Dwight David Yoakam (born October 23, 1956) is an American country singer-songwriter, actor, and filmmaker. He first achieved mainstream attention in 1986 with the release of his debut album Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc.. Yoakam had considerable success throughout the late 1980s onward, with a total of ten studio albums for Reprise Records. Later projects have been released on Audium (now MNRK Music Group), New West, Warner, and Sugar Hill Records.
His first three albums—Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc., Hillbilly Deluxe, and Buenas Noches from a Lonely Room—all reached number one on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart. Yoakam also has two number-one singles on Hot Country Songs with "Streets of Bakersfield" (a duet with Buck Owens) and "I Sang Dixie", and twelve additional top-ten hits. He has won two Grammy Awards and one Academy of Country Music award. 1993's This Time is his most commercially successful album, having been certified triple-platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
Yoakam's musical style draws from a wide variety of influences including alternative country, neotraditional country, honky-tonk, rock and the Bakersfield sound. He is known for his distinctive tenor singing voice, unconventional musical image, and the lead guitar work of his longtime producer and bandleader Pete Anderson. Yoakam writes most of his own songs but has recorded many successful cover songs by a wide range of artists including Johnny Horton, Elvis Presley, Cheap Trick, The Blasters, Lefty Frizzell, and Queen. He has collaborated with Beck, John Mellencamp, k.d. lang, Ralph Stanley, and members of Alison Krauss & Union Station. As an actor, Yoakam has appeared in the movies Red Rock West, Sling Blade, Panic Room, The Minus Man, and Wedding Crashers, as well as South of Heaven, West of Hell, which he wrote and directed. He also appeared in the TV series P.S. I Luv U and Under the Dome, as well as the Amazon Prime Video original series Goliath.
Pikeville (/ˈpaɪkvəl/) is a home rule-class city in and the county seat of Pike County, Kentucky, United States. The population of Pikeville was 7,754 as of the 2020 U.S. Census. Pikeville serves as a regional economic, educational and entertainment hub for the surrounding areas of eastern Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia. It is home to the University of Pikeville and the Pikeville Cut-Through, the second-largest earthmoving project in the Western Hemisphere.
The city has been a center of rapid development in Eastern Kentucky since the 1990s. Pikeville College (now the University of Pikeville) opened the Kentucky College of Osteopathic Medicine in 1997. The university also opened the Kentucky College of Optometry, the first optometry school in Central Appalachia, in the fall of 2016. In September 2018, Pikeville's City government was named 2018 KLC City Government of the Year by the Kentucky League of Cities. This was the inaugural year for the award and was intended to recognize "a city that has done something transformational and our first ever recipient certainly demonstrates a city making a huge impact on its region.
Dwight Yoakan tracks to check out: I Don't Know How To Say Goodbye, A Thousand Miles from Nowhere, Streets of Bakersfield
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