Fort Pierce, Billy Bob’s, And A Hard Ending
By the 1980s Stewart’s life grew more complicated. Alcohol and drugs took a toll. Recording slowed, but he remained a powerful live draw in Texas dancehalls and Florida roadhouses. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, independent label HighTone Records coaxed him back into the studio for albums like Brand New and Battleground, which critics praised as a rough-edged return to form.
In 2003 he finally released an official live record, Live at Billy Bob’s Texas, where the announcer introduces him as “king of the honky tonks” and Stewart growls through career-spanning sets.
That same year, tragedy struck at home. On November 26, 2003, Mary Lou Stewart died of pneumonia after nearly forty-three years of marriage. Friends told reporters that Gary was devastated and canceled his upcoming shows.
On December 16, 2003, he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his Fort Pierce apartment. National outlets including CMT, the New York Times, the Houston Chronicle, and roots-music magazine No Depression all reported his death and took stock of his influence.
Back in eastern Kentucky, The Mountain Eagle ran a short notice titled along the lines of “Funeral services for Gary Stewart, 59, formerly of Letcher County,” noting that services were held in Fort Pierce and quietly reminding readers that the honky-tonk king was once a kid from Dunham and Jenkins.
An Appalachian Honky Tonk Legacy
In the two decades since Stewart’s death, his reputation has only grown. Writers for outlets like Dangerous Minds and Antigravity magazine have called him “country music’s dark angel” and “the Count Yorga of honky tonk,” pointing new listeners to Jimmy McDonough’s long, haunting essay “Little Junior, King of the Honky Tonks: The Life and Death of Gary Stewart.”
Saving Country Music published a twentieth-anniversary retrospective in 2023 that framed his life as both a cautionary tale and a lost chapter of country history. McDonough himself has expanded his earlier work into a full-length biography, Gary Stewart: I Am from the Honky-Tonks, slated for release in the coming years and widely described as the definitive account.
For Appalachian historians, Stewart’s story matters on several levels. He stands as a textbook example of the mid-twentieth-century coalfield diaspora: a miner’s son pushed out by injury and job loss, who carried the mountains with him into a new landscape. He turned that experience into music that spoke to working-class listeners who understood eviction notices, company towns, and long rules of two-lane blacktop between home and wherever the work was.
He also complicates easy narratives about “hillbilly” music. Stewart blended honky tonk, southern rock, soul, and bluegrass, drawing praise from rock critics and punk-leaning listeners as well as country traditionalists. Yet when Kentucky put up its Country Music Highway signs, he did not ask to be labeled anything fancy. As the Hall of Fame biography notes, he liked to say it plainly: he was proud to be from Letcher County.
On the map, Jenkins is a small dot on U.S. 23, a former company town tucked against Pine Mountain. In country-music history, it is also where Gary Ronnie Stewart came into the world in 1944. The records in the courthouse and the memories in the festival crowds agree.
Sources & Further Reading
Kentucky birth certificate for Gary R. Stewart, vol. 061, certificate no. 30044 (1944), Letcher County vital records, as cited in multiple reference works and discographies. Wikipedia+1
Social Security Death Index entry for Gary Ronnie Stewart, giving a birth date of 28 May 1944 and a death date of 16 December 2003, last residence Fort Pierce, Florida. Wikipedia+1
The Mountain Eagle (Whitesburg, Ky.), various “Way We Were” columns and notices on Stewart’s Jenkins Days appearance and his 2003 funeral, describing him as a Letcher County or Jenkins native. The Mountain Eagle+3The Mountain Eagle+3The Mountain Eagle+3
Headwaters Television segment, “Gary Stewart on Headwaters Television” (1979), with interview by Jack Wright, circulating via later digital uploads and social-media shares. youtube.com+1
Gary Stewart’s recordings, especially Out of Hand (RCA, 1975), Little Junior (RCA, 1978), Brand New (HighTone, 1988), Battleground (HighTone, 1990), I’m a Texan (1993), and Live at Billy Bob’s Texas (2003). Wikipedia+1
“Gary Stewart,” Kentucky Music Hall of Fame and Museum, 2024 inductee biography. Kentucky Music Hall of Fame and Museum
“Gary Stewart (singer),” Wikipedia entry and its cited sources, including Time, CMT, the Palm Beach Post, and work by Bill C. Malone, Kurt Wolff, Vladimir Bogdanov, and Irwin Stambler. Wikipedia+1
Country Music Highway magazine and web features, especially “Letcher County’s Gary Stewart,” which tie Stewart’s story to U.S. 23 tourism and the Route 23 marker near Jenkins. Country Music Highway+2Country Music Highway+2
Praguefrank’s Country Discography and related discography sites, which compile detailed sessionography and confirm the 1944 Letcher County birth date. Country Discography 2+1
Encyclopedic histories such as Bill C. Malone’s Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class, The Encyclopedia of Country Music, and Country Music: The Rough Guide, all of which discuss Stewart’s role in modern honky tonk. Wikipedia+1
David DeVoss, “A Honky Tonk Man,” Time, 27 September 1976. TIME
Chet Flippo, “Honky Tonk Singer Gary Stewart Dies,” CMT.com, 17 December 2003. Wikipedia
Charles Passy, “The Ballad of Gary & Mary Lou,” Palm Beach Post, 14 March 2004. Wikipedia
No Depression, “Gary Stewart: 1945 to 2003,” 29 February 2004. No Depression+1
Jimmy McDonough, “Little Junior, King of the Honky Tonks: The Life and Death of Gary Stewart,” Perfect Sound Forever (2004), and his forthcoming biography Gary Stewart: I Am from the Honky Tonks. Furious+1
“20 Years Ago: The Tragic Death of Gary Stewart,” Saving Country Music, 16 December 2023. Saving Country Music
Dangerous Minds, “Country music’s dark angel: The ragged glory of Gary Stewart,” and Dirk Fontenot, “The Count Yorga of Honky Tonk: An Ode to Gary Stewart,” Antigravity magazine. Dangerous Minds -+1
Real Appalachia, “Gary Stewart – Country Music’s Most Underrated Singer?” (Melody Mondays feature) and related posts linking Stewart to Letcher County heritage and the Country Music Highway. Real Appalachia+1
Local and county histories for Jenkins and Letcher County, Kentucky, including entries that list Gary Stewart among notable residents. Wikipedia+2Familypedia+2