About this episode

Jimmy McDonough discusses his career and biographies of musicians including Neil Young and Gary Stewart.

For this episode we invite the very entertaining Jimmy McDonough to join us — all the way from Portland, Oregon — and discuss his career as "the king of the crazy biographers". Our guest explains how he moved (back) to New York from Indiana in the '80s and how he got his foot in the door at the Village Voice with a 1988 profile of country singer Gary Stewart, the subject of his new book. We then hear about the long and painful saga of his extraordinary Neil Young biography Shakey (2002) — and his singular approach to the biographical trade. Clips from Amy Linden's 1995 audio interview with Al Green give us the opportunity to ask Jimmy about his 2017 biography of the Reverend Green, after which we finally get to the 40-year gestation of I Am from the Honky Tonks and the story of his obsession with his doomed honky-tonk hero. He explains why the book felt like a mission and why Gary Stewart could and should have been a country superstar. After Mark quotes from featured writer John Morthland's review of the Monterey Pop Festival (with a namecheck for the late Country Joe McDonald) and from a 1975 interview with Tammy Wynette – another of our guest's biographical subjects — Jasper…

People in this episode

Hosts: Mark Pringle, Barney Hoskyns, Jasper Murison-Bowie

Guest: Jimmy McDonough

Topics covered

• biography
• music history
• country music
• interviews
• author insights
• cultural commentary

Keywords

• biography
• music
• country music
• Neil Young
• Gary Stewart
• Al Green
• interview
• honky-tonk

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Village Voice, Wolf+Salmon

Books & works: Shakey, I Am from the Honky Tonks, Gary Stewart: I Am from the Honky-Tonks

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