In the mid-1970s, Gary Stewart seemed destined to burn up the charts, with a string of drinking and cheating songs from a singularly possessed talent. He sang “Your Place or Mine,” “Out of Hand,” “She’s Actin’ Single (I’m Drinkin’ Doubles),” and other hits with an unearthly quaver that made damnation sound awfully tempting. By 1980, he had burned himself out, at least as a country hitmaker, all but disappearing from the public eye. Journalist McDonough decided to track him down to his Florida trailer home for one of those whatever-happened-to pieces, which the Village Voice published in 1988. His extended visit to coax Stewart back into action included verbal challenges, substance abuse, a thrown knife, and some brutal honesty on both sides. It also included McDonough’s deep dive into a vault of unreleased taped performances that convinced him that Stewart’s hits had barely scratched the surface of his artistry, that Stewart was one of the greatest American musical artists of all time. When McDonough took his leave, Stewart “encouraged me to write the story as I saw fit: ‘Don’t puss out on me, bud. Tell it the Jimmy way.’” McDonough would go on to apply “the Jimmy way” to a series of critically incisive, occasionally controversial biographies—Neil Young, Tammy Wynette, Al Green et al.—but the Stewart story is the one he couldn’t let go. He leaves nothing out here: OxyContin (“or ‘hillbilly heroin,’ the media nickname Gary preferred”), moonshine, meth and quaaludes; a volatile marriage and a familial history of drugs and dysfunction; suicides, car crashes, and skirmishes with the law. The result is more than 500 pages of mayhem and revelation, a narrative that is often hilarious, occasionally horrific, and inevitably grim.