The Drovers Old Time Medicine Show - Prater's Creek Gazette

Buck Owens (1930-2006)

Buck Owens Photo Today, country music legend Buck Owens passed away of unknown causes. Known to the world through his years on the television show Hee-Haw, he was known to everybody else as one of the most influential singer/songwriter/band leader/guitar pickers who ever lived. To people my age (46), we heard him on the radio when we were kids, but we really knew him on Hee-Haw, which went on the air in 1969. To most of us he was a doofus playing this red, white, and blue guitar.

And that image is what most folks my age probably remember. But to a lot of us, his influences were heard in the “cowpunk” scene that sprung up in the mid 80’s. We started searching out his albums at flea markets and yard sales. And we played all of those classics such as “Tiger By The Tail”, “Act Naturally”, and “Together Again” over and over again. When the Carnegie Hall concert was re-released in 1987 we went crazy over Buck and lead guitarist Don Rich with their Nudie suits and matching silver metal-flake Telecasters. Within a month I had found, at The Anderson Jockey Lot, almost every album he and The Buckaroos had ever recorded.

We realized what the older folks, and the folks just a few years older than us knew. People who knew him through The Beatles doing “Act Naturally”, or the Grateful Dead doing Buck songs (Jerry Garcia always cited Don Rich as a major influence). Buck was awesome!

His sound came to personify the “Bakersfield” sound. A stripped down sound, with tight harmonies, and the unmistakable sound of a Fender Telecaster. Buck grew up in Texas where he heard lots of Bob Wills and early rock and roll on the radio, and he later had these elements in his music. And Buck loved the early rock and roll, even recording some under the name “Corky Jones” in the late 50’s. On the Carnegie Hall concert album the band dons Beatles wigs and does “Twist and Shout”. While he had a long string of #1 hits, he often got flack for having a rock and roll edge to his music. In 1964 he took out a full page ad in Music City News promising he’d never do another song that “wasn’t country”. Then a few weeks later he released a Chuck Berry song.

Buck Owens Photo While his music did have a rock and roll edge and beat to it, it was pure country. While Nashville was churning out string laden, syrupy songs with loads of background vocals, Buck and the Buckaroos were a tight five-piece band and recorded as a band. And they plain kicked butt doing Buck’s songs live.

After Rich died in 1974, in a motorcycle accident, Buck said it “was as if I’d lost my right arm”. He eventually went into retirement from performing and recording, and concentrated on his vast business investments.

In the mid 80’s, Dwight Yoakum came out of the LA hardcore and cowpunk scene playing music that owed a great debt to Buck. And Yoakum more than paid that debt when he brought Buck out of retirement with the hit“ Streets of Bakersville”. But he did more than bring Buck out of retirement. He helped restore his reputation as the great artist that he was, not just the doofus on Hee-Haw.

No Buck Owens wasn’t just the guy on Hee-Haw. He was an American original.