A bright, country heartbeat that remembers itself — “My Heart Skips a Beat” is a small, urgent confession of sudden love that sounds like a porchlight switching on at dusk.
“My Heart Skips a Beat”, written by Buck Owens, was one of Owens’s signature hits in the 1960s and later became a loving touchstone when Dwight Yoakam recorded it as part of his tribute album Dwight Sings Buck. Yoakam’s version is not a chart-seeking single but a deliberate homage: he chose this short, punchy song because it is archetypal Buck—economical, honky-tonk plainspoken, and melodically irresistible—and because it allowed him to wear his influences on his sleeve.
Right at the top, the essentials: Buck Owens first made “My Heart Skips a Beat” famous in the mid-1960s; the original bears all the hallmarks of classic Bakersfield country—telecaster twang, tight rhythm, and a lyric that names simple feeling without over-polishing it. Years later, Dwight Yoakam placed the song on Dwight Sings Buck (released in 2007), an affectionate, well-crafted collection in which Yoakam channels Owens’s phrasing and the Buckaroos’ spare arrangements while still keeping his own vocal personality intact. The decision to include this song on that record was both homage and reclamation: a younger generation’s way of saying, quietly and firmly, “this is where I came from.”
Listening to Yoakam’s rendition, older ears will first notice how little he changes the song’s frame and how much he makes it his own in tone. The tune itself is compact—barely over two minutes in many versions—so every syllable matters. Yoakam respects Buck’s economy; he keeps the arrangement tidy and the tempo snapping, letting the telecaster ring and leaving generous space around the vocal so that the small emotional punctuation—an off-beat “darlin’,” a held vowel—carries weight. Where Buck’s original could be heard as a direct statement from a young man in love, Yoakam’s take reads like memory: the same joyful pulse, but sung by someone who knows what it feels like to have that pulse repeated and returned across decades.
The story behind Yoakam recording this song is easy and affectionate. Yoakam has long been an avowed student of the Bakersfield sound; he drew early inspiration from Owens’s phrasing, from Don Rich’s unmistakable harmony work, and from the honky-tonk clarity that values feeling over studio gloss. Dwight Sings Buck was conceived as a straight tribute—no irony, no pastiche—but as a loving re-entry into the songs that shaped Yoakam’s musical grammar. Including “My Heart Skips a Beat” was a way of giving listeners a small, shining exemplar of the tradition he was honoring: short, bright, and impossible to resist singing along with.
What makes this version especially touching for listeners now older is the way it folds youthful rush into seasoned tenderness. The lyric’s panic—when a beloved appears and the heart literally “skips”—is the same in both Buck and Dwight’s hands, but Yoakam’s voice carries the seasoning of memory: it suggests the first time you felt that lurch and the hundred times you felt it again, sometimes smaller, sometimes with the same electric charge. For someone who remembers spinning a vinyl single on a kitchen turntable or hearing Owens on AM radio, Yoakam’s performance acts as a bridge: it brings that original moment back into the present while letting us hear how the feeling has matured.
Finally, the track’s modesty is its lasting charm. It doesn’t try to be epic; it wants only to be true to a feeling and to the lineage that produced it. In a catalogue of big statements and grand gestures, Dwight Yoakam’s “My Heart Skips a Beat” is a small, honest document—two minutes of honky-tonk clarity that remind the listener why certain songs persist: they name something human in the plainest terms and, in doing so, make memory and longing feel immediate again.