Oldies Musics

At three o’clock in the morning on May 1, 1967, Elvis Presley stood beside Priscilla Beaulieu inside the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas and promised to spend his life with her. He was 32, she was 21, and the ceremony lasted only a few minutes. There were no thousands of cheering fans, no concert lights, and none of the excitement that usually followed Elvis wherever he went. Instead, there was a carefully arranged wedding attended by a small group of people. The man who could fill entire arenas had chosen to marry in the quiet hours before sunrise. Yet even this deeply personal moment could not escape the extraordinary attention surrounding his life.

Introduction **ELVIS AND PRISCILLA: A WEDDING THAT CAPTURED A DREAM, A LOVE, AND A LIFETIME...

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Born 28 years apart, Dwight Yoakam and photographer Emily Joyce spent a full decade dating out of public view before marrying at a California church in March 2020. After his 1990s romances with actresses like Sharon Stone and Bridget Fonda drew constant tabloid photographers, the singer born in Kentucky in 1956 found a very different life when he met Joyce in 2010. Born in 1984 in Arlington Heights, Illinois, she had studied at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland and earned a graphic design degree from the Rhode Island School of Design. Even though Yoakam had sold more than 26 million records worldwide, Joyce never used his name to draw attention to herself. She kept her personal social media accounts completely blank and stayed away from the Hollywood spotlight through their 2016 engagement, their wedding at St. Monica Catholic Church, and the arrival of their son, Dalton Loren, in August 2020. Instead of stepping in front of the cameras, Joyce went to work behind her own lens. She began taking Yoakam’s official portraits and photographing studio guests for his SiriusXM channel, Dwight Yoakam and the Bakersfield Beat. When he returned in late 2024 with Brighter Days, his first new studio album in eight years, Joyce handled the visual imagery for the record. For decades, fans knew Yoakam as the guarded country singer with his Stetson hat pulled low over his eyes. More than sixteen years after they started dating, the portraits taken by his wife show a relaxed husband and father nearing seventy who finally feels at home in front of a camera because of the woman holding it.

On November 15, 2024, 68-year-old Dwight Yoakam released his album Brighter Days and listed his four-year-old son, Dalton Loren Yoakam, as an official co-writer on the title track. The release marked Yoakam’s return to the studio after an eight-year gap following his 2016 bluegrass record Swimmin’ Pools, Movie Stars… and nearly a decade since his 2015 album Second Hand Heart. Beginning in the 1980s with classics like Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc. and Buenas Noches from a Lonely Room, he had spent nearly four decades singing about heartache and isolation while working late through the night in recording studios. That rhythm shifted in August 2020 when he welcomed his first child at age 64 with his wife, photographer Emily Joyce, following ten years of quiet dating. Friends saw the longtime night owl trade his late studio hours for early mornings making breakfast and taking his son on walks. While Yoakam was working in a Los Angeles studio, four-year-old Dalton played near his father’s guitar and began humming a simple, unscripted tune. Yoakam built the structure of the title song around his son’s melody. Though long known for strict technical standards in the control room, the 68-year-old singer kept the boy’s natural, unpolished singing on the finished track beside his own weathered honky-tonk voice. Joyce brought the rest of the household into the project by shooting the official portraits of her husband for the album cover and promotional materials. After decades of building his name on songs from lonely rooms, Yoakam preserved this late chapter of his life by placing his young son’s voice and songwriting credit permanently beside his own.