Dwight Yoakam

All Dwight Yoakam's local fans who have been waiting for him to please, please (baby) come back to Houston can now say "Thank you." When he came racing out of L.A. in a "Long White Cadillac" in the mid-'80s, the Kentucky-born Yoakam proved you could be a staunch honky-tonk traditionalist and still become a Nashville star, covering the likes of Hank Locklin, Lefty Frizzell and Johnnys Horton and Cash, and duetting with mentor/idol Buck Owens on "Streets of Bakersfield." His good looks didn't hurt either, and in the '90s, widescreen country-pop epics like "A Thousand Miles from Nowhere" and "Ain't That Lonely Yet" landed him on Saturday Night Live and seldom left the radio. For more than a decade now, Yoakam has also won acclaim for his character-acting skills in films like Sling Blade, the Crank franchise and the upcoming The Last Rites of Ransom Pride (co-written by Ray Wylie Hubbard), while continuing to release top-notch albums including Things Change, Population Me and his most recent effort, 2007 Owens tribute Dwight Sings Buck. The Arena's in-the-round configuration will no doubt give all the ladies in the house a prime vantage point to gander at Yoakam's trademark skintight pants — which, as a friend said recently, "are so tight you can tell what religion he is."