Dwight Yoakam photo by Cambria Harkey, courtesy of New West Records.

Dwight Yoakam's 2007 CD, Dwight Sings Buck. Photo courtesy of New West Records.

"After his death, it was the clearest way I could express my love for him and acknowledge the depth of our friendship."
--Dwight Yoakam on why he chose to record an album of Buck Owens songs

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 Dwight was amid a 17-month world tour.

"Buck was just full of life," Dwight 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..."

Immediately, Dwight and his band, who'd been playing Dwight and Buck's 1988 chart topping duet "The Streets of Bakersfield" as an encore, added several Buck classics to the set. "It became part of our musical embrace with the audience every night," says Dwight.

"It was almost as if they let me have a moment with him every night – like we were able to take him on tour with us." By the fall of '06, he and his label New West Records, which released 2005's critically acclaimed Blame the Vain, agreed that Dwight's next album would honor the architect of the Bakersfield Sound. Dwight Sings Buck reprises and re-imagines 15 of Buck Owens' greatest, including 11 Top Five hits, eight of which reached No. 1 on the country charts, spanning 1956 to 1967, with stunning results.

Excluding their hit duet, which had initiated Buck's return to music after a lengthy hiatus, Dwight had never cut an Buck song. "As much as anything in my life, I'm happy to have encouraged him to want to play music again," Dwight explains. "That's why I'd never, ever considered cutting a Buck song. Buck was still doing them and had recorded them wonderfully. I never, ever thought that I would re-record Buck's music and certainly never as an album that I did alone. But then I realized, it wasn't unlike the solo tribute album that Buck did for Tommy Collins, or Merle for Lefty Frizzell. "After his death, it was the clearest way I could express my love for him and acknowledge the depth of our friendship."

That friendship originally blossomed in 1987, when Dwight, who'd been name-checking Buck since his 1986 breakthrough, got Buck onstage with him and urged him to play music again. Since his collaborator Don Rich's tragic death in a 1974 motorcycle accident, Buck had "suffered such a long period of being depressed and confused and hurt," he later said, that he "just went through the paces," eventually retiring from music-making. In Dwight, Buck found the raison d'etre that had been missing for so long. In addition to hitting the charts again, Buck also returned to recording his own albums and opened the Crystal Palace in Bakersfield, where he performed nearly every weekend – including the night he died.