Ken Tucker

The conventional framing of Kacey Musgraves' recent career is that she went pop for a few years on a couple of albums and now is returning to country music with Middle of Nowhere.

But the Texas twang in her yearning, searching voice has always remained rooted in country's deep melancholy.

One of the best moments on this album occurs on the song Back on the Wagon, whose lyric is upbeat and optimistic.

The guy she loves has gotten sober and responsible.

The two of them are planning a new, cloudless future.

But Musgrave's vocal carries all the feelings the lyric suppresses.

You can hear the worry and doubt in her voice.

She wants to believe he's changed, but she can't help but wonder, has he really?

Can I go through all that pain again?

The tension between voice and words creates an entire vivid short story in under four minutes.

Profound sadness and extravagant schmaltz characterized the music of Gary Stewart, the country cult figure who died in 2003.

Stewart's voice was an emotional rumble that rose into a keening high tenor in moments of exquisite pain, as on the title song of his extraordinary 1975 album, Out of Hand.

Gary Stewart's life was out of hand, to put it mildly.

The new biography by Jimmy McDonough called I Am From the Honky Tonks spends more than 500 pages chronicling Stewart's wild life and times.

Born poor into a large Kentucky family in 1944, Stewart idolized Hank Williams, had quit school and was playing in bands by his mid-teens.

Pretty soon, his distinctive voice and the cleverly precise details in his songwriting caught the attention of Nashville stars like Mel Tillis, who provided an entree into the industry.

Early on in the book, McDonough sets up what would be the detail that sets Gary Stewart's life apart from so many performers.

Time and again, writes McDonough, Gary would stress to me he never went looking for stardom, never went knocking on doors, never begged anyone to listen to his demos.

McDonough's book then chronicles the way others pushed Stewart to record the wonderfully agonized ballads he wrote and insisted that he submit to the Nashville star-making machinery.

For a short while, it worked.