"Honky Tonk Man on Aisle Five!"

11/13/2007 Stephen L. Betts Dwight Yoakam made a unique in-store appearance on Monday. He wasn’t in a shop surrounded by CDs or DVDs, however; he was meeting-and-greeting fans at the Meijer Grocery Store in Grand Rapids, Mich. In town to promote the recently released Dwight Sings Buck, a tribute to the late country music pioneer Buck Owens, Dwight was also celebrating the success of his Bakersfield Biscuits line of frozen foods, which includes Chicken Lickin’s Chicken Fries. Dwight tells the Grand Rapids Press that Buck Owens was indirectly responsible for getting him into the food business. When Buck opened the Crystal Palace, his restaurant, club and museum in Bakersfield, Calif., in the mid-1990s, he asked Dwight to do something special to commemorate the event. "As a joke, I had biscuits made and called them Dwight's Bakersfield Biscuits for Buck's menu," says Dwight. For nearly 90 minutes, Dwight signed autographs at the grocery stores for hundreds of fans, including Andrea Wenz and Matthew Flesner, who drove from Plymouth, Minn., after finding out about the appearance on an Internet message board. Wenz said she and Flesner had seen 43 Dwight Yoakam concerts, but this was her first opportunity to meet the star. “It’s kind of ironic, after all those shows, to have to go to a grocery store to meet him,” she said.