By Bartee Haile
“Hee Haw,” a country music variety show co-hosted by Buck Owens and Roy Clark, hit the airwaves on June 15, 1969 as a summer replacement for the “Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.”
Alvis Edgar Owens, Jr. was born in 1929 on a farm near Sherman a short distance from the Red River. As a small boy, he declared that he preferred the name of the family donkey to his own. His parents went along, and after that everyone called him “Buck.”
Driven west by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, the Owens clan headed for California in 1937 but got only as far as Mesa, Arizona. That was where Buck quit school in the ninth grade to work on the family farm and to master the guitar, his real interest.
By his late teens, Buck’s picking had improved to the point that he was playing once a week on a radio show and most nights in the honky-tonks in the Phoenix area. At 19, he married a country music singer, the first of his four wives, and by 1950 had fathered two sons.
To support his growing family, Buck drove trucks through the San Joaquin Valley in central California. He liked the looks of Bakersfield so much that he talked his wife into moving there in 1951.
The club scene in his adopted hometown provided Buck with plenty of paying gigs and the opportunity to form his first band, the Schoolhouse Playboys. Bakersfield’s close proximity to Hollywood made regular round-trips to Capitol Records possible, enabling Buck to sit in on recording sessions with artists like Tennessee Ernie Ford, Faron Young, Wanda Jackson, Gene Vincent and Sonny James to mention a few.
But Buck was not satisfied with being a studio musician and a big fish in the small Bakersfield pond. He jumped at the chance to sign with Capitol but was bitterly disappointed by the lack of success his initial singles enjoyed.
Convinced his recording career was over before it had even begun, Buck relocated to Tacoma, Washington with his second wife in 1958. During the day, he spun records and sold advertising for a radio station and at night performed in any club that let him on stage.
Late that year, Capitol Records decided to give Buck another shot, and this time allowed him to use the steel guitar and fiddle so essential to his honky-tonk sound. To everybody’s surprise, a single from that second-chance session titled “Second Fiddle” caught fire and climbed to No. 24 on the Billboard country chart.
Buck soon proved he was no one-hit wonder with “Under Your Spell Again,” which peaked at No. 4. That was right about the time he moved back to Bakersfield followed by Don Rich, a Tacoma-based guitarist and vocalist who became his closest collaborator and best friend.
On the strength of several more Top Ten hits and brisk sales of his first album, Buck and his new buddy went on the road. After months of making do with “house” musicians, the duo patiently pieced together a band of their own that a bass player by the name of Merle Haggard called The Buckaroos.
Buck knew it would take a No. 1 single to put him on top, but he did not think “Act Naturally” was the song that would do it. Rich managed to change his mind, and the result was the first of an incredible streak of 15 consecutive No. 1 hits that spanned four chart-busting years.
Halfway through the ’60s, Buck Owens and The Buckaroos were the hottest act in popular music. They sold records and albums by the truckload and performed live in front of packed houses of every description – small clubs to giant arenas – nearly every night of the year.
In 1969 two Canadian television producers dreamed up a cornball country-music version of Rowan and Martin’s “Laugh-In” as a summer substitute for the Smothers Brothers. Buck argued that he did not have time for the show with his hectic schedule, a problem the producers solved by having him tape his segments twice a year.
“Hee Haw” turned out to be the Smothers Brothers’ permanent replacement with ratings that went through the roof. After a two-year run on CBS, cut short by the network’s purge of programs with a rural theme, it found new life in syndication and stayed on the air until 1992.
Since the tragic death of Don Rich in a motorcycle accident in 1974, Buck had only been going through the motions. Other than “Hee Haw,” on which he continued to appear until 1986, his career had come to a screeching halt.
Buck finally broke his silence on the subject of Rich’s premature passing in the late 1990s. “He was like a brother, a son and a best friend. I think my music life ended when he did.”
In 2006, hours after what turned out to be a farewell performance at his Crystal Palace restaurant, club and museum in Bakersfield, Buck Owens died in his sleep of an apparent heart attack. The Dust Bowl refugee was 76 years old.
Bartee’s three books and “Best of This Week in Texas History” column collections are available for purchase at barteehaile.com.
