Owner of Buffalo’s Occidental Hotel Wins 2024 Gospel Song Of The Year

A who’s who of global bluegrass stars were in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, this past week for the annual International Bluegrass Music Awards.

Among that who’s who was Buffalo, Wyoming’s Dave Stewart, whose song “God Already Has” was named the 2024 Gospel Song of the Year at Friday’s awards ceremony.

He was also nominated for songwriter of the year.

Sharing the award is co-writer Mark “Brink” Brinkman and Dale Ann Bradley, who sang the soulful ballad.

For gospel bluegrass, it’s the equivalent of a movie winning Best Picture, and Stewart is a star.

Folks in and around Johnson County and Buffalo know Stewart as a performer, musician and co-owner and operator of the historic and famous Occidental Hotel.

He’s well-known in Wyoming for the fabulous jam sessions hosted every Thursday night at the Occidental.

“It’s a great honor to be nominated for this, and I don’t take it lightly,” he told Cowboy State Daily before Friday’s award ceremony and winning. “I respect all the writers who are here.”

“God Already Has” was written in Wyoming last year, Stewart said.

“Brinkman came out here last year and spent three weeks just kind of traveling through with his wife to do some hiking,” Stewart said.

Stewart doesn’t always write with a partner. Some of his gold records have been solo written, like “True Grass,” which went to No. 1 on the bluegrass charts and stayed there for 50 weeks.

A Remarkable Comeback

Stewart’s presence at this year’s IBMA World of Bluegrass Awards was something of a comeback that not too many people know about.

The songwriter caught West Nile virus in 2000 and became very ill as a result.

“I lost like 30-some pounds in a week,” he said. “My liver and kidneys, everything was shutting down. And it actually went into my brain, which West Nile can do.”

Stewart recovered, but he developed a stutter and had memory loss. He couldn’t remember any of the tunes to his songs, or even how to play a guitar, much less write a song for it.

“By the grace of God, I recovered from it, because the doctors had said there was nothing they could do for me,” he said.

He worked on splitting some logs every day to rebuild strength. But writing anything felt like too heavy a burden to carry. So after he was finished, he’d go lie down. But his wife Jackie wouldn’t let him slide into oblivion quite so easily.

Every day she’d come tell him that he needed to go write some music.

“I couldn’t remember how, though,” David said. “I was confused, and that’s one of the symptoms of West Nile. It’s confusion, and kind of almost like dementia.”

But Jackie just wouldn’t let David give up.

“Every night, she would put my songs, because I had several hundred songs on a demo, and she’d put them on a CD,” David said. “And every night when I’d go to sleep, she’d put that portable CD player in my ears and play the songs for me at night when I would go to sleep.”

That went on for weeks, he said.

“Then one day, I was laying in a hammock along the creek, and she said, ‘How are you doing?’ And I said, I just don’t feel good, you know? I’m just weak. I don’t want to be me anymore,” Stewart recalled.

That last line felt like something snicking into place, a puzzle piece that had found home.

“I got up, went into the house and wrote that as a song,” he said. “That song’s been recorded now several times and been a No. 1 song for me.”

Just The Beginning

The song was just the beginning of Stewart’s comeback. There was still a long way to go.

Stewart needed motivation, Jackie decided. That’s where her next idea came from.

“Dawn Wexo saved the Occidental from being torn down, but she was having some struggles,” David said. “So Jackie asked me, she said, ‘Hey we gotta help her some way.’”

Being semiretired, David didn’t want to get too involved in any big projects.

“Well, no,” she told David, agreeing with him on that. “But you could play your music. She needs people to come to the Occidental. No one is coming.”

So Stewart started the jam sessions, which have become hugely popular in Buffalo and pack the Occidental saloon every Thursday night. It not only helped breathe new life into the historic hotel, it was good for David’s music. It motivated him to keep writing and keep playing his songs.

Not long after that, Stewart decided to take his musical journey in a new direction. Though it was really, in some ways, an old direction too.

“I grew up on bluegrass,” Stewart said. “And country music changed a lot in the ’90s. It’s more like pop or hip-hop now. It just doesn’t feel good to me anymore.”

The moment he switched to bluegrass, it seemed his songs were so much easier to write. He soon had a dozen or so No. 1 songs and, more recently, nominations for the IBMI World of Bluegrass Awards.

Wyoming Is Cold, But Second Chances Abound

Music is the reason Stewart first came to Wyoming in the late 1970s.

“I’m from Florida, and this band I was playing with, they all moved out to Wyoming to go to work for my brother, who was an electrical contractor,” Stewart recalled. “So, they called me and they said, ‘Hey, we need a singer.’”

Jackie warned him it was cold in Wyoming.

“She was born in South Dakota,” David said. “So I said, ‘Well let’s just try it.’”

They arrived in Wyoming in 1977, and never left.

Wyoming oil and gas was enjoying a boom at the time, so Stewart’s band had places to play almost every night. Writing so many songs and singing in so many places soon paid off with the offer of a record deal in Nashville.

But Stewart didn’t pursue it.

“You know, that happens sometimes,” he said. “When we came out here, I was just kind of playing music with the band.”

Those Nashville dreams didn’t die with that, though, and he has his wife to thank for that, too.

It was 1988. Jackie and David were sitting at a truck stop in Gillette and George Jones was on the radio singing “He Stopped Loving Her Today.”

“I started humming a song that I had written called ‘In the Wings of the Grand Ole Opry,’ just because it was kind of a similar melody,” David said.

That’s when he recalls Jackie saying, “What would you do to sing on the Grand Ole Opry?”

“I said, ‘Oh gosh, if I could sing on the Opry, I’d walk to Nashville, Jackie.’ Then she said, ‘That’s a great idea,’” he told Cowboy State Daily.

It took Stewart 84 days to walk to Nashville from Wyoming, and when he got there, they did let him have his dream. He got play on the Grand Ole Opry’s stage, where all the big stars of country music have played.

“That kind of got me started back in the country music scene in Nashville and into the writing,” Stewart said. “I got to writing deal with Eddie Raven, if you remember him. I got to write and deal with his company for a while and got some cuts in country music.”

Of Banjos And History

Stewart told Cowboy State Daily if he were to win songwriter of the year, it should really be his wife going up on the stage with him.

“She’s really been the force behind me getting to this point,” Stewart said. “She’s always believed in my music. She’s always been supportive of my music, and always liked what I wrote.”

Lately, Stewart has been going back through old songs he’s written, turning them into new bluegrass tunes and sending them back out into the world. He’s also working on some new songs and has just written one called, “It’s Another Missing You Montana Morning,” with his friend Brinkman.

Stewart doesn’t plan to slow down his songwriting anytime soon.

“I like songs that have a meaning,” he said. “I’m a storyteller, so when I write a song, I like to tell a story. And the songs I write need to have a purpose and a meaning to them. I like stories that really tell something.”

He’s also a big believer in passing things on to the next generation to keep history alive. That’s become another important thread in the music he writes.

“You can’t erase history,” he said. “Good or bad, you have to keep history so that we can learn from it. Erasing history to me is a sin.”

Like the banjo, he added, a gleam in his eye, as another story starts to take hold.

“If you ask people where the banjo came from, most would say, ‘Oh some hillbilly in the Appalachian Mountains.’ But the banjo comes from Africa. They put pigskin over a gourd, and that’s where it came from.”

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.