This Week in Texas Music History, we grab a tiger by the tail and transform country music in the process.
On August 12, 1929, country singer Buck Owens, pioneer of the Bakersfield Sound, was born to a sharecropping family in Sherman in North Texas. As with so many farmers, the Great Depression rooted them out, and the family moved west to Mesa, Arizona, where Owens worked odd jobs. By 1945, he had formed his first bands and hosted a radio program. A truck driving gig took him to California, where Owens decided to settle in 1951 in Bakersfield. Country music would never be the same. Owens was a primary architect of the Bakersfield Sound, a country music born of Dust Bowl migrants to the Golden State that leaned into honky-tonk’s hard-edged electric guitar.
Buck Owens’ band the Buckaroos, featuring guitarist Don Rich, was the style’s ground zero, building on the work of the Maddox Brothers and Rose and pointing ahead to the careers of Merle Haggard and even Dwight Yoakam. In 1960, Billboard crowned Owens the “most promising country and western singer of the year.” His first album came out in 1961, and in 1963, Buck Owens and the Buckaroos first topped the charts with “Act Naturally,” a sly comic number later covered by the Beatles. “I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail” would follow it up the charts in 1964. Owens appeared at the Grand Ole Opry and had his own television show by 1966. It was on TV that he achieved his most visible mainstream success, as one of the co-hosts of the cornpone variety show Hee-Haw with Roy Clark.
So, if in Buck Owens we have another young Texan, displaced to Arizona then California, standing up for hard country sounds on the West Coast, what else makes this Bakersfield story a Texas one? He always remembered Texas, and was always remembered here. When he appeared on Austin City Limits in 1988, he told the crowd, “there are two kinds of people, Texans and those who wish they were,” before proudly announcing his Sherman roots. In 1992, Casper Rawls and Tom Lewis started the annual tradition of celebrating Owens’ birthday every year at Austin’s Continental Club, and in 1995, Owens himself made a surprise appearance there, back on the home turf of Texas once more.
Buck Owens, “I’ve Got a Tiger By the Tail”
Sources:
Erinn Park in Laurie E. Jasinski, Gary Hartman, Casey Monahan, and Ann T. Smith, eds. The Handbook of Texas Music. Second Edition. Denton, TX: Texas State Historical Association, 2012.
Media:
First Episode of the Buck Owens Show, 1966
Buck Owens, “Tiger by the Tail” on Austin City Limits, 1988
Buck Owens, “Truck Drivin’ Man” on Hee Haw
