Randy Poe - Buck Em!: The Autobiography of Buck Owens

Praise for Buck Owens

Its hard to imagine what country music would have been like without Buck Owens. From Act Naturally and Ive Got a Tiger by the Tail to Streets of Bakersfield, Buck helped set the standards and pave the way in an industry that has been very good to many of us.

George Strait

In countless interviews over the years people have asked me to define country music. I just tell them to listen to Buck Owens and the Buckaroos doing Second Fiddle. After all, a shuffle is worth a thousand wordsand you can dance to it.

Emmylou Harris

Buck Owens was a stylist. His sounds have been copied for years. He was one of our best in country music.

George Jones

I dont know that Buck Owens knew how hip what he was doing was, even at the moment. It was that hip. But the players knew.

Dwight Yoakam

We took kind of the Buck Owens approach on Workingmans Dead . Some of the songs in there are direct tributes to that style of music, although theyre not real obvious. And Don Richs attitude was always so cool. His fiddle playing was great, too. He was one of those guys who just sounded good on anything he picked up.

Jerry Garcia

If somebody asked me to describe country music at its best, I would point them to the early records of Buck Owens.

Vince Gill

I think that alongside Fred and Ginger, Lennon and McCartney, Abbott and Costello, Lester and Earl, Elvis and Marilyn, they should clear off a place for Buck and Don because they, too, were a classic duo.

Marty Stuart

He was a great guy, just down to earth. I know he had money and fame and that voice that cut through barrooms and crummy car radios like no one else, but when we hung with him he seemed just like the guy I imagined all those years before when I first heard his records. He was one of us.

Chris Isaak

Buck Owensrockin big beat guitar and a big country smile.

John Fogerty

The Beatles were among his most ardent fans. Anytime Buck put out an album, wed have to send it to the Beatles.

Ken Nelson, Capitol Records

Buck Owens, more than any other country artist of his time, brought the bandstand into the production of his records. The songwriting is very direct and poetic in its simplicity. The creative spark between Buck and Don Rich personifies what we call chemistry.

Rodney Crowell

Buck deserves to be remembered as one of the most important artists in all of music history.

Brad Paisley

Copyright 2013 by Buck Owens Private Foundation, Inc., and Randy Poe

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, without written permission, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

Published in 2013 by Backbeat Books
An Imprint of Hal Leonard Corporation
7777 West Bluemound Road
Milwaukee, WI 53213

Trade Book Division Editorial Offices
33 Plymouth St., Montclair, NJ 07042

Photos of Buck Owens on tour (insert two) appear courtesy of Rolene Brumley. Photo of Owens on the set of Hee Haw (insert three) appears courtesy of Gaylord Productions. All other photos are from the Buck Owens Private Foundation.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Owens, Buck, 1929-2006, author.
Buck em! : the autobiography of Buck Owens / with Randy Poe.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4803-3064-1
1. Owens, Buck, 1929-2006. 2. Country musiciansUnited StatesBiography.
I. Poe, Randy, 1955 II. Title.
ML420.O945A3 2013
782.421642092dc23
[B]
2013035097

www.backbeatbooks.com

We worked eleven hours straight, six nights a weeknow listen to thiswith no intermission. You heard me right. No intermission. The music never stopped.

Buck Owens

Contents

In a time when country airwaves were awash in cosmopolitan string sections and large choral arrangements, a pair of silver sparkle Telecasters pierced through the foggy landscape like the high beams on a Cadillac. A crying pedal steel howled like a coyote. A drummer pounded away at a freight-train beat. And the artist behind this honky-tonk rebellion would go on to be one of the biggest stars in country music history.

Buck Owens was a great many things all at once: equal parts ace guitarist, television star, bandleader, businessman, and radio visionary, he would defy the classic jack of all trades, master of none saying and become master of everything he attemptedfascinating in his ability to always give people just what they were looking for, simply by being himself.

He would change the way country records were mixed, produced, written, and perceived. He would inspire everyone from ordinary everyday music fans to the Beatles. He would go on to play iconic shows at the White House and Carnegie Hall.

In the way that Chet Atkins crafted the Nashville Sound, Bill Monroe pioneered Kentucky Bluegrass, and Bob Wills was synonymous with Texas Swing, Buck Owens was destined to hold the deed to a dusty old California oil town that was the yin to Nashvilles yang.

To this day it still baffles me that the twangiest, honky-tonkinest, countryest music made in the 60s was not made anywhere near Nashville, but in California by a Texan, actually. Buck Owens and his trusty Telecaster sidekick Don Rich would come to epitomize the Bakersfield Sound, and change music foreverlike some hillbilly Lone Ranger and Tonto out to restore justice and twang.

But there is so much more to Buck Owens than just this rhinestone-clad musical icon. He was a complicated guy, with intense dedication to his art and a tireless work ethic. He was a father, a husband (a few times, actually), and a truly loyal friend. He would outwit the record companies, invent a unique sound, and mentor countless younger artists like myself, Dwight Yoakam, and Garth Brooks. He not only perfected the honky-tonk Bakersfield Sound, he also built his very own state-of-the-art honky-tonk Crystal Palace, smack-dab in the middle of Bakersfield itself. And it was there that he would play out his twilight years with his fans coming to see him play his music in his hometown, instead of the other way around.

I thank God I got to know Buck Owens. From my earliest musical memory, which is Tiger by the Tail on my Papaws turntable, to Saturday nights watching Hee Haw , I was a disciple. And getting to know the man behind the legend did not detract from the legend at all. He was a true inspiration. As you read this book, I hope you will get a similar feeling from getting acquainted with one of the twentieth centurys most fascinating musical figures.

I miss Buck Owens. But his music and his story live on.

Brad Paisley

To say that Buck Owens was a singularly unique figure in country music history would be light years beyond clich. There have been four, maybe five, other artists in the history of the entire genre who have left as indelible a sonic imprint on so many millions of listeners ears.

In addition, he and his band exploded visually onto the collective cultural scene. With a look of jet-age, honky-tonk hipness born from a fearless outsiders perspective, Buck responded to authority and convention with a steely-eyed hard shove back.

Yet there was still the necessary romantic innocence in Bucks longing drive to overcome the odds against any dream heldto somehow escape the doom of oppressively extreme existence that faced a red-dirt sharecroppers child almost from birth, during the Dust Bowl years of the Great Depression. He not only survived the daunting struggle of those meager beginnings to change his own life, he also went on to change the lives of almost every person who ever came into contact with him.