"I had just that summer discovered a Gary Stewart song I’d never heard before, “Honky-Tonk Man,” a B-side from 1981, recorded not long before Stewart was dropped from RCA. Stewart always had a genius for melodrama, but on this number he digs so deep that he almost buries himself in self-parody. The story of a honky-tonk singer who gains fame and adoring crowds, the lyrics are triumphant, but Stewart trembles and growls and gurgles out syllable by aching syllable, an anthem of abject surrender. For all of its campy oddity, it is nevertheless a devastating recording. Melodrama, in extremis, is horror. “Want to hear a man sing his own epitaph?” McDonough wrote. “Seek out ‘Honky-Tonk Man.’”
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https://www.oxfordamerican.org/item/1294-honky-tonk-man
