When the whistle blows each morning and I walk down in that cold, dark mine, say a prayer to my dear savior. Please let me see the sunshine one more time. When oh when will it be over? When will I lay these burdens down? And when I die, dear lord in heaven, please take my soul from 'neath that cold, dark ground.

Dwight Yoakam

Categorized in : Morning Prayer Sunshine

Buddy , you might think that I've lost my mind. But mister, I'd pay twice to do it one more time.

Dwight Yoakam

mind insanity thinking

I'm a thousand miles from nowhere, time don't matter to me. I'm a thousand miles from nowhere and there's not place that I want to be.

Dwight Yoakam

matter want philosophy

Control success before it controls you.

Dwight Yoakam

success

My parents were not affluent people and were not - didn't come from the extremities of education. My mother had a high school diploma. I often think I so wish she'd come out of the hills in Appalachia and been able to go on to college. I think she would have made a wonderful teacher.

Dwight Yoakam

mother teacher school

Quality is timeless: It will clearly define itself.

Dwight Yoakam

timeless quality

I can't escape being born in Pike County, Kentucky, grandson of a miner, Luther Tibbs, and his wife, Earlene, and traveling as a child up and down Route 23 between Kentucky and Columbus, Ohio, where I was raised, experiencing life via working-class people. Nor do I want to escape.

Dwight Yoakam

kentucky ohio children

Another lesson about a naive fool who came to Babylon, and found out that the pie don't taste so sweet.

Dwight Yoakam

pie lessons sweet

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

hurt drinking mean

In the dark morning silence, I placed a gun to her head. She wore red dresses, but now she lay dead.

Dwight Yoakam

gun dark morning

I come to the garden alone while the dew is still on the roses, and the voice I hear falling on my ear the son of God discloses. And he walks with me, and he talks with me. And he tells me I am his own, and the joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.

Dwight Yoakam

garden son fall

My music is very personal. I've created it in solitude. I face a white wall and beller. I like that sound - the expression of loneliness. That's what it's all about.

Dwight Yoakam

wall loneliness expression

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

quality musical trying

The future has a lot to do with the past.

Dwight Yoakam

past

In retrospect I wrote things about my life and my family's existence, I realized that it was a frighteningly harsh way to make a living. And I used to say that they were slowly dying trying to make a living.

Dwight Yoakam

retrospect dying trying

My guitars, Cadillacs, and hillbilly music Is the only thing that keeps me hanging on.

Dwight Yoakam

cadillacs hanging-on guitar

I think that we come to a greater understanding of the world we live in and ourselves through reading.

Dwight Yoakam

understanding reading thinking

I hope that books don't go the way of albums and CD, large format albums, and physical product.

Dwight Yoakam

cds albums book

I live out of cans a lot. But I try to indulge only in healthy canned food.

Dwight Yoakam

canned-food healthy trying

I always knew about as a kid, knew that that particular injury at [my grandfather's] finger had been caused in that disaster that killed his brother-in-law, my grandmother's brother. And he never talked about his own brother's death to me. My mother told me about that and told me about the impact on her family. And that's part of what you hear in the first verse of "Miner's Prayer."

Dwight Yoakam

brother prayer mother

[My grandfather -a miner] had black lung, and he didn't talk about it much. It's almost like a combat veteran. But he witnessed some horrific things.

Dwight Yoakam

veteran black grandfather