Between the mid-1950s and 1971, Phyllis Buford stood beside Buck Owens through the entire arc of his rise from an unknown working musician in Tacoma, Washington, to one of the most powerful superstars in American country music. Those fifteen-plus years together spanned the golden era of Owens and his band, the Buckaroos. During their marriage, he recorded twenty-one consecutive number-one singles on the Billboard country charts and carried the Bakersfield Sound to audiences worldwide. By 1969, Owens had entered millions of American living rooms as the co-host of the national television show Hee Haw, while simultaneously building a commercial empire of publishing houses, record labels, booking agencies, and radio stations. Yet the fortune that replaced their early poverty came at a quiet cost. Driven by the memory of childhood hardship, Owens threw himself into a relentless schedule, playing more than two hundred tour dates a year from the White House to Japan while running his growing business machinery. When they had little in the rainy Pacific Northwest, they shared simple meals around the same table. Once they had everything in California, Owens was rarely home. While millions watched his easy smile on television every weekend, Phyllis faced an increasingly empty mansion in Bakersfield and long stretches of waiting between his flights. A private woman who valued a quiet family life, she found herself further removed from the noisy, temptation-filled orbit surrounding a 1960s touring superstar. In 1971, the distance finally ended the longest marriage of Owens’ life in divorce, closing the chapter on the partner who had anchored his home long before the twenty-one chart-toppers ever existed.

When Buck Owens and Phyllis Irene Buford divorced in 1971 after more than fifteen years of marriage, the split ended a partnership that had begun in a cramped Washington state house before Owens owned a single hit record or radio station.

Throughout the 1960s, while Phyllis raised their son, Johnny Dale, and kept their Bakersfield household away from the music press, Owens and his band, the Buckaroos, recorded twenty-one consecutive number-one singles on the Billboard country chart. Beginning with 1963’s “Act Naturally” and running through 1967’s “Sam’s Place,” the streak turned a former Tacoma disc jockey into one of the highest-paid performers in American music.

Yet the commercial machinery Owens constructed during those years left almost no space for domestic life. Determined never to return to the sharecropping poverty of his youth, Owens teamed with manager Jack McFadden in 1962 to establish Omac Artist Corporation, taking direct control of his own bookings while managing acts such as Merle Haggard, Susan Raye, Tommy Collins, and Freddie Hart.

Two years later, Owens formed Blue Book Music to retain ownership of his songwriting royalties rather than handing them over to Nashville or Hollywood publishers. By the end of the decade, he had converted an old thirty-five-mm movie theater on Chester Avenue in North Bakersfield into Buck Owens Studios, allowing him and the Buckaroos—anchored by lead guitarist and fiddler Don Rich, steel guitarist Tom Brumley, bassist Doyle Holly, and drummer Willie Cantu—to record on their own schedule without driving down to Los Angeles.

Owens simultaneously poured his touring profits into broadcasting properties across California and Arizona. In 1966, he purchased Bakersfield station KUZZ, followed in 1967 and 1968 by Phoenix stations KTUF-AM and KNIX-FM, building a regional media company that eventually grew into a multimillion-dollar enterprise.

Every expansion pulled him further from the Bakersfield home he shared with Phyllis. The Buckaroos logged more than two hundred concert dates a year, playing everywhere from New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1966 and the White House in 1968 to concert halls in London and Tokyo. When CBS launched the variety series Hee Haw in June 1969 with Owens and Roy Clark as co-hosts, Owens added regular trips to Nashville soundstages to tape seasonal batches of episodes.

In Fife, Washington, a decade earlier, Phyllis and Buck had eaten meals at the same kitchen table between his shifts at radio station KAYE. In Bakersfield, the gated mansion their wealth purchased sat quiet for weeks at a time while Owens lived inside tour buses, hotel suites, and broadcast offices. A private woman who avoided the industry party circuit, Phyllis grew increasingly distant from the fast-paced life surrounding a touring headliner, and their marriage legally ended in 1971.

The years immediately following the 1971 divorce brought major shifts across Owens’s personal and professional world. With the domestic anchor of his fifteen-year marriage gone, Owens spent even longer hours inside his Chester Avenue offices and on the road. Although he continued topping the charts alongside Susan Raye and reached number two in 1972 with “Made in Japan,” his unbroken string of solo number-one hits had already come to a close.

Then, in July 1974, thirty-two-year-old Don Rich was killed in a motorcycle accident on California’s Highway 1 on his way to join his family for a vacation. Coming just three years after the end of his marriage to Phyllis, the death of his closest musical partner and friend brought Owens’s golden era with the classic Buckaroos lineup to a halt.

In 1975, Owens ended his fifteen-year partnership with Capitol Records, moving to Warner Bros. Records as his touring pace slowed. A brief third marriage to Buckaroos fiddler Jana Jae in May 1977 collapsed in an annulment filing after three days and ended in divorce in 1978.

After 1978, Owens never married again. By the 1990s, he had left Hee Haw and opened the Buck Owens Crystal Palace in Bakersfield, a museum, restaurant, and nightclub where he performed on weekend nights surrounded by his gold records and vintage instruments. Yet among the four decades of business ventures and marriages that followed his breakthrough, the fifteen years with Phyllis remained the only chapter that bridged the quiet kitchen table in Tacoma and the height of his empire.