Dwight David Yoakam (born October 23, 1956) is an American singer‑songwriter, actor and film director, most famous for his pioneering country music. Popular since the early 1980s, he has recorded more than twenty‑one albums and compilations, has charted more than thirty singles on the Billboard Hot Country Songs charts, and sold more than 25 million records.
Yoakam was born in Pikeville, Kentucky, the son of Ruth Ann, a key‑punch operator, and David Yoakam, a gas‑station owner.[1] Like many Kentucky families of the mid‑20th century, the Yoakams moved to Ohio in hopes of creating a better life. However, Yoakam has always maintained a strong connection his Kentucky roots, as evident by many of his songs, such as Readin', Rightin', Route 23, Bury Me, Floyd County, Louisville, and I Sang Dixie.
Dwight discussed the church's influence on him musically:
I was raised in a congregational church called Church of Christ, and we sang a capella It had a profound impact on my life, 'cause some of my earliest memories are sitting around with my family, opening hymnbooks and singing. Those things were all part of the menagerie of sounds I heard growing up. [2]
He was raised in Columbus, Ohio, but his family would return to Kentucky on weekends, thereby maintaining a sense of «home.» Yoakam graduated from Columbus' Northland High School on June 9, 1974. During his high school years, he excelled in both music and drama, regularly securing the lead role in school plays, such as «Charlie» in a stage version of Flowers for Algernon, honing his skills under the guidance of teacher‑mentors Jerry McAfee (music) and Charles Lewis (drama). Outside of school, Yoakam sang and played guitar with local garage bands, and frequently entertained his friends and classmates as an amateur comedian, impersonating politicians and other celebrities, such as Richard Nixon, who, at that time, was heavily embroiled in the Watergate controversy.
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Dwight David Yoakam (born October 23, 1956) is an American singer-songwriter, actor and film director, most famous for his pioneering country music. Popular since the early 1980s, he has recorded more than twenty-one albums and compilations, has charted more than thirty singles on the Billboard Hot Country Songs charts, and sold more than 25 million records.
Yoakam was born in Pikeville, Kentucky, the son of Ruth Ann, a key-punch operator, and David Yoakam, a gas-station owner.[1] Like many Kentucky families of the mid-20th century, the Yoakams moved to Ohio in hopes of creating a better life. However, Yoakam has always maintained a strong connection his Kentucky roots, as evident by many of his songs, such as Readin', Rightin', Route 23, Bury Me, Floyd County, Louisville, and I Sang Dixie.
Dwight discussed the church's influence on him musically:
I was raised in a congregational church called Church of Christ, and we sang a capella It had a profound impact on my life, 'cause some of my earliest memories are sitting around with my family, opening hymnbooks and singing. Those things were all part of the menagerie of sounds I heard growing up. [2]
He was raised in Columbus, Ohio, but his family would return to Kentucky on weekends, thereby maintaining a sense of "home." Yoakam graduated from Columbus' Northland High School on June 9, 1974. During his high school years, he excelled in both music and drama, regularly securing the lead role in school plays, such as "Charlie" in a stage version of Flowers for Algernon, honing his skills under the guidance of teacher-mentors Jerry McAfee (music) and Charles Lewis (drama). Outside of school, Yoakam sang and played guitar with local garage bands, and frequently entertained his friends and classmates as an amateur comedian, impersonating politicians and other celebrities, such as Richard Nixon, who, at that time, was heavily embroiled in the Watergate controversy.
...I kind of came into the world when there was this great explosion of music. The earliest records I heard were Elvis, Johnny Horton, Johnny Cash, things my parents owned...Columbus was just south of Detroit, so we were saturated with Motown. But what was strange was that here you had these Englishmen interpreting traditional American rock 'n' roll. And I thought, 'This is odd.'[3]
Yoakam briefly attended Ohio State University, but dropped out and moved to Nashville in the late 1970s with the intent of becoming a recording artist.
[edit] Music career
Dwight Yoakam.
When he began his career, Nashville was oriented toward pop "Urban Cowboy" music, and Yoakam's brand of hip Honky tonk music was not considered marketable. Immediately, he ran into the closed doors and cliquish social structure that greet newcomers. But unlike most, he neither fought it nor gave up.
"I just chose not to knuckle under to what those guidelines or rules were, however unstated....I think I just have a pragmatic personality. I look at things and say, this is this and this is this and this is the outcome, so why deal with that and that? Why not do what I know I'm ultimately gonna have to do anyway? That attitude can be good and bad; it can make for an impatient personality and it's caused me problems at times. But I think it's also given me the ability to address the core of what I'm doing. So, I went to the West Coast because I saw a freer environment for me creatively out there."[4]
After Yoakam moved to Los Angeles, he worked towards bringing his particular brand of new Honky Tonk or "Hillbilly" music (as he himself called it) forward into the 1980s. Writing all his own songs, and continuing to perform mostly outside traditional country music channels, Yoakam did many shows in rock and punk clubs around Los Angeles, playing with roots rock or punk rock acts like The Blasters (Yoakam scored a small video hit with his version of their song "Long White Cadillac"), Los Lobos, and X. This helped him diversify his audience well beyond the typical country music fans, and his authentic, groundbreaking music is often credited with rock audiences accepting country music.
Yoakam's break came in 1982, when he met Pete Anderson in a bar in the San Fernando Valley called Ryan's Roundup. 'A mutual friend -- a steel-guitar player-- introduced us,' Anderson says, 'and one day, Dwight sat in at a club I was playing.' I said, "What do you want to play?' and he says, "Do you know 'The Fugitive' by Merle Haggard?" Well, hell yeah, I'd only been playing it for 10 years. So I start and he jumps right in....he was like 'Boink. Do it." A lot of times you see a young singer sit in and just shake. But he was very mature on stage and he was really going for it, so I could go for it. He wasn't intimidated one bit."[5]
Yoakam's recording debut was the self-financed E.P. Guitars Cadillacs, Etc. on independent label Oak Records produced by Pete Anderson, now his lead guitarist; this was later re-released, with several additional tracks, as his major-label debut LP, 1986's Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc.. It launched his career. "Honky Tonk Man," a remake of the Johnny Horton song, and "Guitars, Cadillacs" were hit singles. His stylish music video "Honky Tonk Man" was the first country music video ever played on MTV. The follow-up LP, Hillbilly Deluxe, was just as successful.
"Every time country gets too far into its pop excesses, someone comes along with a firm grasp of the music's traditional roots and takes things the other way," says author Chet Flippo, former senior writer at Rolling Stone magazine....'Dwight Yoakam did that, and has managed to keep traditional at the front of his name.' Flippo says Yoakam was at the forefront of what was later termed the 'new traditionalist' movement in country music, paving the way for the vaunted Class of '89, which included the debuts of Garth Brooks, Clint Black and Trisha Yearwood." [6]
His third LP, Buenas Noches From a Lonely Room, included his first #1, a duet with his musical idol, Buck Owens, on "Streets of Bakersfield". 1990's If There Was a Way was another best-seller.
The integrity of Yoakam's sound was summed up by one writer as:
That the old-fashioned style has become Yoakam's professional calling card is no accident. It was his fascination with the classic country standards that ensured his obscurity for so long. He lasted a matter of weeks in Nashville in 1977, just before that period when faux Western -- was that chart-topping duet featuring Kenny Rogers and Sheena Easton real or just a nightmare? -- would blacken country radio for more than a decade. But it is that same devotion to heritage -- Yoakam is some original hybrid of Johnny Cash, Buck Owens and Elvis Presley -- that finally led to his exaltation as God's last gift to a genre stagnating in "Young Country" overmarketing and country-lite Garth Brooks knockoffs. [7]
In an interview, Dwight explained the impact Buck Owen's music had on his own career choices:
Buck illustrated to me that the music that you did in the barrooms was valid in a recording studio; he took his bar band into the studio and recorded them. In the Sixties he demonstrated -- along with Merle Haggard - that the "Bakersfield sound" was a continuation of the honky tonk sound -- as opposed to Nashville, which at that point in time had forged a session sound. And that had a great impact on me, twenty years later.[8]
When asked about Dwight in general, and some of the controversy Dwight's comments about the Nashville music establishment generated at that time, he said:
I started hearing about this kid, Dwight Yoakam. People would send me articles where he devoted his entire conversation to Buck Owens....One day I was watching Austin City Limits and he was on. so I said, 'I'm going to see what this kid is like.' ...So, anyway, one day he comes to my office in Bakersfield at ten minutes 'til five o'clock -- unannounced! He was playing the fair there and invited me to get up and do a song. So I went out with him and he and I kept in touch.[9] I think if Dwight has brought any grief upon himself, it was by telling the truth about what he thinks. I've been around him many, many days and weeks and he is a wonderful young man. He has made such a difference in my world. I think he is going to be the next big, huge number-one superstar in country music. He's so charismatic, a charming kid." [10]
Yoakam's song "Readin', Rightin', Route 23" pays tribute to his childhood move from Kentucky, and is named after a local expression describing the route that rural Kentuckians took to take to find a job outside of the coal mines. (U.S. Route 23 runs north from Kentucky through Columbus and Toledo, Ohio and on to the automotive centers of Michigan.) Rather than the standard line that their elementary schools taught "the three Rs" of "Readin', 'Ritin', and 'Rithmetic," Ohio and Michigan locals would joke that the three Rs they learned were "Readin', 'Ritin, and Route 23 North"!
In one interview, Dwight explained his "hybridization" of rock and soul with country:
I was exposed to all forms of music. I liked the Stones, a lot of the Memphis and Motown stuff, I used to love Marvin Gaye's Pride and Joy-- and that's not that revealing, because it's so closely aligned in an emotional sense with rural white music. It comes from rural black music, and they both started as an articulation of working people's emotions. And I always loved Smokey Robinson's stuff; I was a huge Wilson Picket fan...[11]
Johnny Cash once cited Yoakam as his favorite country singer. Chris Isaak said Yoakam "is about as good a songwriter that ever put a pen to paper. I think he is someone who years from now will still be remembered, like Hank Williams or Buck Owens."[12] Time magazine dubbed Yoakam "A Renaissance Man" and Vanity Fair declared "Yoakam strides the divide between rock's lust and country's lament." Along with his bluegrass and honky-tonk roots, Yoakam has written or covered many Elvis Presley-style rockabilly songs, including his covers of Queen's "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" in 1999 and Presley's "Suspicious Minds" in 1992. He recorded a cover of the Clash's "Train in Vain" in 1997, a cover of the Grateful Dead song "Truckin'", as well as Cheap Trick's "I Want You to Want Me". Yoakam has never been associated only with Country music; on many early tours, he played with hardcore punk bands like Hüsker Dü, and played many shows around Los Angeles with roots/punk/rock & roll acts. His middle-period-to-later records saw him branching out to different styles, covering rock & roll, punk, 1960's, blues-based "boogie" like ZZ Top, and writing more adventurous songs like "A Thousand Miles From Nowhere". In 2003, he provided background vocals on Warren Zevon's last album, The Wind.
In the 21st century, Yoakam released dwightyoakamacoustic.net, a record featuring solo acoustic versions of many of his hits; left his major label and started his own label. His latest album of all-new tracks is 2005's well reviewed Blame the Vain, on New West Records. Yoakam also released an album dedicated to Buck Owens, Dwight Sings Buck, on October 23, 2007.
Yoakam, who continues to have a lasting transformative impact on country music, is currently finishing work on a new original album, the follow-up to 2005's Blame The Vain, expected in 2010. His duet with Michelle Branch "Long Goodbye" is expected to be released as a single at the beginning of 2010 as well.
[edit] Discography
Main article: Dwight Yoakam discography
[edit] Studio albums
* Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc. (1986)
* Hillbilly Deluxe (1987)
* Buenas Noches From a Lonely Room (1988)
* If There Was a Way (1990)
* This Time (1993)
* Gone (1995)
* A Long Way Home (1998)
* Tomorrow's Sounds Today (2000)
* South of Heaven, West of Hell (2001)
* Population Me (2003)
* Blame the Vain (2005)
[edit] Christmas albums
* Come On Christmas (1997)
[edit] Covers albums
* Under the Covers (1997)
* Dwight's Used Records (2004)
* Dwight Sings Buck (2007)
[edit] Compilation albums
* Dwight Live (1995)
* Last Chance for a Thousand Years (1999)
* dwightyoakamacoustic.net (2000)
* Reprise, Please, Baby (2002)
* In Others' Words (2003)
* The Very Best of Dwight Yoakam (2004)
[edit] International releases
* This Is... (1990)
* La Croix D/Amour (1992)
[edit] Outside of music
Yoakam has carved out a niche as one of the most mesmerizing and respected actors working today, most notably in critically acclaimed performances as an abusive alcoholic in Sling Blade (1996), as a sociopathic killer in Panic Room (2002), and as the Sheriff in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005). He has also appeared in Southern California live theater under the direction of Peter Fonda. More recently, he appeared in a supporting role as Doc Miles the doctor for Chev Chelios in Crank and reprised that role in Crank 2: High Voltage. Yoakam also had a cameo appearance in the 2005 comedy movie Wedding Crashers. In 2008, Yoakam played Pastor Phil in Four Christmases, starring Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon.
In 2000, Yoakam co-wrote, starred in and produced South of Heaven, West of Hell, also starring Vince Vaughn and Bridget Fonda.
Yoakam's food brand, Bakersfield Biscuits,[13] sells frozen foods at retailers such as Wal-Mart Superstores, Walgreens, Sam's Club, and Kroger.
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