Recording
The collection is best known for containing the Dave Alvin composition “Long White Cadillac,” a song about the death of Hank Williams, who died in the backseat of a Cadillac on his way to a show in Canton, Ohio on New Year’s Day, 1953. Yoakam played gigs alongside Alvin's band The Blasters, Los Lobos, X, and others in the rock and punk clubs of Los Angeles, and, beginning in 1986, Yoakam scored a run of three consecutive number one country albums. According to Don McLeese’s book A Thousand Miles from Nowhere, Alvin was overjoyed when Yoakam, one of the hottest stars in country music at the time, told him that he was going to record the song:
And I went, “Fuck yes!” So I went down there, and they’d already cut the track and Dwight was putting on harmony vocals. As I’m driving over, I’m kind of imagining how it’s gonna work as a country shuffle. And then I get there and hear a six-minute long psychedelic thing! And all I could do was think like a radio-programmer – can we add more fiddle? [He laughs heartily.] Maybe shorten it a little? I’m trying to get a yacht here. Maybe just a rowboat. And Dwight said to me, “This is my fuck you to country radio.” And my innermost thought was, “Could you pick someone else’s song to do that with?
Yoakam later insisted, “I did it because I loved that song. I thought it was one of the greatest songs ever written. A rock and roll homage to Hank Williams, who was essentially the first rock star.” The album also contains a cover version of the Flying Burrito Brothers song “Sin City,” which was written by Chris Hillman and Gram Parsons. Parsons, who also died young, was a country-rock pioneer and guiding light behind the Byrds’ seminal Sweetheart of the Rodeo album that Yoakam highly regarded. He sang the tune as a duet with Canadian singer k.d. lang, who, like Yoakam, was a maverick on the country music scene at the time.
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