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Greatest Hits Oldies But Goodies Ever

As a teenager in Mesa, Arizona, during the 1940s, Buck Owens scraped together enough money to buy a cheap electric steel guitar, only to realize his family had no money left to buy an amplifier. Born Alvis Edgar Owens Jr. on a poor sharecropper farm in Sherman, Texas, in 1929, he had given himself the name “Buck” as a toddler after the family’s hardworking mule. In 1937, fleeing the Dust Bowl, the Owens family loaded their few belongings onto an old Ford Model T pulling a homemade trailer and headed west toward California. When the car broke down in the desert at Mesa, Arizona, they had no choice but to stay and settle in deep poverty. Seeing his son holding an electric instrument that could make no sound, Alvis Sr., a manual laborer with no formal electronics training, sat down after his exhausting shifts in the Arizona sun and took apart the family radio. For a struggling migrant household in the 1940s, that wooden radio was their prized possession and their only link to the outside world. Still, his father rewired the vacuum tubes and copper leads by hand, sacrificing the family’s evening broadcasts so his son could plug in his guitar. The converted radio buzzed and distorted whenever the volume went up, yet it gave the fifteen-year-old enough sound to leave school after the ninth grade and start earning a living. By day, Buck picked cotton and hauled produce in the fields; by night, he carried his guitar and that rewired radio into noisy Mesa honky-tonks and onto local station KTYL, bringing home every dollar to help feed his mother and siblings. Learning to cut through loud working-class barrooms on a raw, makeshift speaker shaped his lifelong preference for the loud, trebly, hard-edged electric sound he later took to California in 1951 to create the Bakersfield Sound. Decades later, when Buck Owens owned state-of-the-art recording studios and a millionaire’s empire of modern radio stations across America, he still pointed back to that gutted family radio in Mesa as the greatest piece of audio equipment he ever owned.

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When twenty-one-year-old Alvis Edgar “Buck” Owens Jr. arrived in Bakersfield, California, in 1951 with his wife Bonnie and their two young sons, he already knew how to make a cheap guitar cut through the noise of a crowded working-class barroom.

Eighteen years later, the former Arizona field hand bought a 1927 Spanish Colonial theater at 1215 North Chester Avenue in Oildale and turned it into Buck Owens Studios, designing the room around the bright, stripped-down electric sound he had learned to play on makeshift gear as a teenager.

That lifelong focus on loud, clear amplification began in the desert outside Mesa, Arizona. Born on a sharecropper farm near Sherman, Texas, on August 12, 1929—where he claimed the nickname “Buck” as a toddler after the family’s farm mule—he had ridden west in 1937 when Dust Bowl drought ruined the north Texas crops.

When the family’s 1933 Ford pulling a homemade trailer broke down in Mesa, Alvis Sr. and Maicie Owens had no money left to reach California. Settling in deep poverty, young Buck left school after the ninth grade to pick cotton, dig ditches, and haul farm produce alongside his father.

After scraping together enough field wages to buy a cheap electric steel guitar, the teenager realized the family had nothing left for an amplifier. Without formal electronics training, Alvis Sr. sat down after his labor shifts and opened the wooden cabinet of the household radio.

Giving up the family’s evening broadcasts—their primary link to the outside world—his father rewired the vacuum tubes and copper leads by hand so his son could plug the guitar straight into the chassis. The small speaker buzzed and distorted whenever the volume went up, yet it gave the fifteen-year-old enough volume to work after dark.

Carrying that gutted radio into noisy Mesa honky-tonks and onto local station KTYL alongside young guitarist Theryl Ray Britten, Owens brought his nightly earnings home to help feed his mother and siblings. Learning to cut through loud tavern crowds on a raw, low-wattage speaker taught him to pick harder and push the treble frequencies.

While driving produce trucks across the state line into California’s San Joaquin Valley in the late 1940s, Owens saw oil workers and cotton pickers packing Bakersfield dance halls every night of the week. Moving permanently to Bakersfield in 1951, he took a six-night-a-week job at the Blackboard Cafe on Chester Avenue as a guitarist and singer in Bill Woods’s house band, the Orange Blossom Playboys.

To reach dancers at the back of the smoky room, Owens traded his earlier instruments for a Fender Telecaster and turned the amplifier’s treble knob all the way up. Capitol Records producer Ken Nelson and singer Tommy Collins soon heard him at the Blackboard and began hiring him for recording sessions at the Capitol Tower in Hollywood.

Throughout the mid-1950s, Owens drove south over the Grapevine pass to play lead guitar on records for Collins, Wanda Jackson, Sonny James, and Faron Young before signing his own Capitol recording contract in 1957. Teaming up with young Washington fiddler and Telecaster player Don Rich, he built the Buckaroos and launched a streak of twenty-one Billboard number-one country singles beginning in the early 1960s.

In the studio, Owens refused the smooth string sections and soft background choirs then popular in Nashville. He insisted that engineers boost the high end on the Telecasters, push the bass guitar and drums strictly to the front of the mix, and tune the snare drum tight so the beat cracked on tiny car dashboard speakers and tavern jukeboxes.

After purchasing Bakersfield radio station KUZZ in 1967 and expanding his holdings into Phoenix with KTUF and KNIX-FM, Owens grew tired of driving to Los Angeles to record. In 1969, he bought the old Ritz Theater in Oildale, stripped out the movie seating, and installed state-of-the-art multi-track consoles downstairs while moving his broadcasting headquarters to the third floor.

At the Chester Avenue studio, Owens not only produced his own 1970s hits and tracked albums for artists like Susan Raye and Tony Booth, but also leased the room to Merle Haggard and other West Coast stars. Even when surrounded by custom recording consoles and millions of dollars in modern broadcasting hardware, Owens still pointed back to the wooden family radio his father had rewired on a table in Mesa as the finest piece of audio gear he ever owned.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBeOddejiGw

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As a teenager in Mesa, Arizona, during the 1940s, Buck Owens scraped together enough money to buy a cheap electric steel guitar, only to realize his family had no money left to buy an amplifier. Born Alvis Edgar Owens Jr. on a poor sharecropper farm in Sherman, Texas, in 1929, he had given himself the name “Buck” as a toddler after the family’s hardworking mule. In 1937, fleeing the Dust Bowl, the Owens family loaded their few belongings onto an old Ford Model T pulling a homemade trailer and headed west toward California. When the car broke down in the desert at Mesa, Arizona, they had no choice but to stay and settle in deep poverty. Seeing his son holding an electric instrument that could make no sound, Alvis Sr., a manual laborer with no formal electronics training, sat down after his exhausting shifts in the Arizona sun and took apart the family radio. For a struggling migrant household in the 1940s, that wooden radio was their prized possession and their only link to the outside world. Still, his father rewired the vacuum tubes and copper leads by hand, sacrificing the family’s evening broadcasts so his son could plug in his guitar. The converted radio buzzed and distorted whenever the volume went up, yet it gave the fifteen-year-old enough sound to leave school after the ninth grade and start earning a living. By day, Buck picked cotton and hauled produce in the fields; by night, he carried his guitar and that rewired radio into noisy Mesa honky-tonks and onto local station KTYL, bringing home every dollar to help feed his mother and siblings. Learning to cut through loud working-class barrooms on a raw, makeshift speaker shaped his lifelong preference for the loud, trebly, hard-edged electric sound he later took to California in 1951 to create the Bakersfield Sound. Decades later, when Buck Owens owned state-of-the-art recording studios and a millionaire’s empire of modern radio stations across America, he still pointed back to that gutted family radio in Mesa as the greatest piece of audio equipment he ever owned.

In 1993, shortly after leaving his long-running television role on Hee Haw, 64-year-old Buck Owens underwent cancer surgery that removed part of his tongue and jawbone, taking away the crisp vocal delivery that had defined the Bakersfield Sound for four decades. At the time of his diagnosis, Owens was already a broadcasting millionaire who owned the powerhouse radio station KUZZ and media properties across California and Arizona. With his fortune secure and his 1960s recordings already legendary, he had every reason to retire quietly and let the public remember his voice the way it sounded on his classic vinyl records. Instead, after enduring radiation treatments that made even swallowing food and forming basic words painful, he spent months retraining the muscles in his mouth just to speak and sing again. Rather than hiding the physical change, he poured his money and energy into building the Crystal Palace in Bakersfield, opening the venue in 1996 as a permanent home for his music. Every Friday and Saturday night for the last ten years of his life, Owens walked out under the stage lights with the Buckaroos. Even after a severe bout of pneumonia and surgical complications hospitalized him again in 1997, he returned straight to his weekly shows as soon as he recovered. He never tried to disguise his raspy, slightly slurred vocals, often joking with the crowd about how he sounded so everyone in the room could relax and enjoy the night like old friends. The fans who filled the Crystal Palace during those final ten years did not come expecting the polished perfection of his youth. They came to applaud a man who owned a broadcasting empire and could have stayed home, yet stood in front of a microphone every weekend and fought for every single word he sang.

On the afternoon of July 17, 1974, 32-year-old guitarist and fiddler Don Rich finished a recording session in Bakersfield, California, and climbed onto his custom three-wheeled motorcycle to meet his wife Marlene and their two young sons, Vic and Vance, for a family vacation in Morro Bay. For fifteen years, ever since Buck Owens first met the young fiddler in Washington state in 1958 and brought him south to California, Rich had been the musical brother at Owens’s side. Twelve years apart in age, the two men shared a bond where a single glance or the shift of a shoulder on stage told the other when to change a chord or step into a chorus. Rich’s biting Telecaster guitar and high harmony vocals helped drive twenty-one number-one country hits for Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, defining the Bakersfield Sound. Owens had long worried about the unstable build of his partner’s custom trike, repeatedly pleading with Rich to stop riding it. That afternoon on Highway 1 near San Luis Obispo, with Marlene and the boys traveling in a separate car along the same route, the motorcycle lost control and struck a center divider, taking Rich’s life at the scene. Owens flew immediately to San Luis Obispo, where seeing his bandmate motionless in a hospital room just hours after they had been laughing together in the studio broke the famously tough bandleader. In the years that followed, Owens stepped back from his creative peak, canceling recording plans and pouring his energy into broadcasting ventures and television spots on Hee Haw while privately carrying the grief of a chorus line where his partner’s sparkling Telecaster and bright harmony used to stand. For over two decades, he could rarely speak Rich’s name in interviews without tears, admitting that his true musical life had ended in that San Luis Obispo hospital room. When Owens opened his Crystal Palace venue in 1996, he gave Don Rich’s guitars, stage suits, and photographs a place of honor right beside his own. He made sure that as long as people came to Bakersfield to remember Buck Owens, his musical brother would still be standing right next to him.

On the afternoon of July 17, 1974, 32-year-old guitarist and fiddler Don Rich finished a recording session in Bakersfield, California, and climbed onto his custom three-wheeled motorcycle to meet his wife Marlene and their two young sons, Vic and Vance, for a family vacation in Morro Bay. For fifteen years, ever since Buck Owens first met the young fiddler in Washington state in 1958 and brought him south to California, Rich had been the musical brother at Owens’s side. Twelve years apart in age, the two men shared a bond where a single glance or the shift of a shoulder on stage told the other when to change a chord or step into a chorus. Rich’s biting Telecaster guitar and high harmony vocals helped drive twenty-one number-one country hits for Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, defining the Bakersfield Sound. Owens had long worried about the unstable build of his partner’s custom trike, repeatedly pleading with Rich to stop riding it. That afternoon on Highway 1 near San Luis Obispo, with Marlene and the boys traveling in a separate car along the same route, the motorcycle lost control and struck a center divider, taking Rich’s life at the scene. Owens flew immediately to San Luis Obispo, where seeing his bandmate motionless in a hospital room just hours after they had been laughing together in the studio broke the famously tough bandleader. In the years that followed, Owens stepped back from his creative peak, canceling recording plans and pouring his energy into broadcasting ventures and television spots on Hee Haw while privately carrying the grief of a chorus line where his partner’s sparkling Telecaster and bright harmony used to stand. For over two decades, he could rarely speak Rich’s name in interviews without tears, admitting that his true musical life had ended in that San Luis Obispo hospital room. When Owens opened his Crystal Palace venue in 1996, he gave Don Rich’s guitars, stage suits, and photographs a place of honor right beside his own. He made sure that as long as people came to Bakersfield to remember Buck Owens, his musical brother would still be standing right next to him.

Shortly after marrying in Louisiana on October 6, 1996, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill set one strict rule for their marriage: never spend more than three consecutive days apart. Having fallen in love during the 1996 Spontaneous Combustion Tour, both singers knew how easily months on separate tour buses had ended other country music marriages. As their careers expanded at the same time, managers and record labels had to build every booking around that seventy-two-hour limit, and the couple turned down overseas promotional tours whenever their family could not travel together. Throughout the 2000s, as McGraw balanced arena dates with film roles in Friday Night Lights, Flicka, and The Blind Side, keeping that promise meant constant overnight flights between Nashville, film sets, and concert cities. One of them regularly boarded a plane right after a final encore or last camera take just to sit across the kitchen table for morning coffee for twenty-four hours, even when private flight costs matched a night’s concert pay. Knowing his wife would be there within three days also helped anchor McGraw before he got sober in 2008, while showing their daughters Gracie, Maggie, and Audrey what family commitment looked like in practice. Whenever possible, they combined their schedules completely, headlining three Soul2Soul tours in 2000, 2006, and 2017, and spending months filming the 2021 series 1883 together in Montana. Thirty years after their Louisiana wedding, with all three daughters grown, that seventy-two-hour rule still brings McGraw and Hill back to the same Nashville kitchen table every few days.

In December 2001, while her records were selling in the millions worldwide, Faith Hill spent Christmas inside a neonatal intensive care unit watching her newborn daughter Audrey fight to breathe. Between 1999 and 2002, albums like Breathe and Cry had made Hill a global pop and country powerhouse, taking her to the stages of Super Bowl XXXIV and the Academy Awards. At home, she and Tim McGraw had welcomed three daughters in less than five years: Gracie in 1997, Maggie in 1998, and Audrey at the end of 2001. Born eight weeks early with underdeveloped lungs, Audrey weighed just three pounds and eleven ounces and remained in an incubator for weeks. After releasing Cry in 2002, Hill turned down the long solo world tours that normally follow a number-one album. Having been adopted as an infant in a small Mississippi town, she wanted her daughters to wake up in a secure home with their mother present. She stayed in Nashville to drive carpools, sit in bleachers at school games, and cook dinner, allowing McGraw to keep building his touring career. The couple set a strict rule never to be apart from each other or the girls for more than three days. McGraw later credited Hill’s steadiness at home with saving his life and helping him get sober in 2008 when his drinking threatened to cost him his family. When Hill finally returned to major arenas alongside McGraw for the 2006 Soul2Soul II Tour, she brought a custom family bus equipped with cribs, toys, and study spaces. Nearly three decades into their marriage, with Gracie, Maggie, and Audrey grown and close to home, the years Hill spent off the road remain the foundation that held the whole family together.

For the first seven years of his life, Jerry Reed Hubbard lived in Atlanta orphanages and foster homes while his mother worked shifts in a Georgia cotton mill to earn enough to bring her children back. Born March 20, 1937, in Atlanta, he was four months old when his parents separated. Unable to feed two children on a single mill wage, his mother, Cynthia, placed Jerry and his sister, Patsy, in care until she remarried in 1944 and brought them home. Too young during those seven years to understand why he had been left behind, he spent nights wondering what he had done wrong. When Cynthia finally reunited the family and bought her seven-year-old son a cheap guitar, teaching him his first chords, he practiced after school until his fingertips bled. As a teenager sweeping floors in the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills alongside his mother and stepfather, the steady clatter of industrial looms shaped his syncopated clawhammer picking style. Discovered in Atlanta by producer Bill Lowery at eighteen, he served two years in the U.S. Army before moving to Nashville and signing with Chet Atkins at RCA Victor in 1965. In 1967, when Elvis Presley wanted to record Reed’s song “Guitar Man,” studio musicians could not copy the groove, so Presley brought Reed in to play the opening guitar part himself. That fingerstyle sound carried Reed to two CMA Musician of the Year awards, three Grammy Awards, including one for his 1971 chart-topper “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot,” and a screen career alongside Burt Reynolds in the 1977 film Smokey and the Bandit, for which he sang “East Bound and Down.” Behind the loud laughter that friends like Atkins and Reynolds knew as a shield for his childhood wounds, Reed built the stable home he had missed as a boy. He married singer Priscilla “Prissy” Mitchell on July 9, 1959, staying with her and their two daughters for forty-nine years until his passing on September 1, 2008, nine years before the boy from the Atlanta mill district was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

In October 1985, twenty-seven-year-old Alan Jackson and his wife, Denise, loaded their belongings into a rented U-Haul truck and left Newnan, Georgia, for Nashville with no recording contract. For the first six years of their marriage, they had lived in a cramped Georgia basement apartment while Alan sold shoes and cars, worked construction, and drove a forklift in a Kmart warehouse. Ready to give up on music at twenty-six because he thought he was getting too old, he stayed in the game after Denise pushed him to take the risk and approached Glen Campbell at the Atlanta airport during a flight attendant shift, coming home with the business card of Campbell’s publishing manager, Marty Gamblin. In Nashville, Alan took his first job sorting fan mail in the basement mailroom at The Nashville Network, pushing a mail cart past stars his own age like Randy Travis while slipping his demo tapes to producers. Gamblin soon hired him as a staff writer at Campbell’s Seventh Son Music for a hundred dollars a week. For four years, Denise’s flight attendant paycheck kept food on the table in their small apartment. While she worked back-to-back flights and helped copy his lyric sheets by hand, Alan wrote songs by day and pulled a white cowboy hat low over a childhood forehead scar to sing in small bars at night. After several labels passed on his traditional honky-tonk sound, producer Keith Stegall and executive Tim DuBois signed him in June 1989 as the first artist on Arista Nashville, leading to his 1990 breakthrough single “Here in the Real World.” When Alan was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2017, he credited the wife whose airline shifts had carried them from a U-Haul truck and a TNN mail cart to country music history.

In 2003, five years after a four-month separation nearly ended his marriage, Alan Jackson quietly wrote “Remember When” for his high school sweetheart, Denise, and played the finished recording for her at home. They had first met as teenagers at a Dairy Queen in Newnan, Georgia, and married on December 15, 1979. After living in a small basement apartment during their early years, a 1985 airport meeting between Denise, then working as a flight attendant, and Glen Campbell helped open the door for Alan in Nashville. Nearly two decades and three daughters later, the strain of heavy touring and Alan’s infidelity pushed their marriage to the brink in 1998. Living apart from Denise and their girls—Mattie, Ali, and Dani—for four months forced him to face the emptiness behind his stage success. Instead of divorcing, the couple entered marriage counseling, leaned on their faith to rebuild trust, and moved back in together. When Denise first heard “Remember When” in 2003, she broke down in tears as the song traced their real life together, from their broke twenties and the heartbreak that nearly tore them apart to the years ahead after their daughters grew up. Released as a single that October from Greatest Hits Volume II, it spent two weeks at number one on the Billboard country chart in early 2004, accompanied by a Trey Fanjoy video where Alan and Denise slow-danced in front of actual home movies from their 1979 wedding. Denise later shared the full story of their 1998 separation and reconciliation in her 2007 bestselling book, It’s All About Him. Years later, when Alan publicly revealed in 2021 that he was living with the degenerative nerve condition Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, Denise remained right beside the teen she had met at a Georgia Dairy Queen, living out the later years he had promised in a song.