“Readin’, Rightin’, Rt. 23” — a road-song reverie of home, hope and the asphalt of escape
The track Readin’, Rightin’, Rt. 23, written and recorded by Dwight Yoakam, appears on his second studio album Hillbilly Deluxe (released July 1987).
Although the song wasn’t issued as a major single by itself (it served as an album cut rather than a chart-topping radio hit), the album reached No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard Top Country Albums chart and cemented Yoakam’s standing as an important voice in the “new traditionalist” movement of country music.
From the opening chords you’re invited into a landscape of Kentucky hollers, winding highways and the restless young heart of someone longing to leave—or perhaps to remember leaving. The title itself—“Readin’, Rightin’, Rt. 23”—evokes schoolroom ideals (“reading, writing, arithmetic”) but then twists them by naming “Route 23”, a real-life highway cutting through Appalachian Kentucky into Ohio and beyond. According to Yoakam, the song draws from the region near his ancestral home—an older generation’s hollers, coal towns and the urgent migration of sons and daughters northward.
In the lyrics, the narrator watches the old homes, the trainlines, the fields—feeling tethered and yet helplessly drawn toward “that old highway”. The road becomes metaphor: part-escape, part-betrayal, part-memory. The wistful steel guitars, Yoakam’s clear voice tinged with longing, and the faint honky-tonk beat carry you along the edges of a small town fading into memories, where local wisdom whispers: “You can leave, but you still carry this place with you.”
It’s this interplay of place and departure, of roots and restlessness, that gives the song its haunting power. The imagery of kids growing up in one place while dreaming of something else—“the good life that they’d never seen” as one writer puts it — resonates across generations.
For a listener who has lived decades, experienced both longing and leaving, this song hits with particular resonance. It asks quietly: what remains when the dust settles, when the highway slows and you stop looking toward the city lights and remember your hometown instead? What does it mean to be “rightin’” when your life path has already veered off the map you once studied?
In the wider arc of Yoakam’s career, “Readin’, Rightin’, Rt. 23” is a pivotal statement. Having burst onto the scene with his debut album and a string of singles, Yoakam with Hillbilly Deluxe leaned deeper into his Kentucky roots and the “Bakersfield-honky-tonk” sound he embraced. This song stands out among the upbeat covers and radio-friendly hits as something more introspective—raw, personal, reflective.
So when you listen—or return to it—let yourself settle into the lane of the highway, windows down, wind shifting the dust of the past. Feel the tiny towns slip by, the memories of homes you left and homes you still carry. In the middle of that highway, Yoakam’s voice speaks to both the road behind and the road ahead.
And perhaps you’ll remember too: the towns, the roads, the leaving, the returning—and the quiet hope that somewhere along Route 23 or another “old highway”, there’s a place that still remembers you.