Buck Owens is Bakersfield. The city might have already been on the map but Buck Owens created the Bakersfield sound. He called the spare sound of pedal steel and twangy guitars “American Music” but it was an important counterpoint to the more slickly produced sides coming from Music Row in Nashville.
You can’t talk about one without the other.
Now a decade after his death, Buck Owens’ autobiography Buck ‘Em is out in trade paperback. And it’s a worthy read.
Imagine if you will, a country music star who decided to sit down and tell you his life story from start to finish. The book has the feel as if Owens was personally talking to you. Part of that is due to how Owens began the project, talking on cassette tapes. After Owens passed away, biographer Randy Poe painstakingly assembled them into a chronological narrative tracing his rise from poverty during the depression to becoming one of the premier country entertainers in show business.
During his lifetime Owens had twenty-one number one country singles and starred on the television variety show Hee Haw for nine years. The book moves chronologically throughout Owens’s life in short vignettes that are quick-read mini-chapters. It’s like living oral history with plenty of personal touches.
In his direct and folksy way, Owens recounts how as a child, he once came in to his family’s house and announced his new name was Buck. “I don’t remember the day I changed my name,” he writes, “but my daddy told me, I know it’s true. We had an ‘ol mule named Buck that we plowed with, and my daddy said that one day—when I was around three years old, I came in the house and said, ‘Call me Buck.’ My daddy said if anybody tried to call me Alvis or Junior or anything like that, I just wouldn’t answer. From that day on they had to call me Buck—Buck Owens.”
That was when Owens was living in poverty as the son of a sharecropper, repairing the holes in his shoes with scraps of linoleum. The little boy would grow up to not only be a successful session player, and star of stage and screen, but the owner of multiple radio stations.
Owens, who would grow up to be a star of stage and screen, had four marriages and admits his failings as a husband and father. One of his wives later married Merle Haggard and Owens states for the record that Haggard didn’t steal her away as it was reported.
Owens is best known for the song “Act Naturally” penned by Johnny Russell and later covered by the Beatles. Owens describes how many in the country establishment disliked the Beatles, not so much for their long hair but for taking fans away from country music. Owens didn’t see it that way and liked all kinds of music. Years later when Owens toured Europe, he made a stop at Abbey Road studios and recorded a duet with Ringo Starr, the Beatles drummer who sang and popularized it in the mid-Sixties.
Owens admits that co-hosting the television variety show Hee Haw was detrimental to his career. Not only did it affect his record sales but it cast him as a hillbilly who wasn’t taken seriously as an artist.
My favorite parts of the book are the personal anecdotes that Owens shares. “I wasn’t old enough to understand how a radio worked, so I thought there were little people who got up inside of that thing and sing.”
In another, he talks about accepting a visit to play at San Quentin prison, three years before Johnny Cash recorded his live album and shortly after Merle Haggard got out of the prison.
Owens was able to talk a guard into taking him into visit a gas chamber and describes the smell of death.
Perhaps one of the most heartfelt passages was not written by Owens but by one of today’s biggest country stars. In his foreword, Brad Paisley points out how ironic it was that the “countriest,” “twangiest,” “honky-tonkinest” music made did not come from Nashville but was made by a Texan in California. He called it a honky tonk rebellion.
In a heartfelt preface, protégé Dwight Yoakam describes reverently the excitement Owens felt in the possibility of publishing his memoirs but not living to see them come to fruition.
After the lengthy chronology that takes you through the greater part of the 20th century, Buck ‘Em leaves you with the feeling you knew Buck Owens – and were touched by the humility of a country legend.
Originally posted here.
