Country music is in a state of flux these days. On one hand, pop stars and pretenders like John Denver and Olivia Newton-John are garnering airplay, sales and awards, breaking Nashville's stranglehold on the market. On the other hand, a growing band of tradition-minded newcomers like Moe Bandy and Gary Stewart have invaded the airwaves and charts, ignoring Nashville's typical formulas and taking the music back to its roots in the honky-tonk style of Lefty Frizzell and Ernest Tubb.

"Honky-tonk," unlike countrypolitan pablum, is combo music meant for dancing and drinking, with lyrics to match; apart from isolated entries in the genre from Jerry Lee Lewis, Conway Twitty and Merle Haggard, it hasn't been performed much during the past five years. But Gary Stewart, following in the wake of Moe Bandy, is the man to change all that. He's scored three Top Ten hits in a row, each of them undiluted honkytonk, and he doesn't look to be stopping now. If you can hit with titles like "She's Actin' Single (I'm Drinkin' Doubles)," who needs the Nashville symphony?

Like any self-respecting C&W comer, he boasts a colorful but humble past. An ex-airplane factory worker from Florida, Stewart made his start in the late Sixties, hustling tunes on Music Row. But it was only last year that Stewart emerged as a recording artist in his own right, scoring his first hit with "Drinkin' Thing."

He sings of men beyond the brink, helpless before their own instincts. "Out of hand, out of hand," he wails on his second hit single, "I'm a hardlovin' kind of a man/I need more to keep me goin'/Than this gold wedding band." Although the singles are cast in a conservative Nashville mold, using choral backup and session musicians, the accompaniment is relatively sparse, and the lyrics are hard-core country.

Stewart's singing is something else again. Even on a ballad like "She's Actin' Single," there's a quivering edge to the man's vibrato, a hint of wilderness that is a far cry from the staid treatment most weepers endure these days. On the album, moreover, that wilderness blossoms on the uptempo numbers, particularly "Honky-Tonkin'" (not the Hank Williams song, but one by Troy Seals).

Stewart pushes the band here to the point where they sound clumsy. Against a clutter of strumming guitars and a stiff drummer, he asserts his own vocal style and, in the background, plays his own piano (shades of Jerry Lee Lewis). Where the band grinds out pro forma licks, Stewart hovers on the verge of anarchy, growling, howling, his voice breaking with a force that recalls classic rockabilly.

Singing like this hasn't been heard in country music in years. With practitioners like Stewart around, honky-tonk—and rockabilly—may not be dead yet. We'll see. (RS 190)

JIM MILLER