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music, it’s fitting that he would find musical kinship with Alvin, who mined a seam of what would subsequently become known as “Americana” for riches similar to that in the songs of John Fogerty. On the album release of
Guitars, Cadillacs
, Yoakam offered special thanks to Alvin and the Blasters, as part of a select few “who believed when nobody else cared.”
    â€œI later discovered that we’d both been cooks in Long Beach in the late ’70s, worked half a mile away from each other,” remembers Alvin with a laugh. “I was a cook in a Middle Eastern restaurant that was predominantly vegetarian. And Dwight was a cook at a place called Hamburger Henry’s.
    â€œI’d go there and get a burger after cooking vegetarian for eight hours. And Dwight didn’t get famous
only
for doing drinking songs, but he did quite a few. So it’s kind of ironic, this vegetarian cooking hamburgers, who had never had a hamburger in his life, and singing drinking songs, and he’d never had a drink. And singing them pretty persuasively.”
    The years between driving to Los Angeles in 1977 and cutting his first demo in 1981 were plainly productive ones for Yoakam in terms of writing. All of the ten songs that Yoakam would cut for that demo would subsequently be re-recorded for his first three albums, except for “Please Daddy,” which he’d written in high school, once again using his imagination. It’s a song sung from the perspective of a young daughter who is trying to console her father (and likely herself) that things will be all right after he and her mother had split up.
    To listen to those revelatory demo recordings, first issued on the four-disc, 2002 retrospective
Reprise Please Baby: The Warner Bros. Years
, you’d never suspect that “Please Daddy” would be the only track he wouldn’t re-record for release because it’s as good as many of them. Others more directly reflected his own experience, as he explains of “You’re the One,” a highlight ballad of the demo but not included on a Yoakam album until his third. “I’d written that in 1978 about this girl I’d grown up with, a beautiful preacher’s daughter who broke my heart,” he remembers. “She went to the prom with me. Though, again, it goes well beyond the literal. I was a senior in high school, I was crushed, and I got over it.”
    Living in Southern California gave Yoakam a fresh perspective on what he’d left behind, offering even more of a contrast than he’d experienced between Columbus and Kentucky. Raised in the former, he recognized that the latter provided the inspiration that would distinguish him from the run of the country-rock mill. Not necessarily his own experiences, or even those of his immediate family, but songs in which he could use that legacy for some imaginative reshaping. “Miner’s Prayer” is two generations and a hundred miles from Yoakam’s upbringing; “South of Cincinnati,” a track from the
Guitars, Cadillacs
EP and LP that shows a short story’s command of detail, uses the marriage of his grandparents, together more than fifty years, to explore the alternate reality of a loving couple separated by alcohol and pride.
    One of the ironies of Yoakam’s musical progression in California, when he began to write almost exclusively of Kentucky and cast himself as a pilgrim from the bluegrass backwoods, is that in urban Columbus he’d distinguished himself by his ability to channel the country-rock that had been emerging from Southern California. And that was the music he considered his strength when he made the move west.
    â€œWhen I got out here, I would do ‘Carmelita,’ Linda Ronstadt’s version,” he said of the song he would later cover in a style closer to Warren Zevon’s original. “I would do the Eagles. I was always country rock, because my voice,