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I wrote Miner's Prayer after [grandfather] died. I'd gone back to his funeral, and he died in 1979. And I came back to California, and I think a couple of weeks after that funeral wrote that song thinking about him, his life.

Dwight Yoakam

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Dwight Yoakam
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: October 23
Actor
Film Actor
Film Director
Film Producer
Guitarist
Musician
Screenwriter
Singer
Singer-Songwriter
Television Actor
Pikeville
Kentucky
Dwight David Yoakam
Think
Died
Thinking
Couple
Miner
Life
Week
Miners
Prayer
Funeral
Came
Grandfather
Gone
Weeks
Song
California
Back
Wrote

More quotes by Dwight Yoakam

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I listen to hundreds of those hymns sung repeatedly over the years of my life. And I know that they probably influenced a rhyme scheme maybe to certain extent. They influenced the pentameter of placement of words, etc. And it's not something that's a conscious thing that occurred.
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Ironically, the success I've experienced at country radio has left me ostracized from pop and other formats of radio.
Dwight Yoakam
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I like order. It allows me to have chaos in my head.
Dwight Yoakam
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The congregation that I was raised in was one that sang and a non-instrumental fashion. It was all a cappella singing, and so that had a major influence on me.
Dwight Yoakam
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We started shooting, and then Jodie found out she was pregnant. Forest broke it to me - he'd gone to work and heard it on the radio! It seemed like the movie was doomed. But, like these characters, there was a disregard for all the signs along the way.
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Music's the one thing I try not to analyze. I don't want to destroy the magic that has always been there for me.
Dwight Yoakam
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I embrace country music because of love, a love of what I came from.
Dwight Yoakam
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I guess I stayed with the faith. I mean, organized religion is not something that I've maintained a direct connection to in my life, but the spirituality of it has had an indelible impact on my life and remains with me.
Dwight Yoakam
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I was very fortunate in having David Fincher, the director come to me. Now I've seen the finished product, I feel that every bit of the nine months we spent on the film was worth it.
Dwight Yoakam
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Quality is timeless: It will clearly define itself. And so I make reference to and acknowledge things that I feel have been dismissed, trying to restate those musical and cultural elements clearly and vehemently
Dwight Yoakam
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But that is a valid, continuing service that that music - which is, in some cases, 80 or 90 years old - is rendering. And proving its own timelessness.
Dwight Yoakam
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In the dark morning silence, I placed a gun to her head. She wore red dresses, but now she lay dead.
Dwight Yoakam
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[My grandfather] was very, very fortunate that he was never trapped in a mining cave-in. But he lost his brother in a mining disaster on a shift that he wasn't working. And he was in a collapse where his brother-in-law was killed very near him in the same section.
Dwight Yoakam
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I don't really drink, but I've been around a lot of drinking and, at 18, when you start playing in bars, you start to witness the good, the bad and the ugly of alcohol as a source of escape. I wrote about it because I witnessed its use as a means of medicating - a lot of people using it to medicate themselves from hurt.
Dwight Yoakam
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I don't regret any of the musical decisions I have made.
Dwight Yoakam
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To me, the hook of the riff is what makes a great guitar recording. It's the backbone of the whole song. When you have a strong riff, it's the rocket fuel for the track.
Dwight Yoakam
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In addition, I'm finishing a track for the movie 'Waking Up In Reno', but there are numerous other singers I look forward to recording with in the near future.
Dwight Yoakam
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Buddy , you might think that I've lost my mind. But mister, I'd pay twice to do it one more time.
Dwight Yoakam
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Sadly, I wish I had been able to play [Miner's Prayer] for [grandfather]. Yeah, I'll never escape the influence of him in my life. And my - his wife, my grandmother, Earlene Tibbs - those experiences with them shaped me musically probably more profoundly than anything else in my life and shaped me as a writer.
Dwight Yoakam
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It's meant to reaffirm the validity of that music - clean, minimalist, honest, classic music.
Dwight Yoakam