“Streets of Bakersfield”
Dwight Yoakam and Buck Owens
Written by Homer Joy
Billboard
#1 (1 week)
October 15, 1988
Dwight Yoakam’s first appearance atop the country singles chart came in the form of a duet with his greatest musical influence.
The sound of Buck Owens is all over Yoakam’s records, so it’s not surprising that he knew where to find a great deep cut in the Owens catalog. Also not surprising by this point was his talent for reviving classic cuts and making them his own, as he’d already done with “Honky Tonk Man” and “Little Sister.”
What may be less apparent is how transformational this cover truly is. I heard the Owens original for the first time while preparing this entry, and I was taken aback at how colorless it was. The Tex-Mex flavor of the Yoakam cover is so wedded in my mind to this song that the Owens track sounded unfinished to me at first. What I learned with repeated listening of both versions is that Yoakam’s real innovation was in his interpretation of the lyric.
Where Owens sounds resigned and beaten down on his original recording, there’s a playful, smarmy charm to Yoakam’s spin on this character. He’s more of a louse than a loser, moving through the world with an irrepressible grin and without guardrails. When he sings, “Hey, you don’t know me but you don’t like me,” it’s with the smirk of a man quite insistent that his reputation doesn’t precede him, at least until he gets what he wants before moving on.
Yoakam’s confident and challenging delivery of the chorus connects with anti-heroes everywhere, especially those who can feel like a rebel for three minutes while listening to a country record. My only frustration is that so few of Yoakam’s other records made it to the top and so many of his classics won’t appear in this feature.
“Streets of Bakersfield” gets an A.
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I just checked out Dwight Yoakam’s Wikipedia page and was struck by how few #1s he had for somebody so iconic. He’s not alone in this category (Kris Kristofferson only had one country hit as a solo artist) but it certainly undersells Yoakam’s legacy and what a breath of fresh air he was to country radio at every step of his career. He didn’t hit the mark every time for me as I found a number of his ballads to be dreary, but the more creative and colorful the arrangement, the more likely I was to like his material in both the 80s and 90s.
I’ll disagree to some extent on the Buck Owens original, which I found to be spunky but just not in the same league as Yoakam’s more ambitious and contemporary arrangement. Yoakam’s horned-up, Cajun-fueled version sounded better but at least for me it wasn’t a blowout. I enjoyed Buck and Dwight’s chemistry in the video. This song is indeed a jam, but I can’t give it a perfect score because for whatever reason I just haven’t been in on the joke. What’s the significance of the “streets of Bakersfield” here? Why are we not allowed to judge the narrator’s debauchery simply because we’re not “walking those streets” as he is? It could be that I’m just dense for not connecting these dots but at least for me the songwriting hasn’t fully sold the hook and made me understand why Bakersfield is the key to the kingdom.
Grade: B+
Bakersfield has a reputation for being a very rough town. I thought that’s what the song was referring to. Even today, the violent crime there is way higher than in most parts of the country.
I always liked this song a lot. This whole album was spectacular, both the singles and the deep cuts.
The best single from this album (another No. 1) was yet to come, though.
The original version appeared on the AIN’T IT AMAZING, GRACIE album that Capitol released in 1973.By this time the Buck Owens hit making machine was running short on inspiration. The title cut was an old album cut from the TOGETHER AGAIN / MY HEART SKIPS A BEAT album released in 1964. The band on this album was not the same band that cut his 60s hits and the lack of inspiration bleeds through on every track. “Streets of Bakersfield” was nothing more than an album track never meant for release as a single. Yes Owens sounds resigned and beaten down on the original recording, but that seems to have been his mindset at the time. His immediate prior album IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND had also resurrected an old album track from the 1966 album OPEN UP YOUR HEART as the title track to the album. I purchased each of Buck’s 70s albums as they came out but that was somewhat out of force of habit because none of those albums were as electrifying as his 1960s albums, and I rarely listen to them.
It should be said that the accordion on Dwight’s and Buck’s duet version of “The Streets Of Bakersfield” is played by one Flaco Jimenez, so it’s much more Tex-Mex than Cajun. And in truth, a fair amount of the C&W that came out of California from the late 1940’s into the late 1960’s was very influenced by Mexico, thanks to the farm workers from that country who worked (as they still do) in and around Bakersfield and much of California’s San Joaquin Valley.
Thanks for sharing this! I’m going to adjust the text to reflect this clarification.
Add Buck Owens to my long list of legendary country singers I largely knew only by reputation and reading about their musical legacy.
Thankfully, ’80s country music changed that.
Before this hit, Buck Owens was certainly not on country radio in the Twin Cities.
As for Yoakam, is there an artist in country music who records covers as compellingly, unexpectedly, and innovatively as he does? He has covered Johnny Horton to Elvis Presley to Buck Owens to Queen to Prince. And nailed all of them.
Most country fans credit the Mavericks for introducing them to Flaco Jimenez, but Yoakam did it here, years before “All You Ever Do Is Bring Me Down.”
Nothing on the radio sounded like this 1988 Bakersfield stomp and nobody in new country was anywhere as near as cool, mysterious, and sexy as Dwight Yoakam.
He covers a lot of creative bases here, and ticks many artistic boxes, with one massive tip of the hat to one of his heroes.
Yoakam is a genius.
Peter — Good callout here. There were a couple of other cool covers on this album besides this one — Hank Locklin’s ”Send Me the Pillow” and Johnny Cash’s ”Home of the Blues.”