Born in Texas in the midst of the Great Depression in 1929, the son of a sharecropping family that migrated west Grapes of Wrath style in search of work, the young Buck had a tumultuous upbringing. He was forced to change schools often, and spent a lot of time outside of class helping the family make ends meet by working along side them in the fields, picking cotton, fruit and potatoes. Early on he was introduced to music, and by the 9th grade he had dropped out of school to work full time in the fields and as a delivery man. But he soon learned that playing in honky tonks for five dollars a day was better than the fields for the same pay. After all, a honky tonk (as Owens often remembered in interviews) was cool in the summer and warm in the winter. A nice change of pace from his regular routine.

An early appreciation for his talents by other musicians––his ability to play everything from guitar to dobro to madolin to fiddle to sax even––encouraged Owens that music was the way for him, and he never looked back. He married for the first time at nineteen, while living in Phoenix, and he and his wife Bonnie soon headed out to California, to Bakersfield, which at the time was a hot spot for oil industry wild catters and migrant farmers. There he honed his distinctive honky tonk twang––a voice that could stand up to the best that Carl Smith, Lefty Frizzell and Hank Williams had to offer. But stardom was still a long way off, and for most of the 50’s he worked in the bands of other talents and as a studio session guitarist for artists like Wanda Jackson and Faron Young. Managing to produce a few solo singles, but with no hits yet, he almost packed in his career by 1958 when he decided to move to Tacoma, Washington for a job as a radio DJ. In Tacoma, he kept on recording and met Don Rich, a jack of all trades musician, who would become Owens’ most important musical collaborator and the leader of Owens’ backup band, The Buckaroos. With a surprise hit in 1959, “Under Your Spell again,” Owens was ready to return to Bakersfield and begin making his signature mark on music history.

The late 50’s and early 60’s were a period in country music history that saw the rise of Country-Pop, a Nashville engineered, lavish, orchestral, smoothed out version of the honky tonk sound of the early 50’s. Looking for a broader audience, honky tonk heroes like Ray Price (and just about everyone else in country music) were beginning to jump ship to this new sound that was more accessible to curious urban newcomers. But back in Bakersfield, Buck Owens, and a few other rabble-rousers like Merle Haggard, weren’t keen on the notion of losing their edge. They put down their acoustic guitars and picked up amplified Fender telecasters, stripped their bands down to the essentials, got rid of the pedal steels and turned up the volume. It was still honky tonk, but louder, the lyrics with a little more morose humor, and the sound verging on the still nascent back beat rhythms of rock and roll.