TOM BRUMLEY JOINED BUCK OWENS’ BAND AS A REPLACEMENT. MONTHS LATER, ONE PEDAL-STEEL SOLO ON “TOGETHER AGAIN” BECAME SO DEFINITIVE THAT JERRY GARCIA LATER POINTED TO IT AS AN INSPIRATION TO LEARN THE INSTRUMENT. Tom Brumley was not the first steel guitarist in the Buckaroos. He joined Buck Owens’ band in 1963 after Jay McDonald left, stepping into a group that was rapidly becoming the defining sound of Bakersfield country. Don Rich was already shaping the guitars and harmonies. Buck had the songs. Brumley’s job was to find a place inside that sound without softening it. Then came “Together Again.” Buck recorded the ballad in early 1964 as the flip side of “My Heart Skips a Beat.” The faster song looked like the obvious hit. Brumley changed the balance. In the middle of “Together Again,” his pedal steel answered Buck’s vocal with a slow, aching solo. It was restrained, melodic and full of the crying bends the instrument could produce when the mechanics and the player’s touch worked together. Music theorists have since singled out the passage as a classic example of how the pedal steel can deepen the emotional meaning of a country song. The B-side did not stay a B-side. “Together Again” reached No. 1 on the country chart, interrupting the run of “My Heart Skips a Beat” at the top. The two sides effectively traded places as hits. Brumley’s solo became part of the record’s identity. It was later cited among country music’s finest pedal-steel performances, and Jerry Garcia pointed to “Together Again” as one of the recordings that inspired him to take up steel guitar before playing the instrument with New Riders of the Purple Sage. Brumley stayed with the Buckaroos through most of the 1960s, during the band’s peak years, before leaving in 1969 and later spending more than a decade with Rick Nelson. His distinctive playing became known among steel players as the “Brumley Touch.” Buck Owens supplied the voice and the song. But for a few measures in 1964, Tom Brumley gave “Together Again” the part listeners would spend decades trying to reproduce.

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TOM BRUMLEY JOINED BUCK OWENS’ BAND AS A REPLACEMENT. MONTHS LATER, ONE PEDAL-STEEL SOLO ON “TOGETHER AGAIN” BECAME SO PERFECT THAT JERRY GARCIA LATER SAID IT HELPED PULL HIM TOWARD THE INSTRUMENT.

Tom Brumley did not enter the Buckaroos as the man everyone had been waiting to hear.

He came in as a replacement.

In 1963, after Jay McDonald left Buck Owens’ band, Brumley stepped into a group that was rapidly becoming the defining sound of Bakersfield country. Buck had the songs and the voice. Don Rich had the sharp guitar lines and high harmonies. The band already knew how to sound lean, bright, and harder-edged than the smoother records coming out of Nashville.

Brumley’s job was not to soften that sound.

It was to find the ache inside it.

The Buckaroos Were Already Moving Fast

By the time Brumley arrived, Buck Owens was building something unmistakable.

The Bakersfield sound had more bite than polish. It favored clean Telecasters, driving rhythm, clear vocals, and a working-band directness that felt closer to California dance halls than Nashville string sections.

Pedal steel could have easily turned that sound too sweet.

Brumley did something better.

He gave it feeling without weighing it down. His playing was clean, patient, and emotional, but never overdecorated. He knew how to make a bend hurt without making it beg for attention.

That restraint would soon become the center of one of Buck’s most beautiful records.

The Ballad Was Supposed To Be The Other Side

In early 1964, Buck Owens recorded “Together Again.”

At first, it was the flip side of “My Heart Skips a Beat.” The faster song looked like the obvious hit. It had the energy, the radio shape, and the drive listeners already expected from Buck and the Buckaroos.

But “Together Again” carried something quieter.

It was a ballad about reunion, relief, and the fragile feeling of having love return after it seemed gone. Buck sang it simply, without pushing the emotion too hard.

Then Tom Brumley answered him.

In the middle of the record, the pedal steel rose with a slow, aching solo that changed the entire weight of the song.

The Solo Became The Voice Under The Voice

Brumley’s solo did not sound like a break inserted between verses.

It sounded like the emotion Buck’s voice had been holding back.

The notes moved slowly, with crying bends and a melodic shape that seemed to breathe inside the lyric. It was not flashy. It did not try to outrun the song. It simply deepened everything already there.

That is what made it definitive.

The mechanics of the pedal steel can be dazzling, but Brumley used them for feeling. The bends did not sound like tricks. They sounded like a heart trying to steady itself after being hurt.

For a few measures, the instrument became the second singer.

And listeners remembered it that way.

The B-Side Refused To Stay Hidden

“Together Again” did not remain just the other side of a faster record.

It reached No. 1 on the country chart, interrupting the run of “My Heart Skips a Beat” at the top. The two sides effectively traded places as hits, proving that the ballad had found its own power.

Brumley’s solo became part of the record’s identity.

Not background.

Not ornament.

Identity.

People could remember the song by the steel as much as by the title. That is rare. Many great country records have fine instrumental work, but only a few contain a passage so perfectly placed that the song feels incomplete without it.

“Together Again” had that.

Tom Brumley gave it that.

The Sound Reached Far Beyond Bakersfield

The solo became one of country music’s most admired pedal-steel performances.

Steel players studied it. Country fans carried it. Musicians outside traditional country heard it too. Jerry Garcia later pointed to “Together Again” as one of the recordings that inspired him to take up steel guitar before playing the instrument with New Riders of the Purple Sage.

That says something about the reach of Brumley’s touch.

A few measures on a Buck Owens ballad traveled beyond Bakersfield, beyond country radio, and into the ears of musicians who were building new bridges between country, rock, and roots music.

The sound was precise enough for players to study.

But human enough for anyone to feel.

The Brumley Touch Stayed With Him

Brumley remained with the Buckaroos through most of the 1960s, during the band’s peak years.

He left in 1969 and later spent more than a decade with Rick Nelson, carrying his steel sound into another corner of American music. Among players, his style became known as the “Brumley Touch.”

That phrase fit because his greatness was not only in speed or technical command.

It was in pressure.

Taste.

Timing.

The ability to make the instrument speak at the exact emotional temperature the song needed.

On “Together Again,” he did not take the record away from Buck Owens.

He gave Buck’s heartbreak a second language.

What “Together Again” Really Leaves Behind

The deepest part of this story is not only that Tom Brumley played one of country music’s most famous pedal-steel solos.

It is that he did it as the new man in a band already making history.

A replacement steel player.

The Buckaroos at full force.

A ballad placed behind the faster song.

Then one slow, crying solo that helped turn “Together Again” into a No. 1 record and gave generations of players a passage they would chase for decades.

Buck Owens supplied the voice.

Don Rich helped define the band’s fire.

But for a few measures in 1964, Tom Brumley found the place where the pedal steel could say what no lyric needed to explain.

And once he played it, “Together Again” could never belong only to the singer again.

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Johnny Carson’s First Decade Was Recorded—Then NBC Used the Tapes Again Some NBC videotape logs carry several programs on the same reel. A broadcast was recorded. The tape returned to storage. Later, someone threaded it through a machine and placed another program over the first. News, comedy, cartoons and talk shows could occupy the same physical object at different times, each new recording removing most of what had been there before. That routine erased much of Johnny Carson’s first decade on The Tonight Show. Carson began hosting in October 1962. Night after night, the program captured monologues, conversations, comedians making their first national appearances and public figures speaking in a looser setting than the evening news allowed. The broadcasts felt permanent to viewers because Carson was always there again the next night. The tape itself was expensive. NBC routinely reused two-inch videotape, and most Carson episodes from 1962 through the early 1970s disappeared. Even the first broadcast survives principally through photographs and audio rather than a complete video recording. Control changed the fate of the later shows. After Carson’s contract negotiations gave his production greater authority in 1972, the order was clear: the tapes were to be kept. Ownership arrangements developed further in subsequent agreements, but the preservation line is visible. Most of the early years are missing; the later twenty years remain largely intact. After Carson retired, thousands of tapes were stored roughly 650 feet underground in a Kansas salt mine, where temperature and humidity remained stable. In 2010, 3,300 hours of surviving footage were digitized and indexed so individual guests, monologue subjects and sketches could be located without screening entire programs. The archive preserves more than television comedy. It holds thirty years of American voices passing through one chair beside Carson’s desk. But the empty first decade remains part of its meaning. Television once entered millions of homes and then disappeared beneath the next night’s program—not metaphorically, but on the same reel of tape.

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JOHN AMOS LOST GOOD TIMES WHILE TRYING TO PROTECT THE FAMILY AT ITS CENTER During the third season of Good Times, John Amos began returning scripts with questions the writers did not welcome. Why was J.J. receiving the strongest material while Thelma and Michael were being pushed to the edges? Why did a sitcom built around a struggling Black family increasingly depend on one son behaving like a television caricature? Why were there so few Black writers in the room deciding how James Evans should speak inside his own home? Amos was not objecting to Jimmie Walker’s talent. He understood why audiences loved “Dy-no-mite!” His concern was what the success of that character was doing to the rest of the family. When Good Times began in 1974, James and Florida Evans represented something still unusual on network television: a Black mother and father raising three children together in a Chicago public-housing apartment. James worked temporary jobs, swallowed disappointments and kept returning to the kitchen table. Amos wanted the comedy to grow from that recognizable pressure. His arguments with the predominantly white writing staff became increasingly heated. Amos later admitted that he had the conviction to know something was wrong but not yet the diplomacy to fight it safely. During the hiatus after season three, producer Norman Lear called him. Amos was dismissed. The fourth season opened with James working in Mississippi and preparing to move the family out of the projects. Instead, a telegram arrived announcing that he had died in an automobile accident. The father Amos had fought to protect was removed without appearing onscreen. A year later, Amos played the adult Kunta Kinte in Roots, earning an Emmy nomination and entering another landmark depiction of Black family history. He and Lear eventually reconciled; decades later, they publicly embraced during a 2019 television reunion. But the apartment in Good Times never fully recovered its original balance. James Evans’s empty chair became part of the show. Amos had lost the job. The argument he made about who was allowed to define that family outlived it.

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WHEN HOLLYWOOD STOPPED HIRING WILL GEER, HE GREW VEGETABLES AND BUILT A STAGE IN THE WOODS In the early 1950s, Will Geer sold his Santa Monica home, moved his family onto a cheap piece of land in Topanga Canyon and began planting food. Hollywood had stopped calling. After refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee, Geer had been blacklisted by the major studios. The actor who had appeared in films such as Winchester ’73 could no longer depend on acting to feed his wife and children. Fortunately, he knew the ground. Geer had studied botany before the stage took over his life, and the family supported itself partly by selling vegetables, fruit and herbs grown on the property. His daughter Ellen later remembered him gardening furiously because survival had become the immediate work. Among the trees, another kind of work continued. Geer began staging plays on the land and invited other blacklisted actors and folk singers to join him. Burgess Meredith passed through. So did Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and others whose politics or associations had made conventional stages difficult to reach. Geer called the place Theatricum Botanicum—a garden theater. As the blacklist weakened, he gradually returned to film and television. In 1972, at seventy years old, he began playing Grandpa Zeb Walton on The Waltons. The role made him familiar to millions of viewers who knew little about the years when he had been unable to work. He won an Emmy in 1975. Money and recognition from the series helped Geer reopen the Topanga theater as a public workshop in 1973. Shakespeare was performed beneath the oak trees. Folk musicians returned. Audiences arrived in numbers the informal grounds had never been built to accommodate. Geer died in 1978. The Waltons allowed Grandpa’s death to become part of the family’s story rather than replacing him with another actor. Back in Topanga, Geer’s wife Herta Ware, their children and a small company kept the theater alive. Ellen Geer eventually became its artistic director. The blacklist had taken away the rooms where Will Geer was permitted to act. On the land he bought afterward, his family still performs beneath the trees.

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