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.”