Buck Owens

Alvis Edgar "Buck" Owens, Jr., (August 12, 1929 – March 25, 2006) was an American singer and guitarist, with twenty number-one hits on the Billboard magazine country music charts. Both as a solo ar

Alvis Edgar "Buck" Owens, Jr., (August 12, 1929 – March 25, 2006) was an American singer and guitarist, with twenty number-one hits on the Billboard magazine country music charts. Both as a solo artist and with his band, the Buckaroos (so named by Merle Haggard, a former bandmate), Buck Owens pioneered what has come to be called the Bakersfield sound—a reference to Bakersfield, California, the city Owens called home and from which he drew inspiration for what he preferred to call "American Music".

A consummate bandleader, Buck Owens pioneered a unique and fresh sound: clean and crisp, characterized by sharp staccato guitar riffs, and pedal steel guitar solos, with straightforward lyrics. It was far more streamlined than the honky tonk music of the late 40's and early 1950s with its fiddles and back up singer arrangements. While Owens originally used fiddle and retained pedal steel into the 1970s, his sound on records and onstage was always more stripped-down and elemental, incorporating elements of rock and roll. The sound Owens developed with the Buckaroos depended on his comrarderie and talents of his best friend, Don Rich, whom he met while in Tacoma. Rich can be heard harmonizing on all of Owens hits until his untimely death in 1974, when Rich lost control of his motorcycle and struck a guard rail on Highway 99 north of Bakersfield as he made his way to join his family for a vacation on the coast at Morro Bay. The loss of his best friend devastated Owens for years and abruptly halted his singing successes and career until Owens performed with Dwight Yoakam in the late-1980s.