Everyone loves the Grammy Museum at LA LIVE, whether you’re in the audience or on the stage.  The performers I’ve seen there for an evening of intimate conversation and performance in the 200-seat GRAMMY Sound Stage thrive in this casual atmosphere which includes the state-of-the-art acoustics.  I always leave with that satisfied feeling that I just spent some very personal and intimate time with someone who, before this, had just been a name.  Dwight Yoakam was no exception.  I went that evening as an ignorant “Mountain William” and immediately became a “Hill Billy” novitiate, only to leave as a postulate of Country Western music worshipping at the shrine of Martin D28.  But more about that later.

As Vanity Fair magazine declared, “Yoakim strides the divide between rock’s lust and country’s lament.”  The lust part was easy –- you could tell Mr. Yoakam’s religion from his poured-on blue jeans.  The lament part wasn’t lament in the usual sense of expressing grief, regret or mourning — this was upbeat lament.  Hopeful lament.  Lamentation with a personality.  Maybe it was because of Mr. Yoakam’s engaging stream of consciousness throughout the evening which started with Plato and continued through to the back roads of Country music on to the current trends in entertainment.  This journey redefined the normal connotation of “lament.”

That’s right –- Plato, then to Greek theatre from 5 B.C., and how before that, cavemen must have done shadow pictures on the wall for entertainment .  The thesis for this evening was truly all about entertainment and communicating, and we were mesmerized by Mr. Yoakam’s point of view as he chatted about all of this using his own mysterious segue that kept us involved in a manner that made it possible to just go with the flow, and was more fun than a ____________ (you fill in the blank).

I didn’t come up with the concept of “thesis” for this evening — it was one of  Mr. Yoakam’s concepts when he was talking about how he writes songs.  He explained that he has a collection of thesis statements he’s saved as song possibilities.  A song for him may begin as a thesis statement and then, from picking and noodling and noodling and picking, it moves slowly form an embryonic state with freedom of emotion to possibly become a piece of music that starts to involve vowels and consonants that may or may not become the bare bones for a song.  Guess it’s sort of like a musical term paper.

Inspiration and influence seem to be interchangeable in his background.  His musicology comes from the family car radio, which he referred to as “terrestrial radio,” and not much beyond the confines of the car, with one exception.  His dad was strictly country in his car, but his mom was a different story.  The buttons on the car radio were the buttons to other worlds: classical, popular, standards, old and new honky-tonk…  The exception was that his mom also belonged to the old Columbia Record Club, and one of the records that arrived in the mail one day was Johnny Horton’s Greatest Hits.  The Columbia Record Club?  That Johnny Horton?  Everyone in the audience murmured in amused agreement.  Now there’s a name from the past!  It explains a lot about Yoakam’s early exposure to this kind of music, except that Horton was born in Los Angeles and Yoakam was born in south-east Kentucky.  Johnny Horton is best remembered for his historical songs, and was one of the best and most popular honky-tonk singers of the late ’50s.  Horton managed to infuse honky-tonk with an urgent rockabilly underpinning.

With this bit of information, he took us all off the “land” of the various country music genres: music that’s a blend of popular forms originally found in the Southern United States and the Appalachian Mountains.  With its roots in traditional folk music, Celtic Music, gospel music, and old-time music, it rapidly evolved in the 1920s to the myriad styles we listen to now.  The term “country” music began to be used in the 1940s when the earlier term, “hillbilly” music, was deemed to be degrading, and so Country is the term which has been used since the ’70s.  Now, in the Southwestern United States, a different mix of ethnic groups have created the music that has become the Western music of the term Country and Western today.

Country music produced one of the top-selling solo artists of all time –- Elvis Presley, who was known early on as “the Hillbilly Cat” and was a regular on the radio program Louisiana Hayride.  Yoakam affectionately told us how Presley went on to become a defining figure in the emergence of rock and roll.  Now, music that originally was honky-tonk and rockabilly goes so far as to have Willie Nelson teamed up with Wynton Marsalis and performing with a taste of Errol Graner’s piano included.  Talking about Elvis brought up what seems to be the most famous acoustic guitar -– the Martin D28.  The D stands for Dreadnaught, the largest British battleship ever.

The Martin D28 first appeared in 1916 and has remained the most easily recognizable, from its body size and big booming sound.  At one point, this big booming sound was compromised by encasing the guitar in a hand-tooled guitar case with tooling not unlike a fine saddle. Charles Underwood designed the first famous guitar cover for his friend Elvis Presley in 1956.  This original cover is now enshrined at Graceland. The sound was muffled  from the guitar being encased since there was no opening for the sound to escape. Eventually, someone figured to cut an opening in the case for sound, and that solved the problem.  Then there was a slight bit of humorous information passed on about the evolution of pick guards and their affect on the sound of the guitar.  It seems that these too are a very personal choice.

With all this information and some pretty funny across the audience, we were ready for the goods that would demonstrate the Martin D28’s song theses, guitar covers, pick guards, the Columbia Record club, and Plato.  As generous as Mr. Yoakam was with his time chatting with us, he was as generous with his playing, and we were lucky enough to hear a generous collection of various kinds of songs.  In this 21^st Century, all the styles and thereof is vast: Alternative Country, Americana, Bluegrass, Country Bluegrass, Country/Country, Country Gospel, Honky-Tonk, Outlaw Country, Traditional Bluegrass, Traditional Country, Urban Cowboy…  And it seems Yoakam can play ‘em all and then some.  Don’t forget he’s also an accomplished actor, but that’s for another night on a different stage…but hopefully the same blue jeans.

After having such wonderful music being so close with words so true and feelin’ so good, I left enthusiastically being a Dwight Yoakam cheering section:  Hokum, Pokum, I’m for Yoakam!  Amen!