Howling Wolf

A consummate bandleader, Buck Owens pioneered a unique and fresh sound: clean and crisp, characterized by sharp staccato guitar riffs, and pedal steel guitar solos, with straight forward lyrics. It was far more streamlined than the honky tonk music of the late 40's and early 1950s with its fiddles and back up singer arrangments. While Owens originally used fiddle and retained pedal steel into the 1970s, his sound on records and onstage was always more stripped-down and elemental, incorporating elements of rock and roll. The sound Owens developed with the Buckaroos depended on his comrarderie and talents of his best friend, Don Rich, whom he met while in Tacoma. Rich can be heard harmonizing on all of Owens hits until his untimely death in 1974, when Rich lost control of his motorcycle and struck a guard rail on Highway 99 north of Bakersfield as he made his way to join his family for a vacation on the coast at Morro Bay. The loss of his best friend devastated Owens for years and abruptly halted his singing successes and career until Owens performed with Dwight Yoakam in the late-1980s.

Owens co-hosted the popular and groundbreaking Hee Haw program with Roy Clark. Hee Haw, originally envisioned as country music's answer to Laugh-In, outlived that show and ran for twenty-four seasons. Owens was co-host from 1969 until he left the cast in 1986, convinced that the show's exposure had obscured his immense musical legacy.

Biography

Alvis Owens, Jr., was born in Sherman, Texas. (U.S. Highway 82 through Sherman was named "Buck Owens Freeway" in his honor). "'Buck' was a mule on the Owens farm," Rich Kienzle wrote in About Buck, the biography at Owens' official website adapted from Kienzle's notes for Rhino Records' 1992 "The Buck Owens Collection" box set. "When Alvis, Jr., was three or four years old, he walked into the house and announced that his name was also Buck. That was fine with the family; the boy was Buck from then on."

In 1937, his family migrated to Mesa, Arizona, during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression.

In 1945, Owens co-hosted a radio show called "Buck and Britt". In the late 1940s, Owens became a truck driver and discovered the San Joaquin Valley of California. He was impressed by Bakersfield, where he and his wife settled in 1950.

File:Buckowensjapan.jpg

The Buck Owens in Japan album.

Soon, Owens was frequently traveling to Hollywood for session recording jobs at Capitol Records, playing backup for Tennessee Ernie Ford, Sonny James, Wanda Jackson, Del Reeves, Tommy Sands, Tommy Collins, Faron Young and Gene Vincent, and many others.

During the Rock and Roll craze of the 1950s, Owens recorded a rockabilly record called "Hot Dog" for the Pep label, using the pseudonym Corky Jones. He used the pseudonym because he did not want the fact he recorded a rock n' roll tune to hurt his country music career. Buck loved rock n' roll virtually from the start and it influenced his style of country from then on.

Buck's career took off in 1959, when his song "Second Fiddle" hit number 24 on the Billboard country chart. A few months later, "Under Your Spell Again" hit number 4, and then "Above and Beyond" hit #3.

In the early 1960s, the "countrypolitan" sound was popular, with smooth, string-laden, pop-influenced styles used by Eddy Arnold, Jim Reeves, and Patsy Cline, among others. Owens went against the trend, utilizing pure and raw honky-tonk hillbilly feel, mixed idiosyncratically with the Mexican polkas he had heard on border radio stations while growing up.

Owens was named the most promising country and western singer of 1960 by Billboard and his Top-10-charting duets with Rose Maddox in 1961 earned them awards as vocal team of the year.

In the 1970s, he enjoyed a string of hit duets with a protege, Susan Raye, who subsequentally became a popular solo artist, with recordings produced by Owens.

1963's "Act Naturally" became Buck's first #1 hit. The Beatles later did a straight cover of it in 1965.

In 1967, Owens and the Buckaroos toured Japan, a then-rare occurrence for a country musician. The subsequent live album, appropriately named Buck Owens in Japan, is possibly the first country music album recorded outside the United States.