‘His ache is real’: Bob Dylan and more on the wild genius of honky-tonk hellraiser Gary Stewart

Worshipped by everyone from Willie Nelson to Joe Strummer, the country star with the amazing voice imploded in a blaze of guns, knives, drugs and infidelities. What’s behind his astonishing posthumous rediscovery? ‘He sings like a man arguing with destiny. It sounds like the ache is real, that the ruin is real,” Bob Dylan tells me. “There’s a cracked truth there. What’s unsettling about him is that he sounds like he’s already living in the aftermath.” Dylan is talking about the late US singer-songwriter Gary Stewart. I had approached him because he was one of the few people to speak highly of this country music maverick. Even while still alive, Stewart was a ghostlike figure. He had a period in the Nashville spotlight in the mid-1970s, but his death in December 2003 aged 59 barely registered. Stewart had been forgotten after he cast aside stardom in order to hunker down in a Florida trailer park where he and his wife Mary Lou consumed quaaludes, meth, marijuana and cocaine in industrial quantities. “Growing up with parents who were drug addicts meant I just took this as normal,” says Shannon Ashburn, the couple’s daughter. “I loved them and they loved me and