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Nashville.
    If this were a different sort of biography, one encompassing the minutiae of the life rather than focusing on the progression of the music, we’d have to devote a chapter or more to Nashville, where Dwight made his first stab at a musical career after a brief stint at Ohio State in his hometown of Columbus convinced him that higher education was not for him. His house had never been filled with books, though Dwight’s inquisitive mind found kindred spirits among the grad students from the near South who attended their church, and his vague plans to pursue a degree in history or philosophy suggested some direction after his graduation from Northland High School in 1974. To what goal?
    â€œOh, man I had no idea,” admits Yoakam, whose restless spirit led him to quickly abandon his studies. So he decided to seek musical fame and fortune in Nashville. Why Nashville? Because it was close, a short day’s drive from Columbus, less than four hundred miles. (A pudgy, Indiana high school dropout named John Hiatt had decided to relocate to Nashville for pretty much the same reason. It seemed a whole lot easier and less extreme for a Midwest kid than trying to tackle New York or L.A.) Plus, Dwight had what he called a “landing spot” in Nashville—friends from his church had family there.
    Otherwise, he had no more of a sense of destiny than most other high school grads that had given college a try before deciding that since they no longer
had
to go to school they didn’t want to. Only in retrospect did the sojourn to Nashville become symbolic in the Dwight Yoakam mythos, some saying that he had somehow been spurned there so he had to find somewhere else where his music would receive its proper embrace.
    Nashville didn’t reject Yoakam. Nashville didn’t even notice him. It offered him a job as an extra at Opryland, the theme park surrounding the suburban relocation of the Grand Ole Opry from the venerable Ryman Auditorium. (Opryland has since become a shopping mall, and, yes, there’s a metaphor here.) He was an eighteen-year-old kid with no band, no connections, no songs—well, a few formative efforts, but Yoakam wouldn’t really begin to mine the musical possibilities of Kentucky and establish a hillbilly persona to fit until his subsequent move two thousand miles west would give him greater perspective on what he’d left behind and what he could make from it.
    Yoakam’s music most certainly would have turned out differently if he’d found an enthusiastic reception in Nashville, with its recording industry more interested in polishing brand new urban cowboys than reincarnating the raw-edged, age-old music of the honky-tonk man. And his life could have turned out very differently had he remained at Ohio State, where he would have been one of the many who had once dabbled in music and theater but had left them behind in high school.
    But neither Nashville nor Ohio State had panned out, so when a musician friend in Columbus with a car urged Dwight to accompany him on a cross-country joyride to Los Angeles in 1977, Yoakam didn’t need a whole lot of convincing. After his brief anonymity in Nashville, he continued to play music in Ohio, singing the songs of Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers, things that were closer in spirit to what would become neo-rockabilly than contemporary country.
    Oddly enough, one of the hits that had convinced him that he had something special to offer was “Rock On” by David Essex, where the hitch in the voice of the Brit, almost a hiccup, was something akin to the choke you’d hear in the vocals of the Appalachian bluegrass Dwight had heard in Kentucky. What seemed exotic to the rock fans in Columbus sounded familiar to him.
    Even greater validation came from the popular dominance of the roots-oriented Creedence Clearwater Revival, a band that bridged FM album acceptance and AM single hits and had become one of the