Dwight Yoakam was on the horn talking about musical through lines, connecting the Dust Bowl with the 21st century via a Telecaster.

The lines link Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, the Byrds and the Eagles in Yoakam's inimitable way. He traced them in a voice not quite drawl and not quite rasp, the discourse at times peppered with four- and five-syllable words and at others as syrupy as a river's lazy meander.

The lines also help map Yoakam, who's always straddled the country-rock fence and whose most recent album, "Dwight Sings Buck," pays homage to Owens, his primary influence.

Somehow, things have come full circle for Yoakam. It was Owens and Cash who were leading lights for Yoakam as a struggling musician, when Nashville turned up its nose at him and sent him to California on a journey far more benign but with similar imprint to those that brought the families of Owens and Haggard west during the 1930s Dust Bowl and Depression.

Almost 25 years (and about as many albums) after he first made the scene — and several years after splitting with longtime ace guitarist-producer Pete Anderson — Yoakam says he's "back to where I was when I first started — music as a romance."

It must still be love, for Yoakam, never one to lack chops or the rebel-individualistic streak, will appear at both the Coachella and Stagecoach music festivals this weekend and next in Indio. He's playing both Saturdays, joining, among others, Prince, Kraftwerk and Death Cab for Cutie at Coachella two days hence, and Rascal Flatts, the Judds and Dierks Bentley at Stagecoach on May 3.

Yoakam, in a phone interview from his Los Angeles home earlier this month, pleaded innocence.

"I don't know," he said with a laugh over how the double billing came up. "You'd have to ask them. They called up and said, Can you do 'em both?'"

In a way, this strange musical bedfellows makes sense. Coachella co-founder Paul Tollett, who promotes both events, likes to throw in the odd lineup wrinkle or two. Last year, folk-bluegrass stalwarts Nickel Creek and the legendary Willie Nelson did double duty in the desert. Two years ago, Tollett brought the protean Madonna to Coachella.

Yoakam, 51, also is known to don chameleon duds. His film career is still in flower (the holiday comedy "Four Christmases" and the "Crank" sequel coming up), he has no immediate plans for a new record and isn't really touring, save for a June date at the CMA Music Festival in Nashville.

Yoakam has covered rock songs from Queen ("Crazy Little Thing Called Love"), Cheap Trick ("I Want You to Want Me"), the Clash ("Train In Vain") and Dave Alvin ("Long White Cadillac"). He also (along with Anderson) put a little electric sass into "Little Sister," the song that Elvis first made famous. Yoakam has heard the "too rock for country, too country for rock" label lobbed his way over the years.

"Well," he said with another hearty chuckle, "I guess they booked me the right way then. We'll hope we land on the right days at the right time out in the desert."

Yoakam also claimed that he doesn't know how much he'll vary the set lists, saying he never has one per se save for a few songs loosely in mind as he hits stage — "I'll play what I feel like on either day."

He later hinted that he might do more from "Dwight Sings Buck" at Stagecoach.

@TO-1-Text Subhed:Hard influences

That album, a paean to his California mentor, who died in March 2006, was released last fall to critical acclaim. Owens, Yoakam said, had "a strikingly unique fingerprint in sound."

Owens, along with Haggard, developed in the 1960s what came to be known as the "Bakersfield Sound," marked by twangy guitars, played-up percussion, other elements of rock 'n' roll and stripped-down production values — a rougher honky-tonk sound than what Nashville was putting out then.

"It's really the distillation of the whole kind of post-Dust Bowl, California socio-music experience," Yoakam said. "You don't always hear it as overtly in Buck's music as you do in Merle Haggard's music, but it's there in the subliminal attitude.

"It really captured the hardscrabble edge of the survivor's experience," Yoakam continued. "In Buck's case, it was a very lean, clean and no-nonsense approach."

In a way, they put to music what John Steinbeck did on page with Tom Joad and "The Grapes of Wrath." As Yoakam noted, only the strong made it through the Dust Bowl.

The austere "survivor's expression" that echoed through Owens' music symbolized his own life. When Owens was a child in the 1930s, his parents moved to Arizona from their Texas farm during the Dust Bowl and Depression.

"He was yanked away from everything he'd ever known," Yoakam said of Owens. "He told me once, If we had waited a week more, we'd have died of starvation.' "

Owens later became a truck driver, discovered California's San Joaquin Valley on his travels and moved to Bakersfield in 1950.

Similarly, Haggard was born in 1937 in Bakersfield after his parents moved from Oklahoma. At the time, the city was a haven for economic refugees from Oklahoma and other states. Poor and saddled with a troubled upbringing, Haggard at one point served time in San Quentin for robbery and later dug ditches before he became a musician.

Their songs reflect heartbreak, heartache and stark personal honesty. If Owens had the efficient, minimalist, "keep-your-sight-clean-and-the-powder-dry" style, Yoakam said, Haggard is on the more poetic side of that.

@TO-1-Text Subhed:On the through line

Yoakam wandered this way via Kentucky, where he was born, and Ohio, where he grew up. He went to Nashville in the late 1970s to pursue music but failed to catch on there, prompting a move to California, where he became part of an L.A. club scene that also nurtured bands such as the Blasters, Los Lobos and Lone Justice.

He met Anderson in the early 1980s and began carving out his own sound — a mix that's come to be called both traditional and progressive, daring and "alt-country." One of his album's liner notes dubbed him the "Baskin-Robbins of heartbreak" for his frequent dips into lovelorn themes.

Yoakam also began to channel Owens, especially in his vocal stylings. It was Yoakam who coaxed Owens back to performing in 1987, ending a long funk brought on by the death of Owens' longtime musical partner Don Rich.

The next year, Yoakam and Owens dueted on "Streets of Bakersfield." When Owens died on March 25, 2006, at age 76 in Bakersfield, it was a shock to Yoakam, who'd had a long phone conversation with him just days before.

Even now, Yoakam struggles to define how close he was with his mentor, noting, "It's hard to discuss. Some of it is really personal."

On his Web site, Yoakam said his friendship with Owens combined parent, peer and sibling.

"In moments, I felt like I was in a relationship with a brother," Yoakam explained over the phone. "There were times when I was an equal. And there were moments when he was doing parenting (of me)."

Ultimately, "Dwight Sings Buck" is about love, Yoakam said. It focuses on 1960 to 1967 — 12 of the 15 selections come from that period — when the Bakersfield Sound was in full boil.

That brought Yoakam to Ventura resident Chris Hillman, former bass player and co-founder of the Byrds.

"The Bakersfield Sound is also about the Byrds, and also what Chris Hillman did with Gram Parsons and Clarence White," Yoakam said. "Without Buck, there's no Chris Hillman. There's no Byrds.

"There's no Eagles," he continued, mentioning another band on the Stagecoach bill (May 2). "Without Buck Owens, there's no through line. ... It's California country music, and I'm proud to be part of it."

@TO-1-Text Subhed:The golden state

Time magazine once labeled Yoakam a "Renaissance man." Rolling Stone said "he has no contemporary peer," and Vanity Fair weighed in with "Yoakam strides the divide between rock's lust and country's lament."

The late Cash called Yoakam his favorite modern country artist.

"It was flattering beyond any expectation," Yoakam acknowledged. "I had the great fortune of meeting and knowing Johnny. We were not as close as Buck and I were, but it meant the world to me. He was one of the beacons of my life musically when I was struggling, he and Buck. Ah, those sounds they made."

That got Yoakam back to musical through lines again.

Cash, he noted, had "that same survivor's austerity, from east of the Mississippi" (although Cash also spent the early 1960s in Southern California, including a memorable stint of hard living in Casitas Springs).

Yoakam wore the producer hat on "Dwight Sings Buck," as he did on the 2005 album "Blame the Vain" following his split with Anderson. It is, Yoakam said, lots of minutiae work, adding, "I don't know if I'll always self-produce."

As for life without Anderson, Yoakam said, "It's all right. Pete and I had a great run of things, making music together. It's been fun to play the things I recorded with Pete and hear it from a new perspective. Pete and I, I'm still very proud of all we did. How he worked as a producer was good for me all those years, and I appreciate it."

His music success allowed him to break into acting, freely admits Yoakam, who's also a 31-year Angeleno.

"Actors are at the mercy of opportunity," he said, "and I've been very fortunate in having had opportunities."

As for the idea that acting will someday equal or eclipse his music career, Yoakam said quickly, "It has some distance to go before it does that."

Looking back, Yoakam said the thing he remembers most about his early L.A. days is "the sunlight late in the afternoon, the hope of California."

"At times, it feels like the late great Golden State, as one of my songs goes, but we are still talking about gold," he said with another deep laugh.

The L.A. music scene back then was "full of fun and joy and promise — and it's made good on a lot of promises for me."

"I'm not a native son, but I'm proud to have been adopted into the family — as Buck was," he said.

So he'll feel at home at a couple of California music festivals, almost as at home as he feels singing Buck Owens.

"I look forward to being out in the desert both weekends," he said, "and Lord knows what'll happen. That's what made Buck nervous about me, and that's what's made it so fun, too."