by Kate Lohnes
He’s a country singer, an actor and a purveyor of his own biscuit brand.

With the wide range of projects on his plate, it comes as no surprise that Dwight Yoakam is a hard man to pin down.

CityScene finally catches up with the Columbus-raised Yoakam, 52, while he is in transit, driving from the Austin, Texas airport to a hotel (he’s playing a show in nearby New Braunfels). He starts with small talk: the Austin heat (“It’s 107 degrees here”), his Texas connections (“The boot company I used for years was down in Mercedes”) and so on. As he warms up to the conversation, it becomes clear Yoakam is a man with stories and memories stored away for just such an occasion. For every place Yoakam has been, he probably has 20 anecdotes waiting in the wings.

But perhaps no place could inspire such nostalgia as Columbus, where Yoakam spent his childhood.

“I used to say that I was born in Kentucky, raised in Ohio and grew up in California,” he recalls fondly. Yoakam spent his childhood in the Buckeye State: he graduated from Northland High School in 1974 and briefly attended college at The Ohio State University before lighting out for the territories – as it were, Nashville, where he tried to jumpstart a country music career. He eventually moved to Los Angeles, where he earned street cred and airplay by playing his brand of country in rock and punk clubs.

Today, Yoakam finds himself at the helm of an extremely successful career. His music has earned him two Grammy Awards. He has been a frequent guest on the talk show circuit, playfully sparring with Jay Leno, David Letterman, Jon Stewart and Regis Philbin, among others. He has also starred in movies with Hollywood A-listers such as Billy Bob Thorton (Slingblade) and Jodie Foster (Panic Room). His biggest business endeavor outside entertainment has been the Bakersfield Biscuit Brand, which distributes to supermarket chains around the country (the brand was named for his song Streets of Bakersfield, a duet with Buck Owens, and began as an inside joke).

Though he has lived elsewhere for the past 32 years – Yoakam still resides in L.A. – his memories of Central Ohio remain vivid. In many ways, his youth mirrored that of his peers: winter days rabbit hunting, local burger joints and the near-hero worship of Woody Hayes and the Ohio State football.

“I was such an Ohio State kid,” he says. “I always rooted for those Buckeyes. That was in the heyday, the ’68 team with all the great ball players that played for Woody on that national championship team.”

Even so, events in Yoakam’s early years served as predictors of where his life would eventually lead him.

“One of the first great performances I ever saw live, when I was old enough to go with buddies of mine down to the (Ohio State) fair, one night I went down and saw Johnny Cash,” he says. “What a really great show, and what a memory of being in the presence of somebody who truly was a legend.” (Decades later, Cash would call himself a fan of Yoakam’s music, and complimented the younger artist on his cover of Ring of Fire.)

Yoakam also culled experience and lessons from his high school years, where he acted in school plays and playing in the marching band.

“I had a great, wonderful acting teacher named Charles Lewis, who ran the theater department at Northland High School and a great band director named Jerry McAfee,” he says. “(Lewis) brought a degree of professionalism that has been a part of the underpinning of what I’ve been able to do in acting. It has served me very well.”

Aside from the lessons he learned, vestiges of his Ohio past have carried over. Some of his songs reflect the life he knew here: “Readin’, Rightin’, Route 23,” for example, pays homage to U.S. Route 23, which runs north from his birth state of Kentucky through Columbus (his fan club is also named after Route 23). Yoakam also attributes the humor in his songs to his Columbus roots, what he called an “interesting mix” of agriculture and a university town.

“There’s a droll sense of humor to the Ohio culture, specifically from Columbus south,” he says. “It just breeds a certain kind of humor.”

Yoakam still maintains his Buckeye loyalties in sports, as well: as a kid, he lived for the Cincinnati Reds and Bengals broadcasts on the radio.

“I always tease my Pittsburgh friends about how I hated the Steelers, because I was a Bengals kid,” he says. “I still cannot bring myself to root for the (Los Angeles) Dodgers. And I cannot root for USC (The University of South California).”

By the end of the conversation, Yoakam has demonstrated Ohio still owns a part of his heart, even though his career has led him far away from the Midwest. His work has taken him around the world, he says, but it still has the power to lead him back. Wherever he goes, Ohio will be waiting for him.

“That’s the great thing about what I do, and the success I’ve had with music. It actually brought me home many times over the years to perform,” he says. “It will always been home.”

Kate Lohnes is assistant editor of CityScene Magazine.