Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Buck: For the Record

Buck Owens, the flashy rhinestone cowboy of Hee Haw fame and singer of hits like Act Naturally, died of heart failure, Saturday, March 25th at his home in Bakersfield. He was 76.
Buck had undergone throat cancer surgery in 1993 and was hospitalized with pneumonia in 1997.
Buck, who played red, white and blue guitar, shaped country music with a phenomenal string of more than 20 No. 1 records, most released from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. He was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1996.
Among his biggest hits were Together Again (also recorded with Emmylou Harris), I've Got a Tiger by the Tail, Love's Gonna Live Here, My Heart Skips a Beat and Waitin' in Your Welfare Line.
In 1988 he had another No. 1 record, Streets of Bakersfield, with Dwight Yoakam.
Ringo Starr of the Beatles, recorded Act Naturally twice, singing lead on the Beatles' 1965 version and recording it as a duet with Buck in 1989. The song was written by Johnny Russell and Voni Morrison and tells of a poor soul who foresees a movie career playing "a man who's sad and lonely, and all I gotta do is act naturally. ... Might win an Oscar, you can never tell."
Along with the music, Buck was a co-host of Hee Haw from 1969 to 1986. He and guitarist Roy Clark had a lot of fun with country music and hayseed humor.
Alvis Edgar Owens Jr. was born in 1929 outside Sherman, Texas, the son of a sharecropper; during the Depression, the family moved to Arizona.
And here’s a strange: Buck Owens told TV's Great American Country during an interview last year that "this is the last one of these things I'm ever going to do." That turned out to be true.
GAC has put together interview highlights and country singers' reactions to Buck's death into one episode of Country Music Across America, called Buck Owens: The Final Conversation. Check GMC for running times.
For more information, go to www.buckowens.com.

1 Comments:

At 4:10 PM CDT, Blogger Jerry550 said...

He was the only Country artist to have a song covered by the Beatles. I wonder how Gordie Tapp and Don Harron are doing?

 

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