A Country Music Highway Story

Virginians, especially Southwest Virginians, are justifiably proud of the Crooked Road, the country music driving tour from Ferrum to Breaks, Virginia that snakes across mountain roads that verify the name and honors one of the most vibrant musical heritages of the Appalachians. Part of the road, US 23 from Gate City to the Kentucky state line is also known as the Country Music Highway, just as the entire length of US 23 in Kentucky is known. For Kentuckians and far Southwest Virginians, US 23 was the road people took to escape the regular downturns in the coal industry and find work in the auto factories of Ohio and Michigan, and every spring expatriates from those places still return to the hills to visit family who still live there.
 
In Kentucky, the list of artists that were born along that road is huge: Patty Loveless and Dwight Yoakum in Pikeville, Loretta Lynn and Crystal Gayle in Paintsville, Ricky Skaggs, Keith Whitley, Tom T. Hall, The Judds, and Billy Ray Cyrus farther north, and a host of lesser-known artists such as Hylo Brown and Molly O’Day in between. Interestingly, of all the country music artists who hailed from that road, only Ralph Stanley in Clintwood still lives there and still sings the great mountain music he grew up with.
 
Just across the state line from Dr. Ralph’s domain, US 23 runs for a short distance through Letcher County, Kentucky, and the first highway sign denotes that this section of the Country Music Highway honors Gary Stewart, whose family went in the opposite direction. Instead of following US 23 to the North, Stewart’s father George in 1958 turned south and wound up in Fort Pierce, Florida. George’s family coal mining venture had failed and he did not want to go back into the mines where he had been injured too many times before. He reasoned that if he was going to take a chance with his life, it had to be for more money than a miner’s pay. When his coal mine went under, George pulled up stakes and headed for warm weather. Gary was twelve at the time and regardless of the time he spent on the road, Fort Pierce remained his home, although he never forgot his Appalachian roots.
 
The first time I met Gary Stewart was in the late Sixties, when he was just breaking into the music business and he was making the rounds of country music stations all across the country. One of his stops was WPRT, an old 5000 watt AM station in Prestonsburg, KY, where I had a “board shift” as a disk jockey. He was in the company of his black-haired, bubbling wife Mary Lou, who had married Gary when she was twenty and he was sixteen. She was a beautiful woman and I wondered what had attracted her to someone as scrawny and frail as Gary. She saw his talent, of course, and remained his biggest promoter as long as she lived.
 
The next time I ran into Gary was in the mid-Seventies, when he was a headliner, after a string of hits, including his number one, She’s Acting Single (I’m Drinkin’ Doubles). Time magazine did an article on him around that time as the embodiment of the Southern country blues singer saying “The South is to the music of America what late 18th Century Vienna was to classical music—the source,” and Gary was one of its princes. I was living in Virginia then, but I saw him on a trip to Louisville, KY. He was in his element, happy and wired, and selling more booze for the club I was visiting than anyone who had ever played there. During a break from his sets, I wandered over to his table where Mary Lou was sitting with him. They were both excited about his career and I was surprised they remembered me. “They still brown-bagging it in Pike County?” he asked me, referring to the fact that Pike County, Kentucky was dry then and nightclub patrons had to bring their own booze and pay through the nose for “set-ups” supplied by the club. Gary was a true Floridian by that time, but still kept an affection for the hills of his birth and the sometimes infuriating idiosyncrasies of his people.
 
The last time I saw Gary was in the Eighties, when all the fame and promise of his early career and evaporated due to his boozing and drug abuse, and he was back in neighboring Floyd County, KY, playing the circuit of smalltime bars he had grown out of twenty years before. I was working in television news then, and finishing my master’s thesis at Longwood, spending half the week in Virginia and half the week in Kentucky. I stopped by WPRT after delivering some tape to one of my stringer stations in Huntington, WV and was checking to see if there was any news in the region when one of the disk jockeys told me Gary was in town and had collapsed during a performance. He was in the hospital and she was on her way to visit him. She invited me along and I accepted her invitation with some trepidation. I had heard of his troubles and I wasn’t sure I wanted to see what he had become.
 
When we approached his hospital room, I could smell the distinctive aroma of something that was definitely not on the hospital’s pharmacopoeia, and when we opened the door, Gary was sitting up in bed, wearing his trademark oversize hat and puffing on what appeared to be a very poorly made cigarette. Mary Lou wasn’t with him and I didn’t ask about her. I wondered if his legendary drinking and pill popping had finally run her off. His eyes were drooping and he looked scrawnier and paler than ever. I had my doubts that he would remember me, but he squinted and cocked his head like a terrier and spoke: “Hopkins? Where you been, boy? I figured you’d wrote a book or somethin’ by now.”
 
Unfortunately I hadn’t, I told him, and jokingly said I would write his some day. “Hell, man,” he said. “I ain’t finished livin’ it yet.” We talked for a while longer, reflecting a bit and sharing a joke or two about the mountains and their unique people. He was still proud of his roots. Strip mining had ground its way across the coalfields then and Gary shook his head at the destruction. It was different from when he was a boy, he said, and the damage was limited to the little truck mines where his father worked. Gary Stewart was not a philosopher, but what was happening to the hills bothered him. Soon more fans came into the room and I made my goodbye. I never saw him again.
 
His downward spiral continued for most of the following decade although the music he produced was some of the most definitive country blues he had ever done. I can’t help but wonder if any of it was affected by what he saw happening to his homeland, although I wonder how much of it he could have seen through the fog of his addictions. I didn’t keep tabs on Gary, but when I heard his son Joey had killed himself in 1988 I wondered if he would survive. Somehow he did, but by the end of the century, Gary was living on pills and booze. His halcyon days were long gone and for a time he lived in a trailer owned by his mother. In 1997, he released an album titled The Essential Gary Stewart and it introduced him to a whole new generation of fans. I looked over the song list and found that I had all the records, but mostly on old 45’s, so I bought it. I thought he could use the money.
 
The day before Thanksgiving 2003, Mary Lou, his wife of forty-two years, worn down by all those years on the road with him, died of pneumonia. I always thought he would go first; I was amazed he had lasted as long as he did. But on December 16, he followed her home. Not long before, he had released an album, Live at Billy Bob’s, and was planning a comeback tour starting at the famous Texas saloon. I didn’t think he would have been up to it without Mary Lou.
 
There are no monuments to Gary Stewart on the Country Music Highway; no plaque on the wall where he was born at the hospital in Jenkins, KY and no marker on the hillside where his father went broke attempting to eke a living out of the unforgiving coal seams of Letcher County. A few family members still live there, but there is little reason to stop and look for his memory. The world and country music have gone on. But for a moment as you cross Pound Gap on US 23 and see the scars of strip mining across the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, you are back in the world of Gary Stewart’s childhood. You can see why generations have taken flight from the coalfields and feel the determination of those who remain and are desperately fighting to keep its heritage alive.
 
There are some major changing going on the coalfields of Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia, as their residents, alarmed by what is happening to their mountains, are becoming more vigilant and protective of what we have left. It may have some effect, although the economic forces arrayed against us are huge. Still, people are becoming more aware of the environmental holocaust mining has visited upon the mountains and some changes are coming. The Country Music Highway is one of a series of attempts to capitalize on our people instead of the coal we don’t even own. Gary was still alive when the designation was given to US 23, but I don’t believe he came back to the hills to see his sign put up. Like most of his fans, I had nearly forgotten him until I heard of his death. He was gone when the Country Music Highway museum in Paintsville opened in 2005, but fans now flock to his exhibit. I think he would be pleased.