Alvis Edgar Owens Jr., in conjunction with his band The Buckaroos, from the late 1950s until the late 1960s took country music to a wider audience. This was, in part, due to the fact that they were based in California. Their sound was to make the town of Bakersfield famous.
http://youtu.be/BaNX55olkxw
A child of the Great Depression, poverty and smothering dust storms had forced his family out of sharecropping in Texas, and to head westwards. “Buck” sang in honky tonks, in Bakersfield, drawing upon a style of hillbilly that had once been at the root of country music.
http://youtu.be/liX6eVZsbeE
Whereas the likes of Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell had drawn inspiration for their creativity from their lives of indulgence, Buck Owens was a man of principle who set high standards of professionalism. His love of rock and roll also influenced his music and made it stand out from what was being emitted from Nashville.
Buck visited Billboard’s country music charts for thirty years from 1959, racking up twenty-one No.1 hits. Recordings that contain the same vitality as when they were released.
http://youtu.be/FxtdoJN-IIw
The death of his leading guitarist, Don Rich, as the result of a motorcycle accident, in 1974, so affected Buck that he gradually drifted into semi-retirement, just as the film, ‘Urban Cowboy’, was being popularly received and bringing country music to the fore, in 1980. In 1987 he met Dwight Yoakam, a devotee of Buck’s music, and the pair recorded Buck’s recording from 1972, “The Streets Of Bakersfield”. The duet gave Buck his first No.1 since his original recording of the song.
I was firstly introduced to the music of Buck Owens in the 1970s when what was then radio station, 2KY, in Sydney, decided to play country music for a couple of years. His only hits, in Australia, coincided with that. These were “Made In Japan”, which reached a peak of No.7, in 1972, and “(It’s A) Monster’s Holiday” (No.4, in 1974); on the pop charts here.
http://youtu.be/iqfkZ_n_TzI
Buck wrote or had a hand in writing many of his recordings. “Crying Time”, which he also wrote, rose as high as No.6 on Billboard’s singles pop chart, in early 1966, for Ray Charles, and No.5 on its rhythm and blues chart.
http://youtu.be/L-magrm3Voo
Coming from abject poverty made Buck determined to create wealth from other means than selling records. Thereby, he became a diverse and astute businessman. Buck died in March of 2006, at the age of seventy-six.
The names of more recordings by Buck Owens can be found in the suggested playlists.