Was The Dwight Yoakam of the '90s the Last Great Country Singer?

Rejected by Nashville, Yoakam honed his sound in L.A.'s punk clubs, and emerged as (see title). Go on, name someone in today's pretty awful country-music climate who better deserves the accolade

To borrow an old Irish idiom, “I was great with him at the time,” that is, with the country singer/songwriter Dwight Yoakam, whom I called in a 1994 article “the most talented country singer to emerge in the eighties,” along with one other, Steve Earle. Both burst into stardom with their respective 1986 debut albums, which put the world on notice. Yoakam’s Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc, Etc and Earle’s Guitar Town were the two best—well, my two favorite—country albums of the ‘80s’ latter half. For a good 15 years, Dwight Yoakam had it both ways, an artistic and commercial winner. His first three records—Guitars, Cadillacs, Hillbilly Deluxe, and Buenas Noches from a Lonely Room—all went to #1 on Billboard’s country chart and were certified platinum (Guitars, Cadillacs double-platinum). Although Dwight’s fifth, 1993’s This Time, climbed only as high as #4, it kept on selling, and with three-plus-million copies sold, it was and remains Yoakam’s bestselling album.

This Time’s release was the occasion for one of several interviews I’ve conducted with Dwight. Posted at the bottom of this piece in its near-entirety, the interview ranges further, wider, and deeper than this little essay. Dwight, I’ll note had a decidedly analytical bent (overcompensation for his rural southern Appalachian roots?) and a tendency towards verbosity that could verge on self-parody. How many country singers are willing to spend ten minutes of an interview trying to nail down the difference between induction and deduction? Roy Acuff would have said, “The boy’s had too much book-learnin’.”

At a time (the late ‘80s) when country music was slithering towards its most commercially successful, and aesthetically lame, years ever (it has since sunk lower), Dwight Yoakam was a breath of fresh air. Guitars, Cadillacs remains my favorite, with, by my count, five great songs out of 10: the Johnny Horton classic “Honky Tonk Man”; “Bury Me” (“a-long the Big Sandy/Down in those blue-grey mountains…”), a duet with Maria McKee, whose Lone Justice was one of the great ‘80s/’90s country-rock bands); “South of Cincinnati,” a slow, sad waltz buoyed especially by Brantley Kearns’s fiddle; Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” which Yoakam and Pete Anderson, Dwight’s lead guitarist and longtime producer, rework into something new, hot, and exciting, with a punk-mariachi vibe; and the title song, fueled by Anderson’s stuttering Telecaster (Anderson was a master, probably the finest younger electric guitarist in country music, as well as part of the coterie who were putting together what was not yet known as Americana. He was Yoakam’s lead guitarist, bandleader, and producer on more than a dozen albums.)

“South of Cincinnati,” below, is Guitars, Cadillacs’ gem, one of the prettiest and saddest country songs of any era. It’s on ballads like this that Yoakam’s signal gift, a voice of burnished silver, is especially evident. If “South of Cincinnati” has its share of thematic cliches, it is no less effective for them: the wreck of a boozer who abandons his Kentucky roots and the love of his life to end up in a Chicago flophouse, and his forlorn ex- back home, too proud to mail the letter that she rewrites daily, keeping it tucked inside the Book of Luke, that says she’d gladly welcome him back. “He lies there drunk, but it don’t matter drunk or sober/He’ll never read the words that pride won’t let her send.” Maudlin, and so is “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”

Country singer or not, Yoakam came into his own not in Nashville but in southern California, whose own rich country music tradition extends back to the 1940s, if not earlier. Los Angeles is where Yoakam signed his first record deal, built his earliest fan base, and encountered, and fruitfully partnered with, Anderson, in whose laundry room Dwight crashed when he arrived in California.

In L.A., Yoakam found a country-music scene far more to his liking, including Buck Owens’s Bakersfield bar-band sound, which Dwight adored; cowpunk bands like the Blasters, Green on Red, Lone Justice, and fellow transplants like the Detroit-born Anderson. Yoakam played L.A.’s punk clubs as often as its honky-tonks, establishing a much more diverse following than if he’d stayed in Nashville.

Unlike his hero and fellow Nashville renegade, Merle Haggard, Yoakam is not a native Californian, but the product of a unique, literally centuries-old culture, rural southern Appalachia. “I can never escape being the grandson of Luther and Earlene Tibbs, nor do I want to,” Yoakam told me. “There’s a pride garnered from understanding where you came from. I come from mountain people, rural mountain people.” The Tibbses were Yoakam’s maternal grandparents, who lived and died in the east-Kentucky village of Betsy Lane. Dwight was born in Pikeville, KY, the county seat of east Kentucky’s Pike County, and grew up in Floyd County, just west of Pike. “I’ve got a lot of family still down there, in Floyd County and Pike County.” His parents migrated, with their three children, Columbus, OH, along with hundreds of thousands of others to whom one could as easily apply the term “hillbilly” as to the inhabitants of an east Kentucky holler. “Hillbilly” is far from a term of opprobrium for Yoakam; you’ ll find it sprinkled throughout his song and album titles, almost a term of endearment.¹ See footnote for the lyrics to “Readin’, Rightin,’ Rt. 23,” Yoakam’s essentially autobiographical song about eastern Kentucky’s Ohio-bound migrants fleeing the coal mines for factories they found almost equally, if not more, dehumanizing. U.S. Route 23, by the way, runs right past Betsy Lane.

Dropping out of Ohio State after a brief tenure, Dwight headed to Nashville in search of country-music success, and met with none; these were the pre-Outlaw, countrypolitan years, presided over by the strings-happy producer Billy Sherrill, who could make George Fucking Jones sound schmaltzy. In 1977, Dwight lit out for the territories and didn’t stop until he reached the ocean.

Working with Anderson, Dwight began to hear his own sound. Though Dwight shaped himself, Anderson deserves a lot of credit. As a boy, Yoakam absorbed a mess of influences, from the Rolling Stones to Flatt and Scruggs. It was Anderson who helped Dwight make sense of it all, while encouraging him to keep stretching. Case in point: “A Thousand Miles From Nowhere,” my favorite This Time song, whose extended two-guitar coda (Anderson overdubbing himself) creates the effect of two jets soaring in tandem, According to Anderson, the outro was inspired by another extended two-guitar coda: Eric Clapton and Duane Allman’s on Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla.” Drawing inspiration from the best, regardless of genre.

Just who occupied that pantheon of Yoakam’s, which he had to sift through in order to find his own voice? “You know what?” he said. “If I stare at this hard enough, if it’s a constellation you’re asking for, it breaks down into three groups of three.” But no sooner had he started ticking off names than he realized that his musical cosmology not nearly as orderly as he’d thought. Realizing that this time, he was just going to have to be unsystematic, he bent to the task of naming names.

“First you’ve got Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, and Flatt and Scruggs. I heard bluegrass throughout my childhood. You couldn’t escape it, it was just there, in my grandparents’ house. I grew up on [Flatt and Scruggs’s] ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown.’” Nor was bluegrass all that different from a genre to which it is rarely considered close kin. “If you add drums and electric bass to Bill Monroe’s ‘Rocky Road Blues,’ you’d have had rock and roll a decade earlier.” Following devious, dimly-lit passages, one realizes that the flip side to Elvis’s “That’s All Right,” the song that launched rock & roll, is “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” written in 1945 by Bill Monroe and recorded in 1947, by Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys. Featuring Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs.

“Johnny Cash,” said Dwight, “loomed so much larger than life. He walked over to me backstage at the Opry and said, “Hi, Dwight. I’m Johnny Cash.’ As if.” It’s on Cash’s “Ring of Fire” that Dwight pulled off something he’s done again and again, namely, taking a great artist’s signature song, or one of them, and making it one of his own.

The rocking rhythm of Pete Anderson’s lead guitar on This Time’s “Fast as You” strongly evokes the rocking rhythm of Roy Orbison’s lead guitarist (Bobby Goldsboro??!) on “Pretty Woman.” Dwight met Orbison, he told me, “at 38,000 feet, on a flight from Dallas to Nashville. And what an appropriate place to meet Roy Orbison. He had this angelic, ethereal quality to him. He made me feel ashamed of ever having lost my temper.”

From 1968 to 1972, “Merle Haggard was, I think, the greatest who ever lived,” Yoakam said. “When he wrote songs like ‘Mama’s Hungry Eyes.’ When he wrote songs like ‘Holding Things Together,’” about a divorced father whose ex- ignores her daughter. “It only has one verse. That song only needs one verse,” and remarkably for someone who keeps so tight a rein on his emotions, Yoakam’s voice catches when he speaks the verse.² “If that doesn’t bring you to your knees emotionally…. It’s a gut-punch. I mean, Merle Haggard—phew.” I’ll note in passing that although Yoakam didn’t speak to it, his painstakingly honed band sound owes much to Haggard and his Strangers, the tightest band in country music of the late ‘60s through the late ‘80s. Haggard only hired virtuosi, each of whom kept his brilliance under wraps until Merle gave him the nod to show his stuff, the unspoken priority putting Merle’s compositions across. Dwight was as excited, if not more, “by Buck Owens’s band sound—that bar-band, honky-tonk, roadhouse approach to making a record.” Oddly, Yoakam didn’t speak at any length about Owens’s huge musical impact on him, nor about their close friendship. In 1988, Dwight talked Owens out of a premature retirement to make a duet recording of a song Owens had released, unsuccessfully, in 1973. “Streets of Bakersfield” was Yoakam’s first #1 Billboard country hit (and Owens’s 21st and last).

Curiously, it was a specific aspect of Elvis Presley’s music, not the music itself (whose impact, no doubt, is too obvious for Yoakam to have bothered to mention), that had the most effect on Yoakam, namely, the image, burned into little Dwight’s impressionable brain, of Elvis’s use of his guitar as a prop, something more to be brandished than played. Although Yoakam was a fine, deft flat-picker on his big Martin D-18, whereas Presley could barely play, it makes perfect sense that Yoakam’s onstage dandling of his guitar—pointing it at the ceiling, at the floor, at the audience, virtually tossing it up in the air—that this elaborately mannered choreography, which long ago became a sort of ironic self-parody, comes straight out of the Elvis playbook. “I had a guitar from as far back as I can remember—my dad brought one home from the service. And I just didn’t escape that influence, that infatuation, with the visual image of Elvis Presley with his guitar.”

“As I think about it,” Yoakam said, “I was very influenced by Johnny Horton,” whose 1956 country hit “Honky Tonk Man” opens Dwight’s first album. “My mom happened to be in the Columbia Record Club and she had a Johnny Horton’s Greatest Hits album that I played over and over. There’s another artist who crossed over. I’m not talking about the novelty songs, ‘Battle of New Orleans,’ ‘North to Alaska,’ I mean songs like ‘Comanche’ and ‘All For the Love of a Girl’ and ‘Whispering Pines’”—Yoakam breaks into a quiet, rather lovely rendition of the last song’s refrain. “Johnny Horton crossed over not to make more money, but because he assimilated different sounds in an organic sense.”

“And then you’ve got John Fogerty. I was enamored of Fogerty when I was a teenager, and I consider Creedence one of the quintessential California bands. And you’ve got the Stones,” a choice which didn’t surprise me after Dwight’s earlier self-description as “a kid who was never not listening to rock.”

“Well,” Dwight said of his far-flung pantheon, “that’s what it is. I don’t know how it mixes, but it comes out of my mouth like what you hear on this album. It’s not any genre.” This Time, in fact, as Anderson told an interviewer years later, had been an attempt to go beyond genre. “I wanted to get to a point where we made it’s just Dwight Yoakam music. I wanted to get to a point where we made Dwight Yoakam music…. [W]hatever Johnny Cash was, Johnny Cash made Johnny Cash music. Was it country, was it folk, was it Americana, was it rockabilly? It was Johnny Cash music. Kenny Rogers, for better or worse, made Kenny Rogers music. I wanted Dwight to be in that stratosphere.”

The first time I saw Dwight Yoakam perform was in April, 1986 at Club Irving, a modest-sized, standing-room-only Manhattan venue; perhaps 1,000 people could squeeze in. Yoakam, Anderson & Co. were just starting to tour behind Guitars, Cadillacs, released a few weeks before. They opened for the punk band Hüsker Dü, not a surprising pairing; as I mentioned earlier, the ‘80s were, on both coasts, a time of flux, when punks and at least some country musicians were perfectly comfortable appearing on the same bill. Since I was no punk fan, I split after Dwight’s set. Memory furnishes me with few if any details. I remember that “Ring of Fire” was especially powerful and that he was rocking what I already knew to be his stagewear de rigeur: skin-tight, ripped-knee jeans and a ten-gallon hat, which I did not know that Dwight wore not merely as a signifier of his countryness, but because he was going bald at 29.

Seven years later, on July 9, 1993, I saw Dwight again, touring behind This Time. Manhattan’s august Radio City Music Hall is no standees-only venue, but it was for much of that night, Dwight and his band keeping the 7,000-member crowd on its feet for big chunks of the evening, especially for the song with which Dwight was closing this tour’s shows. As with Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” Yoakam had the nerve, and gift, to appropriate a superstar’s signature song for himself. Dwight’s live “Suspicious Minds” sounds nothing like Elvis’s. When Presley played the song live, which he did at almost every one of his late-career shows, he sang the chorus— “We’re caught in a trap,” etc., etc.—many times, perhaps a dozen. Dwight took a different, really ingenious, tack. His ‘92 single of “Suspicious Minds,” which he cut for the soundtrack to the movie Honeymoon in Vegas, clocks in at 3:51. On the 1995 album Dwight Live, the song is almost twice that long: 7:25. Dwight exits at 3:30, but the band plays on, Pete Anderson leading them through the same one-bar lick over, and over, and over. At Radio City, the Philip Glass-like repetition was having an almost trance-like, incantatory effect, the big crowd showing no inclination to head for the exits, but staying right where they were, long after it became obvious that Dwight was not coming back out. I had literally never seen anything like this. When were they going to stop? Never, maybe! Finally, after three-plus minutes, and that feels like an hour when you’re listening to the same one-bar phrase, Anderson swung his guitar up, the band exploded into the standard, free-for-all, every-which-way-but-loose coda, and it was over. This was no Buck Owens concert, but somebody’s, whether Yoakam’s or Anderson’s, great idea, a brazenly original Duchampian piece of conceptual art.

When Dwight Live came out in May 1995, I reviewed it in Entertainment Weekly, as follows. “Cinema-struck Dwight Yoakam has evidently been too busy trying to jump-start his movie career [that’s a whole other subject] to cut us a new studio album. No matter; Dwight Live is still the most satisfying country record of the half year. Two decades ago, when country talent was plentiful, Dwight would’ve been just one of a half-dozen top-notch male singers. Today, he stands pretty much alone: the class of country. It’s not due to charm (he has very little), nor an especially rich imagination (he does basically the same thing every time out). What Doo-wight’s primacy boils down to is (1) ownership of a great instrument (the boy can flat-out sing) and (2) an irreducible core of integrity (no matter how mannered his persona, when Yoakam opens his mouth, he’s baring his soul).

“Like most interesting artists, Yoakam is contradiction-ridden. If he comes across as surly and aloof, he is also generous: On the tour that Dwight Live documents, his shows often stretched past standard length. They were beautifully paced, too, ending (as does the album) with a killer version of ”Suspicious Minds.” And he’s got enough chutzpah to appropriate one of the King’s signature tunes as his own. Is Yoakam villain or hero? Imposter or real thing? Listen to the crowd’s verdict as he yells good night.” Grade: A.

1. Yoakam’s lyrics to “Readin’, Rightin,’ Rt. 23”:

They learned readin', writin', Route 23
To the jobs that lay waiting in those cities' factories
They learned readin', writin', roads to the north
To the luxury and comfort a coal miner can't afford
They thought readin', writin', Route 23
Would take them to the good life that they had never seen
They didn't know that old highway
Could lead them to a world of misery

Have you ever been down Kentucky-way
Say south of Prestonburg
Have you ever been up in a holler
Have you ever heard
A mountain man cough his life away
From diggin' that black coal
In those dark mines, those dark mines
If you had you might just understand
The reason that they left is all behind

Have you ever seen 'em
Put the kids in the car after work on Friday night
Pull up in a holler about 2 a.m.
And see a light still shinin' bright
Those mountain folks sat up that late
Just to hold those little grandkids
In their arms, in their arms
And I'm proud to say that I've been blessed
And touched by their sweet hillbilly charm

They learned readin', writin', Route 23
To the jobs that lay waiting in those cities' factories
They learned readin', writin', roads to the north
To the luxury and comfort a coal miner can't afford
They thought readin', writin', Route 23
Would take them to the good life that they had never seen
They didn't know that old highway
Could lead them to a world of misery

Yeah, it turns out that that old highway,
Leads you to a world of misery

2. “Holding Things Together”’s one verse:

Today was Angie's birthday
I guess it slipped your mind
I tried twice to call you
But no answer either time
But the postman brought a present
I mailed some days ago
I just signed it love from mama
So Angie wouldn't know.