FEATURES
Adios Buckaroo!
/ Casey McKinney
03.27.06
Buck Owens 1929-2006
The path to discovery of a favorite musician can sometimes be a tortuous affair, especially when the artist you have come to love and admire could easily have been your grandfather. My first remembrance of Buck Owens, like many my age, was seeing him with his tri-colored red, white and blue guitar, pickin’ and a grinnin’ with side kick Roy Clark on the Laugh-In style country music comedy show Hee-Haw. The show had already been in syndication for years, but the only times I recall ever seeing it was down at my grandparents' in South Georgia. Streaming over the airwaves from Albany to the small farming town of Arabi, population 300 or so, Hee-Haw was like Friends or Seinfeld is today, ubiquitous, always on. Owens was cute, big eared and squinty-eyed, kind of dorky, I remember, and affable. But years later, when my musical tastes were settling into punk, hip hop, and indie rock, he became only a faint blip on the radar of memory––a ‘Pfft, You Were Gone’ kind of blur.
But just as Johnny Cash (RIP) began attracting attention from an MTV style audience through the slick Mark Romanek video of a Nine Inch Nails cover and the posthumously produced Oscar winning filmography Walk The Line, many other unlikely older artists whose musical style is hardly exercised today have managed to find younger audiences (think Tom Jones, R. L. Burnside, etc). Still others have yet to cull that wide reaching cross-generational appreciation.
Having been a fan of Owens now for a few years, and seeing him for the first and only time two years ago (09/07/04), it’s hard to imagine why this maverick musician, the creator of the Bakersfield country rock sound, the progenitor of No Depression and other modern spin offs, never reached the indie-cred level of people like Cash or Willie Nelson, country music peers who successfully grabbed the attention of young listeners––listeners who for the most part have no interest in any of the overproduced bubblegum streaming out of Nashville today.
And why not? Fans of Wilco or Neko Case or those tragically hip Gram Parsons rediscoverers who don’t know the music of Owens would be pleasantly shocked to learn of the guy’s history and to listen to classic albums like Together Again and My Heart Skips a Beat or to hear fans scream Cheap Trick-Budokan-style on Buck Owens and his Buckaroos Live in Japan (1967). The goofy anchor of Hee-Haw was much more than his rustic humor allowed on his boob tube stint. He was a pioneer, an outsider, a true rebel genius.
The path to discovery of a favorite musician can sometimes be a tortuous affair, especially when the artist you have come to love and admire could easily have been your grandfather. My first remembrance of Buck Owens, like many my age, was seeing him with his tri-colored red, white and blue guitar, pickin’ and a grinnin’ with side kick Roy Clark on the Laugh-In style country music comedy show Hee-Haw. The show had already been in syndication for years, but the only times I recall ever seeing it was down at my grandparents' in South Georgia. Streaming over the airwaves from Albany to the small farming town of Arabi, population 300 or so, Hee-Haw was like Friends or Seinfeld is today, ubiquitous, always on. Owens was cute, big eared and squinty-eyed, kind of dorky, I remember, and affable. But years later, when my musical tastes were settling into punk, hip hop, and indie rock, he became only a faint blip on the radar of memory––a ‘Pfft, You Were Gone’ kind of blur.
But just as Johnny Cash (RIP) began attracting attention from an MTV style audience through the slick Mark Romanek video of a Nine Inch Nails cover and the posthumously produced Oscar winning filmography Walk The Line, many other unlikely older artists whose musical style is hardly exercised today have managed to find younger audiences (think Tom Jones, R. L. Burnside, etc). Still others have yet to cull that wide reaching cross-generational appreciation.
Having been a fan of Owens now for a few years, and seeing him for the first and only time two years ago (09/07/04), it’s hard to imagine why this maverick musician, the creator of the Bakersfield country rock sound, the progenitor of No Depression and other modern spin offs, never reached the indie-cred level of people like Cash or Willie Nelson, country music peers who successfully grabbed the attention of young listeners––listeners who for the most part have no interest in any of the overproduced bubblegum streaming out of Nashville today.
And why not? Fans of Wilco or Neko Case or those tragically hip Gram Parsons rediscoverers who don’t know the music of Owens would be pleasantly shocked to learn of the guy’s history and to listen to classic albums like Together Again and My Heart Skips a Beat or to hear fans scream Cheap Trick-Budokan-style on Buck Owens and his Buckaroos Live in Japan (1967). The goofy anchor of Hee-Haw was much more than his rustic humor allowed on his boob tube stint. He was a pioneer, an outsider, a true rebel genius.
