'Bye, Buck

Buck Owens was a different kind of country music star: He played Carnegie Hall, not the Grand Ole Opry; he lived for Bakersfield, not Nashville.

Owens, the "Act Naturally" singer-songwriter who made a music mecca of a central California farming town, and a weekly event of a cornpone TV variety show known as Hee Haw, died in his sleep at his home early Saturday, hours after his final concert. He was 76.

And, yes, as if there were ever any doubt, Owens' home was in Bakersfield.

Bakersfield, California, is where the Texas-born Owens moved in 1951. And it was where he helped give rise in the 1950s and 1960s to the so-called "Bakersfield Sound," a twangier, harder-driving country. For evidence of the style, try almost any classic track by Waylon Jennings. Or Merle Haggard. Or Buck Owens.

As a Salon.com tribute to Owens observed in 1999, the man "was no poet...but [he] owned country in the '60s."

According to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, of which Owens was an inductee, Bakersfield ties or no, Owens reeled off 15 straight number one records from 1963-67.

"Act Naturally" was among Owens' catchiest hits. Certainly, it caught the ears of the Beatles. The British band recorded it, with Ringo Starr on vocals, in 1965 for Help!. (For those more familiar with the bastardized U.S. versions of the early Beatles albums, the song was a cut off the collection known as Yesterday...and Today.)

From 1969-1986, Owens was a TV fixture, hosting, along with Roy Clark, Hee Haw, a mix of comedy, music and girls in pre-Daisy Duke Daisy Dukes. A Top 20 hit for CBS, the show was nevertheless canceled after two seasons in a network purge of country-fried entertainment that also claimed the lives of Green Acres, Mayberry RFD and The Beverly Hillbillies. Unlike those sitcoms, Hee Haw lived on, and lived on well, in first-run syndication.

In Bakersfield, Owens owned radio stations, production facilities and a concert venue, Buck Owens' Crystal Palace, located on Buck Owens Boulevard. Owens was the Crystal Palace's house act. He played there Friday and Saturday nights, accompanied by his signature red-white-and-blue guitar, and backed by his namesake band, the Buckaroos.

Fittingly, Owens' final gig came at the Crystal Palace, the Bakersfield Californian reported.

Last Friday night, the newspaper said, Owens wasn't feeling well, but he wasn't fixing to disappoint a group of fans from Oregon, either. So, according to the report, he took to the stage, where he lasted for about 90 minutes before ceding the spotlight to his band.

"He just kind of eased off the back of the stage and down the steps and left," Buckaroos bassist Doyle Curtsinger said in the Californian. "That was it. That was the last we saw of him."

Cause of death was not immediately known, according to a statement on Owens' official Website, BuckOwens.com.

After news of Owens' death spread on Saturday, a handwritten sign was placed in front of the Crystal Palace, per a Californian news photo. It said, simply: "We'll miss you, Buck Owens."

Bakersfield was there for Owens, in good times and bad. And in the 1970s, the times were not so great. After 1972, Owens' hit-making touch left him. Then, in 1974, his longtime collaborator and guitarist Don Rich died in a motorcycle accident.

"After Don's death, I don't think I ever quite recovered," Owens said in a biography on his Website. "I had such a long period of shock and such a long period of being depressed and confused and hurt that I couldn't talk about Don much for at least four, five, six years."

In 1988, Bakersfield, with a big assist from Dwight Yoakam, came through for Owens.

Yoakam, then a country music upstart, enlisted Owens to duet with him on a new version of the older man's 1970s song, "Streets of Bakersfield." The new version was a No. 1 hit. Owens, who never really went away, was back. In 1996, he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

In his official biography, Owens said that if he had to do it all over again, he'd work more with, not against, the Nashville scene. Owens was not complaining, just observing.

"I'd like just to be remembered as a guy that came along and did his music, did his best," he said, per BuckOwens.com, "and had a hell of a time."