Gary Stewart ~ If My Eyes Touch You

CLICK here for a brief biography on Gary Stewart. Gary Stewart ~ King of the Honky-Tonks Stewart was born in 1945 in the Letcher County, Kentucky town of Jenkins, the son of a coal miner, who moved his family down to the Florida coast when Gary was 12. There he learned to play guitar at the age of 17. Later, he met and married a woman named Mary Lou Taylor, to whom he stayed married for the rest of his life. He moved to Nashville and recorded a handful of memorable singles for Decca Records, while co-writing with fellow Floridian Bill Eldridge. They generated minor hits for the likes of Nat Stuckey, Jack Greene, Billy Walker and Hank Snow. The real catalyst for Stewart’s success was producer Roy Dea, the man who captured the hard-country side of Gary’s unique sound. Dea was a sort of father figure to Gary, and Stewart, a born delinquent, tried in vain to be a good son. Dea helped him secure a recording contract with RCA, although then-A&R man Jerry Bradley wouldn’t seal the deal until Gary agreed to cut his hair. Gary was thirty before he had a top 10 album of his own. His debut album called Out of Hand (1974) was a formidable deadpan triumph, but by the end of the Seventies he had fallen victim to self-consciousness in his singing and writing, as well as some of the vices he documented in his tough honky-tonk hits like Drinking Thing, She’s Acting Single and Out of Hand. During the following years there were more along the same lines such as Whiskey Trip, Brand New …
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