Buck traveled with his family to the Phoenix, Arizona area in 1937 as they searched for a better life. Eventually, they traveled to California's San Joaquin Valley, doing farm work. At a young age Buck vowed that when he grew up, he would not be poor. He found a way out of his family's poverty through his musical talent.
3 comments:
There are just some artists that shouldn't have to die. Buck Owens is one of them. But you know
something? He won't ever. Yes, he may have left this Earth, but his music certainly hasn't. Last night, I was driving up the interstate after I learned the
news and popped my Buck Owens greatest hits CD in. Such great memories rushed through me. The
memories of HeeHaw, listening to the broadcast of the Crystal Palace performances on the internet, and can't forget the red,white, and blue guitar that was such a trademark of Owens that is displayed in the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Owens will be missed dearly by so very many. My condolences go out to his family and friends.
The mainstream press memorialized
Buck as the red-white-and-blue-guitar-playing guy behind a string of 20 #1 hits for Capitol Records
starting in the 1960s. But Inside Radio also remembers Owens as a rare country star who wasn’t based in Nashville — and the onetime owner of KNIX, Phoenix (sold to Clear Channel) and the three stations he still owned in Bakersfield (KUZZ, KUZZ-FM and KCWR). Buck used the consolidation window to get $84 million for KNIX in 1999 — not a bad return on an investment he made in 1968. Buck always understood the power of broadcasting. For a while in the late 1950s he worked in Tacoma as a DJ, salesman and part station owner. Broadcasting was also in the genes of his kids — Buck’s son Michael ran Phoenix for years and Mel has Bakersfield. Buck had health problems including surgery for throat cancer in 1993. But his outlaw-maverick appeal, an 18-year string of co-hosting TV’s Hee Haw and a late-80s recording comeback with Dwight Yoakam kept him on the minds of country musicians. And he continued performing live in Bakersfield (right up to a 90 minute show at his Crystal Palace nightclub last Friday night).
Once asked how he’d like to be remembered, Owens said, "I'd like to be remembered as a guy that came along and did his music, did his best and showed up on time, clean and ready to do the job, wrote a few songs and had a hell of a time."
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