Buck Owens shaped sound of country

Section: Life, Pg. 02d

Buck Owens, arguably as much as any artist, built the musical foundations for modern country music.

Owens, who died Saturday at 76 of heart failure at his home in Bakersfield, Calif., jump-started a slick '60s Nashville sound with a jolt of energy borrowed from rock and a uniquely Western honky-tonk realism.

He was as big a star as country produced in the '60s, racking up 19 No. 1 hits and 14 other top 10 records. It was Owens' hit Act Naturally that became Ringo Starr's Beatles showcase, and Ray Charles covered the country star's classics Cryin' Time and Together Again.

Powered by the crisp guitar licks of the late Don Rich and the driving rhythms of backing band The Buckaroos, Owens' hits jumped out of the radio, contrasting with the strings-laden Nashville productions of the era. Owens was the driving force in establishing his home base, Bakersfield, as the only serious modern rival to Nashville's grip on country music, as he, protege Merle Haggard, Wynn Stewart and Tommy Collins saturated radio airwaves.

Although Owens cooled off on the charts by 1974, cutting such novelties as On the Cover of the Music City News, Monsters' Holiday and You Ain't Gonna Have Ol' Buck to Kick Around No More, a parallel career made him even more widely known to the American public at large: He co-hosted the country comedy series Hee Haw from 1969 to 1986.

That bucolic role unfairly pigeonholed him in many people's eyes, but his musical reputation was restored in 1988 when a duet with then-hot new star Dwight Yoakam, Streets of Bakersfield, became Owens' first No. 1 hit in 16 years.

Yoakam was an avid Owens booster ("I will cherish forever the musical moments he graciously shared with me during his life," Yoakam told the Associated Press) and helped fire him up to take one last whack at the country charts in 1989, when he had minor hits with Hot Dog, a rockabilly tune he had cut as Corky Jones in the '50s, and a duet on Act Naturally with, fittingly, Ringo Starr.

Not that he needed the royalties -- Owens was successful in real estate and radio. In recent years, Owens played regular gigs at his Crystal Palace club in Bakersfield, the last one Friday night.

In 1965, Owens caused a stir by pledging in the Music City News, "I shall sing no song that is not a country song." A month later, he released an album that included a cover of Chuck Berry's Memphis, and in 1969 he had a hit with Berry's Johnny B. Goode and the decidedly folk-rocking Who's Gonna Mow Your Grass.

But he wasn't contradicting himself: Owens was one of those rare musicians whose style was so distinctive and definitive that everything he recorded became a Buck Owens song.

(c) USA TODAY, 2006