THE 10+ CLUB - Buck Owens

• Total # of #1s: 21
• First #1: “Act Naturally” (1963)
• Last #1 (for now!): “Made in Japan” (1972) as a solo, “Streets of Bakersfield” (1987) as a featured artist on a Dwight Yoakam record
• Best #1: “Love’s Gonna Live Here” (1963)
• Honorable Mentions: “My Heart Skips a Beat” (1964), “I’ve Got a Tiger By the Tail” (1964), “Think of Me” (1966), “Open Up Your Heart” (1966)
• Worst #1?: “Johnny B. Goode” (1969) (this is an awesome Chuck Berry song, a musical landmark if there ever was one, but the Buckaroos’ phoned-in version of it is pretty flat considering what they were capable of)
• Best also-rans: “Under Your Spell Again” (1959), “Above and Beyond” (1960), “Excuse Me (I Think I’ve Got a Heartache)” (1960), “Together Again” (1964)

This is one of those cases where the lens of a #1 hits discussion paints a more incomplete story than usual. It sort of looks like the story of an artist who caught on in a big genre-dominating way but perhaps got overexposed or ran out of inspiration and fell out of favor. That would eventually be a prevailing trend of course, in the more youth-friendly turn-and-burn culture of country radio since the late ‘80s or so. But back in Buck Owens’ day, anyone who got that big had a head start on staying that way for decades (see Merle Haggard, Conway Twitty, Charley Pride etc.)

But there’s more to it, of course. Buck Owens seems to me like one of those guys that was a great artist almost by accident, a guy caught up in the business end of music, putting in the hard work of getting good enough at writing, playing, and performing to be a real-deal money-making pro. He wasn’t a pretty boy or obvious fount of charisma, but he did assemble one of the tightest and most distinctive bands in music history (the Buckaroos, of course) and record some of the most emotionally resonant country singles of his or any era. I don’t know how much of it was deliberate innovation and how much of it was working with what he had to make something he was satisfied with, a Dust Bowl kid swearing he’d never be poor again and in the process authoring the “Bakersfield Sound,” creating one of the first hugely successful alternatives to standard Nashville country. Influencing pop-rock legends the Beatles and The Byrds to the point that they spent part of their peaks covering his songs. That’s not just impressive, that’s enormous.

Owens was probably moved by practicality more than the average lofty-minded artistic innovator. He was often as shrewd as he was gifted, buying up radio stations and nightclubs in what might be called a vertical integration strategy nowadays. His choice to sign on as host of Hee Haw, which has been derided for decades as a cred-killer for an artist who might’ve had much more left to give, probably to Owens just seemed like a savvy sidestep to a low-pressure gig amusing millions of fans for a no-doubt healthy ongoing payday. Then again, it’s not like Owens was incapable of being ruled by sentiment: hosting Hee Haw likely torpedoed his artistic growth much less than the motorcycle accident death of his Buckaroo right hand man and best friend Don Rich in 1972. Owens didn’t (and probably couldn’t) talk about it right away, but later he’d go on record with the toll that took on his love and joy for creating music. I imagine Owens enjoyed bantering with Roy Clark week in and week out on Hee Haw, but his real best buddy and closest collaborator clearly left a void with his untimely passing, to the point that more-inspired work just wasn’t in the cards.

By the time I was old enough to pay attention in the early ‘80s, a lot of Buck’s onetime contemporaries were still having radio hits, whereas if you weren’t watching Hee Haw Owens seemed as bygone as Hank Williams or Bob Wills, despite still being very much alive. Looking it up on the internet wasn’t an option of course, you’d just have to wait until you got old enough to go record shopping and even then have to do a little digging in the old-stuff bargain bin (or my own grandparents’ record collection). My patience and curiosity were rewarded, of course. I was digging for gold.