Dwight Yoakam

In spite of Dwight Yoakam's popularity and impressive ability to cross musical boundaries, no biography has ever before been published. Award-winning music critic McLeese (New York Times Reader: Arts & Culture) fills that gap with this jaunty, affectionate, honest, and compelling book. Drawing on interviews with Yoakam and his friends and fellow musicians, McLeese guides us through Yoakam's early years in Kentucky and Ohio in the 1970s, where his formative musical influences were country music and the Monkees, to his years in California, where he perfected his musical persona and came roaring out of the L.A. roots-punk circuit and into the national spotlight. McLeese takes us album by album from Yoakam's firecracker debut, Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc. (1986), to his 2007 tribute to his mentor Buck Owens, Dwight Sings Buck. Yoakam emerges from these pages as a hard-working, honest artist, deeply committed to compositions that both preserve the heritage of country music and push its boundaries to carry the music, the tradition, and his listeners into new territories.