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.

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

Just as Buck did before him, Dwight took his road band – guitarist Eddie Perez, pedal steel player Josh Grange, bassist Kevin Smith, and drummer Mitch Marine – into the studio to cut Buck's songs, shortly after his 250-date tour's end. "That band at that moment" was the perfect vehicle for recording, says Dwight, who immediately began four days of rehearsals for the album rather than recuperate from their arduous trek around the world.

"During the last three months of the tour, those four musicians made it a point to study the originals," according to Dwight. "It really became their obsession. Eddie Perez is a huge, huge fan of not only Buck's but of [guitarist] Don Rich, so Eddie's paying tribute to Don on every note he plays. And Josh Grange made it almost like a graduate-level thesis to study the pedal steel on Buck's records."

As Dwight worked out the arrangements, he found himself reinventing some of Buck's best-known songs: "Only You (Can Break My Heart)" kicks off with a Hammond B3 organ, and "Think Of Me" "turned out to be a whole different approach than Buck's calypso thing," says Dwight. A slowed-down "Close Up the Honky-Tonks," which will be released as the album's first single, employs outstanding percussion, courtesy of former Motown session player Bobby Hall. "She played great," says Dwight of Hall, who also contributed to Blame The Vain. "I wonder what Buck would think of the congas and all that tambourine, the maracas and shakers? I hope he would be proud of this." A spine-tingling departure from the original is Dwight's take on Buck's legendary composition "Together Again."

Backed primarily by Skip Edwards' acoustic piano and Perez' tremolo guitar, Dwight delivers perhaps his most soulful vocal ever on this transcendent, gospel-style version. "I reared back and let go, singing a new melody," Dwight relates. "After the take, I walked in and listened, and I said, 'Well, we're leaving Planet Earth here with Buck and we're going somewhere else – but maybe that's not a bad thing.' That song actually ambushed me. It's the last thing on the album and was the last thing I sang – which I took some liberties with. I hope Buck's fans will allow me that loving liberty." Surely, Buck would have approved – he told one journalist in 1994 that "Dwight is a rebel, an individualist, and I like that about him."

On other Buck hits, including "Act Naturally," "Cryin' Time," "Under Your Spell Again," and "Love's Gonna Live Here," Dwight sounds as if he's channeling Buck, with Perez's Telecaster and harmony vocals tapping into the essence of Don Rich. Throughout, Dwight and company make the songs their own, however, with a nod to the guitar interplay of the Beatles (who were also avowed fans of Buck) on "I Don't Care (Just as Long as You Love Me)" and Mitch Marine's drum flams emphasizing the pauses on "Foolin' Around."

"Buck's music just makes everybody smile," says Dwight says of that tune, one of the 15 he picked "based on the emotion of the song. The emotional connection to the music never left Buck Owens."

Looking back on the making of Dwight Sings Buck, Dwight asserts, "I never could have anticipated what a journey this album would become for the band and myself. We thought we could just rehearse Buck's songs and then record them, but once we started, I realized it wasn't going to happen that way. Each song began to take on its own shape and expression, and the album became as unique a recording experience as any in my career. It's almost as if Buck was demanding that? and when that happened, it really became our album."

Ultimately, Dwight hopes that this is an album that lets the fans, as well as himself, say "I love you Buck, and I love you for giving us your music every time I hear it."