California Quote by Dwight Yoakam
![“I wrote "Miner's Prayer" after [grandfather] died. I'd gone back to his funeral, and he died in 1979. And I came back to California, and I think a couple of weeks after that funeral wrote that song thinking about him, his life.” quote by Dwight Yoakam](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/7d3/dwight-yoakam-9632_california_i-wrote-miner-s-prayer-after-grandfather_2249586.jpg)
“I wrote "Miner's Prayer" after [grandfather] died. I'd gone back to his funeral, and he died in 1979. And I came back to California, and I think a couple of weeks after that funeral wrote that song thinking about him, his life.”
![“Sadly, I wish I had been able to play ["Miner's Prayer"] for [grandfather]. Yeah, I'll never escape the influence of him in my life. And my - his wife, my grandmother, Earlene Tibbs - those experiences with them shaped me musically probably more profoundly than anything else in my life and shaped…” quote by Dwight Yoakam](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/7a8/dwight-yoakam-9632_able_sadly-i-wish-i-had-been-able-to-play-min_1035823.jpg)
![“Those songs [from church], I think, shaped to some degree how I would evolve as a writer, pentameter of songs, the melodies of those kind of hillbilly hymns - I used to refer to them - because they were not Southern gospel as much as they were passed down from Scottish Welsh Protestant hymnals.” quote by Dwight Yoakam](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/71f/dwight-yoakam-9632_christianity_those-songs-from-church-i-think-shaped-t_613462.jpg)
![“I heard more of the stories from my mother and my granny and my aunts that would describe what they had known that he didn't often talk about. I remember seeing [grandfather] as a child. He was working in a mine that was fairly close to their home there in Betsy Lane, Ky., and it was so close in…” quote by Dwight Yoakam](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/a57/dwight-yoakam-9632_aliens_i-heard-more-of-the-stories-from-my-moth_706440.jpg)
![“[My grandfather] was very, very fortunate that he was never trapped in a mining cave-in. But he lost his brother in a mining disaster on a shift that he wasn't working. And he was in a collapse where his brother-in-law was killed very near him in the same section.” quote by Dwight Yoakam](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/63c/dwight-yoakam-9632_brother_my-grandfather-was-very-very-fortunate-t_733159.jpg)
