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Greatest Hits Oldies But Goodies Ever

For years after July 17, 1974, Buck Owens refused to say Don Rich’s name in interviews because he could not speak about his bandleader without breaking down. Owens first met Donald Eugene Ulrich in Tacoma, Washington, in the late 1950s, when the young musician was playing fiddle and guitar in local clubs. Over the next fifteen years, Rich stood at Owens’s right hand as leader of the Buckaroos and helped shape the hard-driving Bakersfield Sound. With his silver sparkle Fender Telecaster, lively fiddle, and high harmony vocals locked tightly to Owens’s lead, Rich shared in a long run of number one country records and regular appearances on the television show Hee Haw. Offstage, Owens worried constantly about Rich’s custom motorcycle and repeatedly begged his friend to give it up. On July 17, 1974, the 32-year-old guitarist finished work in Bakersfield and headed toward the California coast in San Luis Obispo to join his family for a vacation. He died in a highway crash before he reached them. Across the music business, Owens was known as a sharp, self-made businessman who controlled his own studios, publishing, and career. Behind closed doors, the loss took away his desire to record or walk onto a stage. While he preserved Rich’s instruments and keepsakes, he pulled back from the spotlight and stayed silent about the tragedy in public for years. When Owens finally spoke about Rich in later interviews, he said the younger musician had been a brother, a son, and his best friend all at once. Though Owens continued to run his business and step onstage in later decades, he admitted that his real musical life ended on that July afternoon in 1974 alongside the man who stood beside him in Bakersfield.

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When twenty-one-year-old Donald Eugene Ulrich gave up a college scholarship at Centralia Junior College in late 1960 to move south to Bakersfield, California, Buck Owens had just lost the fiddler on his early Capitol singles and needed a new musical partner.

The two had crossed paths two years earlier in 1958 inside Steve’s Gay ’90s, a restaurant and dance club in South Tacoma, Washington. Owens, who was working as a radio announcer and station partner at KAYE in nearby Puyallup while playing local dances, heard the teenager tearing through rock and roll guitar licks and western swing fiddle tunes. Before winter was over, Ulrich was playing in Owens’s Pacific Northwest dance band and adding fiddle to the 1959 release “Second Fiddle.”

Once Ulrich arrived in California for good and shortened his stage name to Don Rich, Owens handed him a raw, unfinished song in the studio called “Above and Beyond.” Rich worked out the brisk fiddle kick-off that helped drive the record to number three on the country chart in 1960, setting the pattern for the next decade and a half.

While Nashville studios in the early 1960s were leaning heavily on lush string sections and smooth background choirs to court pop listeners, Owens and Rich went in the opposite direction. Influenced by Bob Wills’s dance bands and the loud, noisy honky-tonks around Bakersfield, they needed a sound sharp enough to cut through crowded barrooms without getting buried.

Rich traded his Gibson hollow-body guitar for a solid-body Fender Telecaster and began trading bright, stinging single-note leads with Owens’s rhythm chop. Alongside steel guitarist Tom Brumley, bassist Doyle Holly, and drummer Willie Cantu, the newly christened Buckaroos built what became known as the Bakersfield Sound, a stripped-down style anchored by loud twin Telecasters, a high-strung snare drum, and harmonies that locked together like family voices.

Starting with “Act Naturally” in the spring of 1963, that formula carried Owens and the Buckaroos to twenty-one number one hits on the Billboard country chart over the next decade. On records like “Love’s Gonna Live Here,” “My Heart Skips a Beat,” “I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail,” and “Waitin’ in Your Welfare Line,” Rich sang the soaring high tenor harmony right on top of Owens’s lead vocal, then stepped forward to answer every verse on his silver sparkle Telecaster.

Even when the band recorded instrumental tracks like the 1965 hit “Buckaroo,” listeners could immediately recognize the pair’s playful back-and-forth timing. In March 1966, they brought that California honky-tonk energy to New York City for a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall, producing one of country music’s benchmark live albums.

As Owens expanded his business empire in Bakersfield—buying radio stations, opening Blue Book Music publishing, and converting an old movie theater on Chester Avenue into Buck Owens’ Studios—he put Rich in charge of the band on the road and in the control room. Rich rehearsed the musicians, handled arrangements, and kept the touring operation running while they filmed the syndicated television series Buck Owens Ranch Show and joined the cast of Hee Haw in 1969.

Despite their financial independence and red, white, and blue custom guitars, Owens worried constantly about Rich’s love for fast motorcycles. He repeatedly pleaded with his thirty-two-year-old bandleader to stay off two wheels.

On the afternoon of July 17, 1974, Rich finished a long day of work at the Bakersfield office and left on his motorcycle toward Morro Bay and San Luis Obispo to meet his wife, Marlene, and their two sons, Vance and groundwork-aged Vic, for a family beach vacation. Riding along Highway 1 in San Luis Obispo County, he lost control of the bike and died in a crash before reaching the coast.

For a fiercely independent businessman who owned his master recordings and answered to no one in Nashville, the loss broke the engine of Owens’s career. Unable to say Rich’s name in interviews without weeping, he refused to discuss the crash publicly for years, ended his fifteen-year run with Capitol Records in 1975, and eventually walked away from Hee Haw in 1986.

Decades later, when Owens opened the Crystal Palace music venue and museum in Bakersfield in 1996, he placed Rich’s silver sparkle Telecaster, fiddle, and stage suits on permanent display. Speaking openly at last about the young player he had discovered in a Washington club thirty-eight years earlier, Owens said Rich had been like a brother, a son, and his best friend, and that his own musical drive had ended on that California highway in July 1974.

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

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In 1935, a young Tennessee carpenter named Johnnie Wright heard sixteen-year-old Ellen Muriel Deason singing over an old Nashville radio and spent the next two years convincing the shy teenager to marry him. Wright had traveled from rural Mt. Juliet to visit his sister Louise in Nashville when he caught Muriel and her sisters harmonizing on local station WSIX. Taken by her voice before he ever saw her face, he asked his sister to arrange an introduction. Muriel was quiet and guarded around the stranger at first. Over the next two years, Wright kept driving into Nashville after his shifts as a cabinetmaker, bringing his guitar over to play music with the Deason family until his steady presence finally won her trust. They married on October 30, 1937, when Muriel was eighteen and Wright was twenty-three. Soon after the wedding, he encouraged his reluctant bride to sing onstage alongside him and his brother-in-law, Jack Anglin, and gave her the stage name “Kitty Wells” from an old folk song his father used to play. With Wright backing her career at every step, she recorded “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” in 1952, becoming the first female solo singer to top the Billboard country charts. Even when her fame eclipsed his own duo, Johnnie & Jack, Wright gladly stepped back to manage their road shows and keep her at the center of the stage. The marriage that began beside a sister’s radio in 1935 lasted seventy-four years until Wright passed away in September 2011 at age ninety-seven, followed by his wife ten months later in July 2012.

In June 1961, Patsy Cline lay in a Tennessee hospital bed after a car crash and asked her husband to find the young Kentucky singer she had just heard dedicating a song to her on late-night radio. Days earlier, on June 14, while “I Fall to Pieces” was climbing the charts, Cline had been thrown through a windshield in a head-on collision in Madison, Tennessee. Recovering at Madison General Hospital with a fractured skull, a dislocated hip, and heavy stitches across her forehead, she tuned in to WSM’s Midnight Jamboree from the Ernest Tubb Record Shop. Over the airwaves, newcomer Loretta Lynn sang “I Walk Alone” as a prayer for Cline’s recovery. At Cline’s urging, her husband, Charlie Dick, tracked down Loretta and her husband, Doolittle “Mooney” Lynn, and brought them to the hospital that same night. When the shy newcomer hesitated at the door, Cline welcomed her like family, calling her “hoss” and beginning a sisterhood that lasted the rest of Cline’s life. After leaving the hospital, Cline saw how little the Lynns had in their small rented Nashville house. Having grown up poor in Virginia herself, Cline gave Loretta stage dresses from her own closet, bought her personal clothes and undergarments, and even brought over new curtains to hang in Loretta’s windows. At a time when Nashville’s established female singers guarded the few spots open to women, Cline took Loretta by the hand and walked her directly into their gatherings, making it clear that the coal miner’s daughter was under her protection. Between tours, the two sat at the kitchen table over coffee, talking through marriage, motherhood, and the business skills women needed in a male-run industry. Their friendship lasted less than two years before Cline died in a March 1963 plane crash. For the next six decades until her own passing in 2022, Loretta Lynn kept her friend’s name alive on stages across America, never forgetting the star who reached out from a hospital bed and hung curtains in her home.

In 1989, fifty-five-year-old Vern Gosdin walked into a Nashville studio while his third marriage was falling apart and recorded an entire album about returning to an empty house. Working with producer Bob Montgomery for Columbia Records, Gosdin did not take time off the road to recover from the divorce. Instead, he stood behind the microphone and poured the breakup directly into a ten-song concept album titled “Alone,” released in July 1989. Every track centered on the quiet aftermath of a failed marriage. While Gosdin sang in his weathered baritone, Montgomery and the seasoned Nashville session players often sat in silence behind the control room glass after a single take, leaving the natural catch in his breath untouched on the final master. At a time when upbeat young acts dominated late-1980s country radio, Gosdin’s stripped-down record climbed to number 11 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart. It produced two major hits, with “That Just About Does It” reaching number 4 and “Right in the Wrong Direction” hitting the top 10. The sessions cemented the nickname “The Voice” among his peers, earning high praise from fellow country icons George Jones and Tammy Wynette. Years before his passing in 2009, critics already placed the 1989 release alongside Frank Sinatra’s “In the Wee Small Hours” and Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks.” At fifty-five, during the loneliest season of his private life, Gosdin gave listeners who were walking through their own divorces a voice that understood the silence waiting at home.

In 1982, severe complications from Crohn’s disease forced founding tenor Lew DeWitt to leave the Statler Brothers after twenty-seven years, though he refused to let surgery be his final note in country music. Along with Don Reid, Harold Reid, and Phil Balsley, DeWitt had helped build the quartet from its 1955 beginnings as the Four Star Quartet in Staunton, Virginia. Playing guitar and singing high tenor, he wrote their 1965 breakthrough hit “Flowers on the Wall,” a song that took the group from local Virginia stages to international fame alongside Johnny Cash. Behind the group’s onstage humor during the 1970s, DeWitt quietly endured exhausting intestinal pain that often left him collapsed backstage after shows. When his body could no longer handle the road in 1982, he underwent major surgery to remove much of his intestine and personally recommended young Virginia singer Jimmy Fortune to take his place. Stepping away after nearly three decades left DeWitt fighting both physical weight loss and the grief of losing his life’s work. His former bandmates stayed close, visiting him regularly and continuing to support him as a permanent brother in the group. By 1985, DeWitt returned to the studio and the stage as a solo artist, releasing the album “On My Own.” Though his health only allowed limited travel and shorter appearances, he walked back under the lights with a frail frame, a warm smile, and the clear tenor fans remembered. DeWitt passed away from heart and kidney complications on August 15, 1990, at his home in Waynesboro, Virginia, just miles from where the quartet had started. He was fifty-two. For the next twelve years until the Statler Brothers retired in 2002, the Reid brothers, Balsley, and Fortune paused every concert to honor the man who gave the group its first great song and its harmony.

In early 1982, twenty-seven-year-old Jimmy Fortune walked onto a major stage with the Statler Brothers, stepping into the spot left by founding tenor Lew DeWitt while thousands of skeptical fans waited to hear if the quartet’s harmony had survived. DeWitt had spent years battling Crohn’s disease, and by 1982 his failing health forced him off the road for surgery after nearly two decades with the group. Before stepping away, DeWitt heard a young unknown singer performing nightly for small crowds at Bryce Resort in Basye, Virginia. Convinced the twenty-seven-year-old could carry the part, DeWitt personally recommended Fortune to bandmates Don Reid, Harold Reid, and Phil Balsley. Only weeks after singing in a Virginia ski lounge, Fortune stood under the lights facing an audience that had grown up on DeWitt’s voice. Rather than imitating the man he was replacing, Fortune leaned into his own clear, high tenor while the Reid brothers and Balsley stood close beside him. When he hit his first soaring notes, the hesitation in the hall broke into a standing ovation. That night in 1982 secured the group’s future. Over the next twenty years, Fortune wrote several of the Statler Brothers’ biggest number-one hits, including “Elizabeth,” “My Only Love,” and “Too Much on My Heart,” carrying the harmony DeWitt had entrusted to him until the group retired in 2002.

In 1930, seven-year-old Hank Williams watched his father enter a Louisiana veterans hospital for eight years, leaving the frail Alabama boy to help keep the family afloat by shining shoes and selling peanuts along the railroad tracks. Elonzo “Lon” Williams had suffered severe head injuries after falling from a military truck in France during World War I. When facial paralysis and a brain aneurysm finally forced him into the Veterans Hospital in Alexandria, his wife, Lillie, had to support their children alone through the Great Depression. In Georgiana, Alabama, Lillie ran a small boarding house while working night shifts at a strawberry cannery and a local hospital. Born with undiagnosed spina bifida occulta that left him thin and in constant back pain, young Hank went to work alongside his older sister, Irene. The two tended a backyard garden, roasted and bagged peanuts in paper sacks, peddled newspapers, and carried a heavy shoeshine box down to the train depot whenever passenger cars pulled in. When Hank turned eight, Lillie used her scarce savings and the loose coins from his street work to buy him a secondhand guitar. Between shifts at the depot, the boy followed Black street musician Rufus “Tee-Tot” Payne around town, learning the blues chords and rhythms that shaped his voice. By the time Elonzo was discharged in 1938, Hank was fifteen and already singing on local radio in Montgomery. Those eight hard years without a father, spent working the Georgiana train platforms beside his sister and mother, gave his music the lonesome weight and working-class honesty that millions of listeners later recognized as their own.

On June 15, 1979, Johnny Cash parked a restored cherry-red 1958 Ariel Cyclone 650 motorcycle outside Waylon Jennings’ home in Nashville, returning a piece of the friend Waylon had mourned for twenty years. The bike had originally belonged to Buddy Holly, who bought it at a Dallas dealership in May 1958 alongside bandmates Joe B. Mauldin and Jerry Allison. Back in Lubbock, Texas, Holly had given a young Waylon Jennings his start, producing his debut single and hiring him to play bass on the 1959 Winter Dance Party tour. On February 3, 1959, Jennings gave up his seat on a chartered Beechcraft Bonanza so a flu-stricken J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson could avoid the freezing tour bus. Before parting ways in Clear Lake, Iowa, Holly joked that he hoped the bus froze up, and Jennings shot back that he hoped the plane crashed. When the plane went down minutes after takeoff, taking the lives of the 22-year-old Holly, Richardson, and Ritchie Valens, that passing joke haunted Jennings for the next two decades. By the late 1970s, Jennings was country music’s toughest outlaw, yet those closest to him knew the weight he still carried from 1959. Working with Lubbock singer Joe Ely and members of the Crickets, Cash quietly tracked down Holly’s old motorcycle in Texas, where it had passed from Holly’s father through several owners, and had it restored for Jennings’ 42nd birthday. When Jennings walked outside and recognized his late friend’s cherry-red machine, the hardened country star broke down in tears. He kept that 1958 Ariel Cyclone for the rest of his life. After Jennings passed away in 2002, his wife Jessi Colter and son Shooter preserved the motorcycle in the family, holding on to the gift that finally brought peace to a twenty-year wound.

Rex Linn spent sixty-four years convinced he was meant to live alone, right up until a series of morning FaceTime calls with Reba McEntire in 2020 changed his mind. Born in Spearman, Texas, on November 13, 1956, and raised in Oklahoma City, Linn worked in banks and oil fields before moving to Los Angeles at thirty-two to act. As he built a career in Cliffhanger, CSI: Miami, and Better Call Saul, he also ended a past engagement after realizing he feared marriage and did not want to hurt someone by making a promise he could not keep. For decades afterward, he settled into a San Fernando Valley house with his dogs, his backyard smoker, and Texas Longhorns football. He met Reba in 1991 on the set of The Gambler Returns while she was married to Narvel Blackstock, and for twenty-nine years they remained nothing more than friendly Oklahoma acquaintances who occasionally said hello backstage. That distance held until January 2020, when they reunited on Young Sheldon and shared a dinner in Los Angeles. Two months later, Reba’s mother died during the pandemic lockdown, and Linn called her in Oklahoma to check on an old friend. Talking to her through an iPad screen broke through the walls he had guarded for decades. A man who once prized drinking his morning coffee in total solitude started setting an alarm every day so he would not miss their virtual Coffee Camp. After five months of daily calls, the lifelong bachelor began flying back and forth between California and Nashville before moving in to share his life with her. Now nearly seventy, the man who walked red carpets alone for thirty years rearranges his schedule just to hold Reba’s hand and open her car door.

A bout of bronchitis kept Reba McEntire in a San Diego hotel room on March 15, 1991, sparing her life hours before her band’s plane went down. Following a private performance for IBM executives, a doctor advised Reba not to fly overnight in a small jet with an unpressurized cabin. She stayed behind near Brown Field Municipal Airport with her husband and manager, Narvel Blackstock, while two chartered planes took off ahead for Fort Wayne, Indiana. At 1:45 a.m. on March 16, the first aircraft clipped the side of Otay Mountain in thick fog. All ten people aboard died in the crash, including seven members of Reba’s band, tour manager Jim Hammon, and both pilots. When the pilot of the second plane called the hotel past 2:00 a.m. with the news, Narvel went alone with family friend Roger Woolsey to identify their friends so his wife would not have to face the scene. He returned before dawn, knelt by the bed, and held Reba’s hands to tell her no one had survived. Only nine days later, encouraged by Vince Gill and the victims’ families, she walked onto the stage at the 63rd Academy Awards in a plain black velvet dress to sing her nominated song from Postcards from the Edge. For months afterward, she still turned toward her right on stage out of habit, looking for backing vocalist Paula Kaye Evans before remembering she was gone. That autumn, she poured the grief into her album For My Broken Heart, which sold over four million copies, while she and Narvel covered funeral costs and supported the eight families left behind. Though their twenty-six-year marriage ended in 2015, that night in San Diego bound them together for over two decades, and Reba still honors every name each March 16.