“Daydream Believer” Writer John Stewart, 68

Longtime singer-songwriter John Stewart, passed away on January 19 from a stroke at age 68. Stewart has a long legacy in the business, from his days with the Kingston Trio, to his solo successes and collaborations with some of the top names in the business, including Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. As a songwriter, he is probably best known for a song that was a huge pop hit and a signature song for The Monkees, “Daydream Believer”. Over the course of his recording career, Stewart released over 40 albums.

As an artist, he is probably best remembered for the song “Gold”, a dig at the state of the music business, which was a duet with Stevie Nicks in 1979 from his album “Bombs Away, Dream Babies” but one that Nicks also included on her box set Enchanted.

Stewart joined the Kingston Trio in 1961, though he had already been contributing songs for the group, at the pinnacle of their success, replacing founding member Dave Guard. He was with them through the days when songs like “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” and “The Reverend Mr. Black” were hitting the top of the charts. He stayed with the group until 1967. He recorded thirteen albums with the Kingston Trio. In 1967, he scored with a number one hit for the Monkees during the height of their success, “Daydream Believer”(the song would be recorded by Anne Murray in 1980 and hit number twelve). In 1968, Stewart and his future wife and singing partner Buffy Ford, hit the campaign trail for Robert Kennedy during his bid for the Presidency. It was cut short by Robert Kennedy’s assassination in 1968.

In 1969, he released the classic album California Bloodlines (which Rolling Stone proclaimed as one of the best 200 albums of all time), the first of seven of his releases that made the charts through 1980. In 1988, Stewart scored another hit when Roseanne Cash recorded “Runaway Train” "I'd learned to play electric guitar listening to Lindsey Buckingham records and found out that Lindsey learnt to play acoustic guitar listening to Kingston Trio records, so we'd been talking to each other for eight years before we even met”.

Stewart recorded for Roulette, Capitol, Warner Bros., RCA, RSO, and several Indie labels. His songs have been recorded by Nanci Griffith, Joan Baez, Tommy Makem, The Walker Brothers, Johnny Cash, Jay and the Americans, Ben E. King, Cliff Richard, The Four Tops, Lord Sitar, Mary Chapin Carpenter and too many others to name. His brother Mike founded the We Five, who had a huge hit in the 60’s with “You Were On My Mind”, and one of John’s first bands, even before the Kingston Trio, was a folk group called the Woodsmen, which included Gil Robbins, father of actor Tim Robbins.

Stewart was a multi-instrumentalist. He played guitar, banjo, bass, keyboards and percussion, and besides scoring credits on albums as producer, engineer and arranger, he received credits for liner notes, photography and art direction, as well as for lead, harmony and background vocals on albums recorded by such diverse artists as the Bee Gees, Bloodlet, Chatterbox, Gogi Grant, Nanci Griffith, Stevie Nicks, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Elton John, Jackie DeShannon and Harry Chapin.