Gary Stewart's ten biggest hits

She's Acting Single. But bummed that I Had To Get Drunk Last Night isn't up here.

Out of Hand is a great song too....seriously this guy is such a special person. such a fucking artist.

whiskey trip is great too...but yeah "She's Actin' Single" is hard to avoid

Voting for SAS like everybody else, with a nod to the missing "Single Again."

Love his Greatest Hits album so much -- One of my favorite country albums ever, period.

Should probably vote for one of these (most of which have a certain theme running through them, obviously):

She's Actin' Single (I'm Drinkin' Doubles) (#1 - 1975)
Out of Hand (#4 - 1974)
Drinkin' Thing (#10 - 1974)
Ten Years of This (#16 - 1977)
Quits (#26 - 1977)

But I'm gonna be weird and vote for the rocker I used to play in DJ sets instead:

Flat Natural Born Good-Timin' Man (#20 - 1975)

actually I might vote "drinking thing" if it were an option. the album "out of hand" is all killer no filler

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

My Pick Won (In A Landslide)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmC68DaFKtY

live set recorded in a Florida bar in 2003 — forty years into his career and ten days before his death, and he hadn't lost a whit of his energy & charisma. it depresses me that the last song he played live was the hopeless and world-weary (even by his standards) "An Empty Glass", but I guess it fits.

a couple of Gary's old bandmates took a break from painting someone's house to play a set of 8 of Gary's songs. I love the casual feel of these:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upby9XOqETY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU2el-aKri0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edw97BVSvQQ

Been on a huge kick and looking for similar stuff. Some Michael Martin Murphey stuff definitely fits the bill - what else can you give me in this 70s honky tonk sorta vein?

Moe Bandy, maybe? I'd recommend the compilation Honky Tonk Amnesia: The Hard Country Sound Of Moe Bandy if you like the sound of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qk_pW3N-ZSI

Thanks dude! Good tip. I already have this album. It's great, but literally every song is about cheating. Or being cheated on. Or wanting to cheat. HA!

oh, don't be silly. there's one song on there that's about Hank Williams...and how it's so easy to relate to his songs about cheating. and what about that song where Moe is one of the best rodeo clowns in the business...until his girl cheats on him? and then there's that song where he goes honky tonkin'...to take his mind off the girl who cheated on him...except all the songs on the jukebox are about cheating, so he cries a tear in his beer.

:)

I love this stuff though, wide thematic range or otherwise. Moe Bandy was definitely more of a traditionalist than Gary, in the sense that he didn't really integrate rock into his honky-tonk the way Gary did.

Mickey Gilley was sort of in the same vein as those guys. heck, this song even sounds like "Out of Hand":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKWSZVNNKKI

Will try again. I have tried to get into Mickey Gilley a hundred times but it never 'takes.' On paper, it's everything I should enjoy, but for whatever reason, I don't. I think it's all the sappy strings and shit.

I've been listening to Your Place or Mine; it's gonna become one of my all-time faves, I can tell, for "Dancing Eyes" and the title track.

this guy is awesome. what a voice

this stuff is extremely great, seems like he really needs like a deep dive boxed set of some kind: https://www.bynwr.com/articles/gary-stewart-the-lost-tapes

Yet another good old thread I hadn't seen before (wau @ 0 votes for "Out of Hand," one of his catchiest singles, pretty much a theme song). I wrote this for the Voice, re the then-recent live album, which suddenly, while I was writing it up, turned out to be the last thing released in his lifetime, but also mentions the CD incl. two of his best LPs.

Out of Hand

January 28 - February 3, 2004 Issue 04

His songs flash by like whole lives.
photo: Andrew W. Long

Gary Stewart
Live at Billy Bob's Texas
Smith Music Group

(The following paragraph was written for a country music poll ballot in
December, right before I glanced up from my laptop, and saw the chyron crawl
beneath Larry King: "Singer Gary Stewart has just been found dead in his Florida home."
His wife died, their son already had, and he shot himself in the neck: a fairly slow way to go.)

On Live at Billy Bob's Texas, Gary Stewart is but a ghost of himself. Now
fitting the "quiet ones you gotta watch" barkeep's pro-file, this
free(dom'sjustanotherword)bird of yore---hyped as the "Springsteen of country," when he and B. were driving themselves through mid-'70s murk---no longer shivers
and wails, but leaves dusty fingerprints all over gleaming, surging
honky-tonkcore, the Lost City of his Greatest (mostly shouldabeen) Hits. The band's
eager, but also well-disciplined, and totally unannotated, like ghost riders in the
sky.

(Later): Yeah, another dead guy. Once upon a time, he was Dr. Fun and Mr.
Doom (and self-awareness, and headlonging), simultaneously. Stewart still sounds impossibly corny, truly inspired, while flourishing and flinging single notes and phrases all the way through Out of Hand/Your Place or
Mine, his two best LPs on one CD. Songs flash by like whole lives, but really
they're just his moments, ticking away.

Billy Bob's cuts like "An Empty Glass (That's the Way the Day Ends)" turn the tides
down like blankets, till I'm bathed in (pace tua, St. Sade) the *truly* sweetest taboo (of self-pity).
Tiring, soothing. I just stare through his stare, on the rocks, as he
imagines/avoids/follows her stare. "Maybe you feel cheated, for having married so young,"
he mutters to self and/or significant other (wed in their mid-teens, forty-odd years ago now), while shifting on his bar
stool, in the still-rousing "Ten Years of This." ("A million nights alone!") So:
Mebbe getting married is cheating? No! Not always!

The Live CD is labeled with Gary's chipmunky, half-quizzical half-smirk.
("Crazy world, haint it.") Vividly painted. Like one of those commemorative plates
advertised on late-night basic cable. I try to put it away, but then a-l-l-l
his damned drinkin'/cheatin' songs start swirling through their rounds again.
Scores unsettle themselves, in Gary's man-made afterlife. (Reminding
25-years-teetotaling me: For the first time in eight years, I gotta find another job,
and now Bush wants Mars.) Art sucks.

this stuff is extremely great, seems like he really needs like a deep dive boxed set of some kind: https://www.bynwr.com/articles/gary-stewart-the-lost-tapes

― tylerw, Thursday, June 30, 2022 10:07 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

uhh this is incredible!

yeahhhh
McDonough is working on a Stewart bio — he told me "It'll put your hair in curlers, Tyler."

Love this guy, looking forward to listening to that.

Should I finally read that Tammy Wynette bio?

i haven't read that one — his al green book is very good, though. And of course, Shakey ...

The Tammy book is terrific...lots of good stuff not just about her, but also Billy Sherrill, Glenn Sutton, George Richey, and of course George Jones.

It's astounding just how fucked-up her life was.

Yeah, McD. wrote a really scary catching-up-with-Gary piece in the Voice a lonnng time ago, soon after Gary's son committed suicide, but the Voice archives are missing that and lot of others now (good thing I made my own). That twofer I mentioned, Out of Hand/Your Place or Mine, is an ideel place to start, if you can find it, but also one that never did make it beyond vinyl, far as I know (somebody said it's on discogs marketplace sometimes) is the somewhut uneven but still omg You're Not the Woman You Used to Be, also the RCA '81 Greatest Hits, and several later ones on HighTone, Battleground Gary's Greatest and Best of the HighTone Years. A bunch of others are worth cherrypicking, and yeah xpost Live At Billy Bob's is good in a spooky fanverse way.

shoulda been a comma between Battleground and Gary's Greatest: two diff releases.