Ricky Skaggs was a real beacon for everybody in my generation who wanted to point to the fact that traditional country music could still sell, and still was pertinent to an audience.

After not making much headway in Nashville, he moved to Los Angeles and worked towards bringing his particular brand of new honky-tonk, or "hillbilly" music (as he called it), forward into the 1980s.

[2] In the 2003 documentary series Lost Highway, Yoakam states, "We were reinterpreting the Bakersfield 'shuffle sound' of Buck Owens and what he was doing with that terse kind of shuffle."

[9] According to Don McLeese's book Dwight Yoakam: A Thousand Miles from Nowhere, it was not until the expansion into the Reprise LP that the singer was inspired to write the song "Guitars, Cadillacs," with the "and hillbilly music" replacing the "etceteras" that appeared on the original EP cover, and the executives at Warner Bros. balked, fearing that the Kentucky-born artist's evocation of what the label considered trailer trash "was like waving a rebel flag at the possibility of mainstream success.

"[10] Steve Earle, who rose to fame around the same time as Yoakam and included a song he wrote called "Hillbilly Highway" on his 1986 breakout album Guitar Town, later observed, "What we had in common is that we use the term 'hillbilly,' which pissed George Jones off.

'"[7] McLeese writes: The "hillbilly" tag was something that country had made a concerted effort to ditch, from the countrypolitan sophistication of Chet Atkins and Billy Sherrill productions through the slick suburbanization of Urban Cowboy.

"[11]Other songs, such as the "stone country" barroom lament "It Won’t Hurt" and the heartfelt ballad "South of Cincinnati," display Yoakam's remarkable depth and understanding of country songwriting and storytelling, with the latter putting "an interesting twist on the songwriter’s dual heritage in urban Ohio and rural Kentucky…one that evokes the palpable change that occurs below the Mason-Dixon line, ‘south of Cincinnati, down where the dogwood trees grow.’"[12] Larry Flick of Billboard magazine called "It Won't Hurt" a "classic hurtin' and drinkin' song convincingly sung.

"[13] The bluegrass-influenced "Miner’s Prayer" also looks to Kentucky, an acoustic number powered by dobro (courtesy of David Mansfield), flat-picked guitar, and Yoakam's singing of his grandfather and generations like him who lived and died in the mines of Kentucky, which AllMusic critic Thom Jurek describes as "Bill Monroe meets Ralph Stanley meets Bob Dylan.

"[14] "Twenty Years" tells the vindictive tale of Henry, a man whose life is ruined after the woman he crossed lies in a district court, framing him for a crime he did not commit.

("Tried to warn you, Henry, not to cross her/Tried to tell you about her vengeful ways...") After signing with Reprise, Yoakam and Anderson added four additional cuts to the original EP, the most significant being a cover of Johnny Horton’s 1956 hit "Honky Tonk Man," which would kick off the major label LP and spend six months on the country charts, peaking at number 3.

[15] The two other cover songs on the album, Harlan Howard's "Heartaches by the Number," originally made famous by Ray Price, and June Carter’s "Ring of Fire," the Johnny Cash classic, remained faithful to the spirit of country music but sounded brand new at the same time, placing Yoakam at the vanguard of what became known as the "New Traditionalist" movement alongside he likes of Randy Travis and Steve Earle.

"[9] The album was re-issued on October 17, 2006, complete with demos from 1981 and tracks recorded live at the Roxy Theatre on Los Angeles' Sunset Strip in 1986.

Spin wrote, "These bouncy tunes are filled with images of men drinking whiskey and falling off barstools, of Jezebels ruining good-hearted lunks.