Don Rich’s death in a 1974 motorcycle accident had a well-documented impact on Buck Owens. With his musical drive in neutral, his chart success declining and his Capitol contract expiring, Owens departed his longtime label, recorded a pair of albums […]
There is no shortage of live Buck Owens recordings, but nearly all of them date to his record breaking run in the 1960s. Owens was not only a terrific songwriter, guitarist, singer, bandleader and businessman, but a gifted stage performer […]
There are probably many people who don’t remember that OJ Simpson was found liable for murder back in 1997. With all the Hollywood weirdness of the earlier criminal trial in which he was declared innocent, there was another civil trial […]
Buck Owens’ The Complete Capitol Singles 1967-1966 starts with so-what songs and subdued settings, but his voice is already flexible and on point, mining each note and syllable just enough to check for whatever might be worth extracting–carefully but quickly […]
Some days my bones feel weary. It especially hurts when I get down on my knees, slowly bend over, and flip through dusty shelves of old, used books. Years ago it was record stores, but I can barely recall the last […]
I personally can credit KFAT radio for much of my musical education back in the 1970s. The station not only played great music, they had a sense of humor, which is not heard on music radio much these days. Sully Roddy […]
Joe Swank has had his hands in all aspects of radio — as a DJ, programmer, and a label rep. From reading his responses to my questions, I can see that he values the freedom of being an independent promoter and a […]
When Jay Dee Maness started playing pedal steel guitar at age 10, he certainly couldn’t have imagined that 13 years later he would be playing on one of the most important albums in the history of pop music. Maness was […]
The inexhaustable ouevre of Buck Owens, the father of the Bakersfield sound who died in 2006 with 39 studio albums and 21 number one hits to his name, is really something else. Even today, the glut of Owens-branded LPs, CDs, […]
With the wealth of terrific material included on the first volume of Buck ‘Em!, a second volume had a high mark to reach. But by splitting the sets by era – 1955-67 for the first set, 1967-75 for this set […]
