GARY STEWART’S ONLY NO. 1 HIT WAS ABOUT A MAN DRINKING THROUGH A COLLAPSING RELATIONSHIP. YEARS LATER, THE DARKNESS IN HIS RECORDS WOULD BEGIN TO LOOK FAR TOO MUCH LIKE HIS OWN LIFE.
Gary Stewart did not sound like the smooth Nashville country that filled much of the 1970s.
He had been born in Kentucky and raised in Florida, and by the time country music found him, his voice already sounded like trouble. High, quivering, almost reckless, it seemed permanently on the edge of breaking — the kind of voice that could make a drinking song feel less like entertainment than a man trying to survive the next three minutes.
Before his own breakthrough, Stewart had already worked his way into Nashville from another angle.
With songwriting partner Bill Eldridge, he placed songs with artists including Stonewall Jackson and Cal Smith.
But Gary Stewart was not built to remain only behind other people’s records.
RCA Had To Find The Right Kind Of Damage
RCA signed Stewart as an artist in the early 1970s.
At first, the label struggled to find the clearest direction for him. That was understandable. Stewart did not fit comfortably inside the cleaner Nashville sound of the period. He was too raw for polish, too nervous for easy listening, too intense to be softened without losing the very thing that made him matter.
The turn came when producer Roy Dea leaned into the harder honky-tonk sound that suited him best.
That changed everything.
In 1974, “Drinkin’ Thing” reached the country Top 10 and gave listeners a stronger look at what Stewart could do. He did not sing alcohol as decoration. He sang it as atmosphere, habit, escape, punishment, and sometimes as the only language a broken man had left.
Then came the song that would define him.
The No. 1 Hit Sounded Like A Breakdown
“She’s Actin’ Single (I’m Drinkin’ Doubles)” was written by Wayne Carson.
The title had cleverness in it, but Stewart’s performance pushed it past clever. The song placed him inside a relationship already coming apart: the woman acting unattached, the man answering with twice as much drinking, neither side needing to explain what was already obvious.
In another singer’s hands, it might have sounded like a sharp barroom phrase.
With Stewart, it sounded like a nervous breakdown happening in real time.
His voice shook against the lyric. It climbed, cracked, bent, and staggered without ever fully losing control. That was the tension that made the record so powerful. He sounded as if the song might collapse underneath him, and somehow he kept riding it.
In 1975, “She’s Actin’ Single (I’m Drinkin’ Doubles)” went to No. 1.
It would be Gary Stewart’s only one.
Out Of Hand Put Him In His Own Territory
The album Out of Hand produced three major hits and later came to be regarded as one of the strongest hard-country albums of the decade.
For a moment, Stewart had carved out a space that belonged almost entirely to him. He stood between traditional honky-tonk and the emerging outlaw audience, close enough to the barroom for old-school country fans, wild enough for listeners who wanted something less polished than Nashville’s smoother product.
His records did not ask to be respectable.
They asked to be believed.
That was Stewart’s gift. He could make the mess sound immediate. The cheating, the drinking, the jealousy, the late-night panic — none of it felt like costume. It sounded too close to the bone.
And over time, that closeness became harder to separate from the man himself.
The Songs And The Life Began To Blur
The instability in Gary Stewart’s records was not purely theatrical.
As the decade progressed, he struggled increasingly with alcohol and drugs. Personal losses deepened the damage, and by the 1980s his recording career had slowed sharply.
That does not mean the songs were diary entries.
But it does mean listeners could hear something in them that felt dangerously real.
Stewart was not the kind of singer who made ruin sound glamorous. He made it sound shaky, sweaty, ashamed, desperate, and human. His characters were often already past the point where better judgment could save them. They were living inside consequence, not looking at it from a safe distance.
That was why the records stayed with people.
They had the smell of the room still on them.
The Audience Never Forgot The Rawness
Stewart eventually returned to performing and recording.
He never became a giant mainstream star in the way some of his contemporaries did, but he kept a devoted audience that understood what those RCA records had captured. To those listeners, Gary Stewart was not a footnote. He was one of hard country’s most unsettling voices — a singer who could make honky-tonk music feel almost dangerously alive.
His reputation did not rest on polish.
It rested on pressure.
The sense that the song was being sung by someone who had not fully escaped the trouble he was describing.
That made the final chapter even harder to hear.
In December 2003, Stewart’s wife of more than four decades, Mary Lou, died of pneumonia.
Less than a month later, Gary Stewart died by suicide at his Florida home.
What Gary Stewart’s Voice Really Leaves Behind
The deepest part of this story is not only that “She’s Actin’ Single (I’m Drinkin’ Doubles)” became Gary Stewart’s only No. 1 hit.
It is that the record’s darkness never felt safely contained inside the record.
Kentucky.
Florida.
Songs written for others.
RCA searching for the right sound.
Roy Dea letting the honky-tonk damage show.
Then “Drinkin’ Thing,” Out of Hand, a No. 1 song about a man drinking through a relationship’s collapse, and a life that later carried its own brutal weight.
Gary Stewart sang as if every syllable might fly apart before the band reached the next measure.
That was the danger.
That was the beauty.
And somehow, for three minutes at a time, he held it together just long enough to finish the song.
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