Buck Owens dies at 76
Buck Owens was a different kind of country music star: He played Carnegie Hall, not the Grand Ole Opry; he lived for Bakersfield, not Nashville.Â
Owens, the “Act Naturally” singer-songwriter who made a music mecca of a central California farming town, and a weekly event of a cornpone TV variety show known as Hee Haw, died Saturday at his home, according to his Website, BuckOwens.com. He was 76.
And, yes, as if there were ever any doubt, Owens’ home was in Bakersfield.
Bakersfield, California, is where the Texas-born Owens moved in 1951. And it was where he helped give rise in the 1950s and 1960s to the so-called “Bakersfield Sound,” a twangier, harder-driving country. For evidence of the style, try almost any classic track by Waylon Jennings. Or Merle Haggard. Or Buck Owens.
As a Salon.com tribute to Owens observed in 1999, the man “was no poet…but [he] owned country in the ’60s.”
According to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, of which Owens was an inductee, Bakersfield ties or no, Owens reeled off 15 straight number one records from 1963-67.
“Act Naturally” was among Owens’ catchiest hits. Certainly, it caught the ears of the Beatles. The British band recorded it, with Ringo Starr on vocals, in 1965 for Help!. (For those more familiar with the bastardized U.S. versions of the early Beatles albums, the song was a cut off the collection known as Yesterday…and Today.)
From 1969-86, Owens hosted, along with Roy Clark, Hee Haw, a mix of comedy, music and girls in pre-Daisy Duke Daisy Dukes.