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Buck Owens Buck Owens BiographyWhen Buck Owens passed away in March of 2006, country music lost one of its greatest innovators, pioneers and stylists. Owens, like Bill Monroe before him, stubbornly created his own sound while all around him were conforming to the "new" sounds of the times.
Dwight Yoakam, like Buck before him, refused to bow to conventions and rules, and he in particular is quick to paint Owens as a seminal force, not just in his career but in country music’s acceptance by a rock and roll crowd. Before his cornball grin graced the Hee Haw set, Owens singlehandedly kept country music country when all around him were adding syrupy strings and girl choirs to what was becoming known as the Nashville Sound in the 1960s. According to Dwight, “Buck kept it simple. He knew what he liked, he knew what he wanted, and he crafted a sound that I’m still influenced by today. At a time when country music, and Nashville in particular, was attempting to cross over into pop music--you know with Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline--that very slick, smooth production, Buck was sticking with three chords, a kick ass drum beat and killer songs like "Act Naturally" and "Tiger By a Tail."
As befits a star of Hee Haw, Buck Owens's real name was Alvis, and he called himself Buck after his family’s mule. He grew up poor, working on the land with his sharecropper folks in Texas. Victims of the Great Depression, the family migrated to California in 1937. At least they tried to migrate to California, but their truck broke down in Arizona, so there they settled, and Buck worked in the fields. Music passed the time. “It was a hard life back then. We didn’t have entertainment; there were no TVs and computers back then. We had the radio if you were lucky, and we made our own music. That’s how I discovered that music could transport me in my head to a place that I just loved.”
A natural with several instruments, Owens became competent enough to rent out his talents and finally found work in Bakersfield, California, playing guitar for a house band. Schooled in bars that required the band to play all types of pop music, from rock to jazz and country, Owens quickly learned numerous styles and became adept on his favored Fender Telecaster electric guitar.
When he began recording for small LA labels, he already had a sound of his own. It was country in inflection, rock and roll in execution, and Owens discovered his own brand of rocking country music with early hits like "Act Naturally," "Cry," "Time" and "Together Again." "I didn’t want to make slow, sophisticated ballads. I wanted to play bar room music with a beat. I guess that’s what the rock and rollers liked about it."
The Beatles and The Stones were huge Buck Owens fans, with Ringo recording "Act Naturally." In the 70s Owens lost his bandleader Don Rich, and seemed to lose interest in the record business and devoted himself to his blossoming TV career. He recorded the occasional duets with people he admired like Emmylou Harris and Ringo Starr, but never had another number one till he sang with the man who owed so much to Buck, Dwight Yoakam, on "Streets of Bakersfield" in 1988.
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