Buck Owens

My dad was in the oil business and when I was about 12 we moved for a couple of years to Bakersfield. It was a great time to be in Bakersfield. The town was a bit country. I remember seeing the Bakersfield Bears, a California league team, and learning that a ball that rolls through the fence is a ground rule double. I remember exhibiting at the Kern County Fair and winning a prize for my coin display. And working in the boy scout baked potato booth where the most obese people would ask for a extra pats of butter.

It was a big change from the Bay Area, where I started life. Bakersfield in the late 1950s was not even a bit country, it was country. We could go a couple of blocks away from our house and get into the foothills with jack rabbits and snakes. Music was big in Bakersfield. A few years after we moved Spade Cooley was convicted of murdering his wife. (He eventually died backstage after a benefit concert where he had been momentarily released from prison - but that is another story.)

But there was also this musician named Buck Owens - who was then a local hero. The city was mixed between the oil people and the "oakies" - a lot of the families that came to California in the dustbowl settled in Kern County. Owens had a string of hits - although the Buckaroos actually were formed after we left Bakersfield. There were a lot of songs that anyone who grew up in California around that time would know - from Tiger by the Tail, Love's Gonna Live Here to Act Naturally (one of my personal favorites).

Owens went on to star in Hee Haw - which seemed to stay on the air almost forever. And he had Grandpa Jones and David Akeman (who was known as Stringbean) as partners as well as Minnie Pearl. But I remember his big songs, gaudy outfits (he was one of the guys that realy did wear rhinestones) and the recreation of a sound that will always bring me back to those two years I spent in Bakersfield.

He died yesterday at the age of 76. That is a part of California history and music history that should not be forgotten. The Bakersfield sound lives in my ears almost every day.