CMT Blog: Dwight Yoakam

I wish the Country Music Association would decide whether it wants to be a trade group that promotes a particular brand of entertainment or an adjunct to the American Legion. It’s one thing for the CMA to applaud the good work that some soldiers do some of the time, but it’s quite another for it to fawn over all things military and to coerce those attending the CMA Music Festival to do the same. Here’s what I’m talking about. This year, the CMA arranged for a “flyover” of four military jets before the start of each nightly concert at LP Field. This went on for four evenings. Then, during breaks in each concert, the pilots and support team members of these aircraft were paraded across the stage and introduced to the crowd by name.

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Usually I can persuade a few of my friends to join me for the nightly concerts at the CMA Music Festival, so I don’t have to sit there by myself all night, taking notes. This year, for the first time, I had several friends ask if they could tag along. Well, sure! Seeing the event through the eyes of a first-timer always makes it a lot more fun. When Rascal Flatts suddenly appeared as the surprise guest that first night, you could definitely sense the excitement in the crowd - stuff like this just doesn’t happen outside of Nashville.

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Ever the legend, Johnny Cash is now being immortalized in a musical, Ring of Fire: The Music of Johnny Cash, which premieres tonight in Texas.

Yoakam and Leno have got it going on. Thursday night, Dwight Yoakam will sing on The Tonight Show for the 24th time, making him the only artist to perform that often for Jay Leno.

Catch a sneak peek of Willie Nelson’s somber “Lost Highway” duet with Norwegian singer Kurt Nilsen.

Former supermodel Janice Dickinson wears her support for Miley Cyrus right upfront.

Seven very lucky high school students will be chosen to shoot behind-the-scenes videos on the set of the Hannah Montana movie.

Just in time for Mother’s Day, Keith Urban went shopping for a week-by-week pregnancy guide in Nashville over the weekend.

A trip back home to Ireland recently brought me face to face with my old CD collection and I remembered how much I used to love mainstream country music. I grabbed a few CDs for the trip back to Tennessee, and found a few albums that really formed the basis of my musical education as a teenager.

I remember my brother coming home one Saturday afternoon with an album by a guy in a cowboy hat looking out over a desert - Ocean Front Property by George Strait. After a few listens we were both hooked, and tracks like “All My Ex’s Live in Texas” and “Second Chances” have been burned into my musical hard drive. When I listen to those songs again, I’m transported back to London, specifically sitting in my Dad’s van as we drive to a gig on a dark evening.

Dwight Yoakam’s Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc. was unashamedly hillbilly honky-tonk, and it’s only dated by the fact it probably wouldn’t work in today’s market. Listen to “Honky Tonk Man” and tell me it doesn’t make you do a Dwight dance across the kitchen floor! Meanwhile, “South of Cincinnati” is full of and remorse and longing - heartbreaking stuff. There’s also great fiddling on this record and of course outstanding guitar playing, providing an education for any country musician.

Country music evolves over time and speaks to a lot of people today, but rarely to me. In my early 30s, I feel a little rejected by the country mainstream, but I’m thankful that it did speak to me when I was younger. Maybe in years to come I’ll be talking about the 1980s as the golden era of country music in the same way some folks now talk about the ‘40s and ‘50s, and when I do I’ll pulling out these two albums as evidence.

I’ve been reading Three Dog Nightmare: The Continuing Chuck Negron Story, a book about the tragic fall and personal resurrection of one of the lead voices from the pop band Three Dog Night. In it, Negron makes a claim that the band was one of the first to pack stadiums with a rock show.

The Beatles had done it before, at New York’s Shea Stadium, and there were other bands that played stadiums, though many of them fell far short of filling them out. But I’ll bet no one in the Fab Four’s mid-‘60s era — or in Three Dog Night’s early-‘70s prime — ever thought country music would be capable of that.

So this week’s anniversary of the first George Strait stadium tour is one worth celebrating. Strait brought in 56,000 fans on March 14, 1998, to Sun Devil Stadium in Arizona for a lineup that featured Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, John Michael Montgomery, Lee Ann Womack and others. And Strait continued doing stadium tours with massive talent rosters for several more years before pulling back to his traditional in-the-round arena format.

What’s now amazing is that while the stadium date is still a country rarity, it happens much more frequently than anyone could have predicted in the past. Kenny Chesney is playing 14 of those dates this summer, supported by a rotating list of acts that includes Keith Urban, LeAnn Rimes, Big & Rich, Gary Allan and Luke Bryan, among others. Toby Keith has offered a handful of stadium shows as well.

Strait could likely pick up and fill out stadiums again, if he chose, and you can imagine Keith Urban, Tim McGraw, Brooks & Dunn and Shania Twain (remember her?) doing the same thing. In fact, when the Gridiron Bash — a strange, college-football-related fan competition — lined up stadiums across the U.S. for April, a surprising number of country lineups were employed: Alan Jackson in Alabama, Dwight Yoakam in West Virginia, Dierks Bentley and Wynonna in Kentucky, Montgomery Gentry and Taylor Swift in Tennessee.

At last week’s Country Radio Seminar, one booking agent noted that outside of such longstanding classic-rock icons as the Rolling Stones and U2, there’s no stronger genre for live shows these days than country music.

Considering that a lot of country artists were happy to play high-school gymnasiums and small county fairs at the time Three Dog Night was playing those stadium dates, it’s tough to find stronger support for the upward transformation that’s taken place in country music.

Country music is a diverse genre, and if you have any doubts about that, just take a look at two artists who turn 50 this week. You would have a difficult time arguing that Mary Chapin Carpenter and Sammy Kershaw are anything but polar opposites.

Carpenter (born Feb. 21, 1958) hails from Princeton, N.J., lived during her youth in Japan, attended an Ivy League school and emerged in country music with a sound derived from folk music. There’s not an ounce of twang in her understated vocal presence, and her politics are decidedly blue: At the height of her popularity in the early-1990s, she raised money and awareness for AIDS charities; and in 2000, she performed at the Democratic National Convention.

Kershaw (born Feb. 24, 1958) grew up in Kaplan, La., chose the club circuit over college and got his first hits by singing love songs with car metaphors and references to secluded country lakes. With a vocal style that borrows heavily from George Jones, he is one of the twangiest vocalists to appear nationally in the last 20 years, and his politics are decidedly red: He ran as a Republican for lieutenant governor of Louisiana last year, though he found himself having to insist to reporters he was serious about his candidacy.

The beauty of this dichotomy is that these two artists co-existed quite nicely on country radio for years. Carpenter brought an intellectual presence to the genre along with a wry sense of humor (her “I Feel Lucky” depiction of a barroom scene in which Lyle Lovett and Dwight Yoakam compete for her affections is still chuckle-worthy). When she turned to others for material, she was apt to draw on the talents of alt-country figure Lucinda Williams (”Passionate Kisses“) or rocker Mark Knopfler (”The Bug”).

Kershaw lent a raw, manly air to country, and the titles of some of his singles — “Yard Sale,” “Queen of My Double Wide Trailer,” “Your Tattoo” — show his artistic penchant for songs drawn from the lower end of the economic scale. He ran his career by the book, recording in Nashville and drawing from some of Music City’s most-respected songwriters, including Bob McDill (”She Don’t Know She’s Beautiful”) and Mark D. Sanders (”Vidalia”).

One could show similar contrasts among current country hitmakers — Taylor Swift and Craig Morgan, for example; or Rascal Flatts versus Alan Jackson. Critics slam country as one-dimensional hillbilly fare, but there’s actually a lot of room for a lot of different characters in the format.

I love Buck Owens. I love Bonnie Owens. I love Merle Haggard. I love Dwight Yoakam. Most of all, I love the sound that is the Bakersfield country song, and GOD BLESS Dwight for putting out this record called Dwight Sings Buck. It’s gonna allow a lot of his fans who don’t know Buck Owens’ music to learn and appreciate what influenced the sound that Dwight’s fans have grown to love.

I listened to an interview on XM the other day with Dwight talking about how he met Buck and how he became like a father figure to him. He talked about Bonnie Owens’ harmonies on that old Bakersfield sound and how it instituted some of the sounds we are all familiar with today. Bonnie was an artist in her own right in addition to singing with the likes of Merle Haggard and Buck Owens (she married both). She was named Female Vocalist of the Year in 1965 by the Academy Of Country Music, the same year Bonnie ended up marrying The Hag. From that year on, Bonnie dedicated her time to Merle’s children and his career, touring with Merle’s band The Strangers as a backup vocalist. After 13 years of marriage, they divorced, but she continued singing with his band. With her passing last April, the country music industry lost a real one of the greats.

Dwight’s sound is so innovative and country chic, that hipsters and rockers and country fans alike dig his sound. To me, he is his generation’s answer to George Jones‘ song, “Who’s Gonna Fill Their Shoes.” He is a modern-day living legend and will be around for a long time. He never took a second glance at changing his sound. He just did what he did and is still doing that. He’s updated it a little, but it’s still “Dwight” no matter which way you cut it. Please take a second to go download this brilliant CD. You will see that real country still lives!

We live in a visual, “SEX SELLS” society, and I’m aware of that, but why do age and beauty SOMETIMES matter more than talent? I mean, seriously. I’m not saying there aren’t plenty of beautiful people that sing like birds, and this is a case-by-case thing, because there are plenty of gorgeous and talented people, so no one jump down my throat. I’m just trying to get a handle on the situation.

Someone sent me a link to a discussion the other day guessing country singers’ ages on Velvet Rope. I was like, “Oh Lord, here we go again.” Readers were saying that artists are skirting the age issue too frequently, and that it is annoying. One response was, “Why can’t everyone just tell their real age?” Well, hun, you wanna know why? Because people like you, who are all TOO concerned about how old someone is versus their talent, probably wouldn’t buy a record that a 17-year-old made, even though she was the spitting vocal identity of Patsy Cline or Loretta Lynn.

People just push and push about age, which I think should be an irrelevant subject. Does it really matter if I’m 20 or 50? If you like my music, what difference does it make? If you like it, are you gonna buy my records? If you don’t like it, then I think you should buy one for all your friends, then have a listening party and a discussion. HA!

I think it’s so cool that traditional country crosses so many age barriers. It amazes me nightly, because I thought my fans would be older white males that used to and still only listen to Kitty Wells and Loretta Lynn. But our fans start at 3 and go to 80.  I also think it’s ridiculous that someone’s age and the way they look should matter more than the way they sound. I got this Hank Williams acoustic album the other day. That’s what music is to me – when someone can entertain you with acoustic music as much as they can with a full band, such as Dwight Yoakam’s acoustic CD and Jack Ingram’s acoustic CD.

Back in the day, before there were music videos and magazines, you had no IDEA what any of these folks looked like unless you saw them at a concert or on their record cover. The other day a male friend said to me, “Have you heard so-and-so’s new single? She is so hot!” What does HOT have to do with hearing it? I mean, there were plenty of “hotties” back in the day (Leona Williams, Jeannie C. Riley and her mini skirts, Loretta, Dolly Parton, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, Tammy Wynette and her necklines), but that’s not all that mattered. What mattered were the songs they were singing with their unique voices that you can pick out from across the room.

There’s nothing wrong with living in a beautiful world, but IS THAT ALL THAT MATTERS? What gives??