A bright twang for a bruised heart — “Foolin’ Around” turns hurt into motion, memory into a smile you almost trust
Set the needle near the start: “Foolin’ Around”—as sung by Dwight Yoakam—arrives in 2007 on his tribute album Dwight Sings Buck (New West Records), released October 23. On that set it sits second in the running order, a brisk 2:54 that snaps like a fresh match against the side of a matchbox. The album reached No. 42 on the Billboard 200 during its debut week, a tidy testament to how deeply Yoakam’s Bakersfield devotion still resonated decades into his career.
The song itself is a hand-me-down gem: written by Buck Owens and Harlan Howard, first released in January 1961 and lifted to No. 2 on Billboard’s country singles chart—a lean, sharp-hearted classic that taught a generation how to dance through disappointment. Yoakam doesn’t reinvent it so much as polish the chrome and let the engine idle hotter. You hear the lineage immediately: Owens’s original bark of wounded pride refracted through Yoakam’s high, pinched tenor, that Bakersfield snap still alive in the drums, the telecaster lines as clean as a desert horizon.
What makes Yoakam’s “Foolin’ Around” feel so present isn’t volume or speed; it’s the way he walks the melody like a man who’s learned to keep his balance on loose gravel. The lyric—simple as a note left on the kitchen table—says, I know what you’ve been doing, and I’m done. No sermon, no scene. Just the weary dignity of someone who has counted the lies and found an even number. In Yoakam’s phrasing, there’s that quick little smile of self-protection, the half-tilt of the head that says, I’ll be all right, even if the heart has not yet agreed.
The band gives him room to move. Everything breathes. The guitars jangle, sure, but they don’t crowd; the rhythm section keeps a bounce you feel in your ribs more than your feet. It’s the old Bakersfield paradox—bright tones hiding dark truths—and Yoakam understands it the way a craftsman understands grain: you don’t fight it; you lean with it, let the song’s natural lines show. That’s why this cut glides. It doesn’t try to out-sing the hurt. It keeps it company.
Context matters, too. Dwight Sings Buck is a love letter with no smudged ink—clean, respectful, and alive. By 2007, Yoakam had already made the case that the West Coast twang of Owens and Don Rich was not nostalgia but a living grammar. Returning to those sentences, he doesn’t reach for museum glass. He reaches for the dance floor. Listen to the way “Foolin’ Around” lifts off the downbeat and then settles, unhurried, into the chorus: a small reclamation of self every time the hook lands. That’s the tribute at work—not mimicry, but memory made useful in the present.
For anyone who wore out Dwight Yoakam records in the late-’80s and early-’90s—Guitars, Cadillacs, Buenas Noches from a Lonely Room, This Time—this performance carries a certain kind of homecoming. The voice that once sketched neon sorrow on California blacktop now turns the same pen toward an even older map. Beneath the polish you can still catch the dust, still hear the distance between what we say we’ll do and what we finally manage. That’s why the song lands: the tempo is jaunty, but your chest recognizes itself.
And then there’s the old ghost standing beside it: Buck Owens’s hit version, a No. 2 heart-stopper from an era when country radio still smelled like tube heat and cigarette paper. Knowing that history doesn’t make Yoakam’s take feel second-hand; it makes it feel inevitable, a circle closing with a grin. You’re reminded that certain melodies don’t age; they just change rooms, carrying their furniture with them, the little lamp of pride still burning on the side table.
When “Foolin’ Around” ends, there’s a lovely, empty air where the last guitar ping rests. It’s not triumph and it’s not defeat. It’s release. The kind that lets you pick up your ring, your keys, your ordinary afternoon, and step back into the sun with something like grace. Yoakam hands you that feeling without making a scene of it. Just a steady beat, a clear voice, a note that knows when to quit.
So play it again. Let the old Bakersfield light pour through your speakers, clean and undimmed. Let Dwight Yoakam show you how a 1961 ache can move its shoulders in 2007 and still fit. Some songs are built like that—lean, honest, impervious to fashion. They don’t argue their case. They just keep walking, boots on gravel, eyes level, not foolin’ around.