Dwight Yoakam

About Dwight

Kentucky native DWIGHT YOAKAM blazed out of the Los Angeles club scene in 1986 with his debut Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc., which went on to score double-platinum status. Vote At CMT TodayThis was followed by such million-sellers as Hillbilly Deluxe (1987,) Buenas Noches From A Lonely Room (1988,) Just Lookin’ For A Hit (1989,) If There Was A Way (1990) and the triple-platinum milestone This Time (1993) featuring the Grammy-winning single “Ain’t That Lonely Yet” and his signature hit “Fast As You.” Dwight followed with Dwight Live (1995), Gone (1996), Under The Covers (1997), Come On Christmas (1997), A Long Way Home (1998) and Last Chance For A Thousand Years (1999). Dwight’s version of the Queen classic “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” debuted during the 1999 Academy Awards telecast in a national ad campaign for Gap clothing stores and went on to become another Top-Ten hit.
The two-time Grammy winner has garnered 21 nominations in the course of his career, while selling more than 23 million albums worldwide and earning praise from the likes of Time magazine, hailing him as “A Renaissance Man,” Rolling Stone, noting “he has no contemporary peer,” and Vanity Fair, claiming “Yoakam strides the divide between rock’s lust and country’s lament.”
Yoakam’s acting career has also garnered much acclaim, particularly for his role as Doyle Hargraves in the 1996 Oscar-winning “Sling Blade,” for which he was honored with the Premiere Performance Award recognizing outstanding breakthrough performances in film. Following that, Dwight made his directorial debut (starring in a screenplay he also authored) with the 2001 release of “South Of Heaven, West Of Hell,” a gothic western with an impressive ensemble cast that included Billy Bob Thornton, Vince Vaughn, Bridget Fonda, Peter Fonda, Paul Reubens, Bud Cort and Michael Jeter. Other film credits include a scene-stealing 1994 debut in John Dahl’s “Red Rock West” (with Nicolas Cage and Dennis Hopper), “The Newton Boys” in 1998 (with Matthew McConaughey, Julianna Marguiles and Vincent D’Onofrio,) “The Minus Man” in 1999 (with Owen Wilson and Janeane Garafolo,) the 2002 blockbuster suspense film “Panic Room” (with Jodie Foster and Forest Whitaker) and the 2003 action-comedy “Hollywood Homicide” (with Harrison Ford and Josh Hartnett.)
On March 25, 2006, when Dwight Yoakam got the awful news that his close friend Buck Owens had passed away, it was a shock. Only four days earlier, the honky-tonk compadres had spent four hours on the phone catching up while Yoakam was amid a 17-month world tour. “Buck was just full of life,” Yoakam remembers. “We’d known each other since 1987, and somebody had asked him about me, and he said, ‘People think we have dinner together every night.’ And I said, ‘I know, they act like we’re just down the block from one another,’ and he said, ‘Well, it always will be like that, Dwight.’ Ours was a friendship that was a combination of parent, sibling and peer...”
By the fall of ‘06, he and his label New West Records agreed that Yoakam’s next album would honor the architect of the Bakersfield Sound. Dwight Sings Buck reprises and re-imagines fifteen of Buck Owens’ greatest, including 11 top five hits, eight of which reached 1 on the country charts, spanning 1956 to 1967, with stunning results.

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