Country Music

Classic Country Music Hits

Country Music

In 1981, Buck Owens began wandering through the offices on the Bakersfield block that carried his name. The studios were still working. His radio stations were still broadcasting. People had desks, calls and deadlines. Buck would sit with them for a while, then move to another room. Two years earlier, he had stopped recording. In 1980, he stopped touring. After decades of airports and late shows, he had expected to enjoy the freedom. He played golf, then tennis, then more golf. The empty hours kept coming. Buck later spoke plainly about that period: he had grown bored and deeply depressed. His wife Jennifer could see that retirement was wearing on him. At the offices, he sensed that the people around him could see it too. Owning a busy business was different from having work that required him to get up and meet a particular day. Late in 1985, he noticed a small advertisement seeking an investment partner for a local publication. Buck bought 51 percent of the business, then purchased the remaining 49 percent the following month. He turned the monthly publication into a weekly shopper delivered around Bakersfield. There was no stage in it for him. A shopper had to be filled, printed and sent out again whether its owner felt inspired or not. Buck took to the work with an energy that surprised him. In a 1987 interview, he called the publishing venture a lifesaver; by then, he said, the weekly was going to 110,000 homes. The familiar account of Buck’s quieter years usually runs from the loss of Don Rich to his eventual return alongside Dwight Yoakam. Both belong to his story. So do the years between them, when a man who had spent much of his life making records discovered that golf could not organize a week. By the time another generation was ready to hear Buck Owens sing again, Bakersfield households had already been receiving something from him every seven days.

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.”

FEATURE — THE YEARS BUCK OWENS NEEDED A DEADLINE

The Offices on the Block

Buck Owens did not disappear when he left the road. Bakersfield still had his studios and radio stations, and the people who worked in them still came through the doors each morning. Buck came through too. In his first major interview after years of declining them, he recalled going from office to office simply to sit.

That detail gives his retirement a different shape from the usual account of a star stepping away. He had built a place full of activity. For a time, he could not find his own place in its working day.

Golf Every Day

Buck had reason to want the rest. He had spent years traveling, performing and working on Hee Haw. In 1979 he stopped recording; in 1980 he stopped touring. He imagined days for golf, tennis and racquetball.

He tried them. The difficulty was not that he had failed to earn his leisure. He had earned more of it than most people ever could. But playing whenever he wished did not replace having somewhere he was needed at a certain hour. He later described that stretch as one of boredom and depression.

A Station He Could Switch Off

There was another oddity in his Bakersfield life: Buck owned country radio stations but, for a period, did not like much of the country music they played. He said he left programming decisions to the people running them. Listener research favored a smoother sound than the hard-edged records on which he had made his name. He could turn off the radio; he could not expect a station to serve only his taste.

That restraint made business sense. It also left him near music without giving him the daily work of making it. A guitar remained close at hand, but he told the Los Angeles Times that he seldom touched it during those years.

The Small Advertisement

Near the end of 1985, an advertisement asking for an investment partner in a small publication caught his eye. Buck first bought a controlling share, then the rest. He and his staff expanded it from monthly to weekly.

The choice was less glamorous than a return to the studio and more demanding than another investment left for someone else to manage. A weekly paper required fresh work the next week, and the next. Buck had problems to solve again. Asked about it in 1987, he said the new business had helped pull him through.

The People Who Kept Working

Buck’s longtime colleague Jim Shaw later described an operation that extended well beyond recording: stations, publications, real estate and other businesses. Shaw also pointed to the employees who stayed for decades. That is an important part of the block Buck walked through. The desks were occupied by people whose work did not pause when his performing career did.

Publishing gave Buck another role among them. Its reach could be counted not in ticket holders but in households on a delivery route. By 1987, he said, the shopper went to 110,000 Bakersfield homes.

When the Guitar Came Back

Dwight Yoakam’s invitation and the renewed interest in Buck’s sound eventually drew him back toward performing. That return is often told as though the missing years had simply been spent waiting for it. Buck’s own account suggests otherwise. He had changed the daily arrangement of his life before he resumed making records.

He could later choose which shows were worth doing and leave the long tours behind. The weekly publication had given him something useful during a period when neither a full comeback nor an empty calendar suited him.

What Buck Owens Really Leaves Behind

Jim Shaw remembered the scope of Buck’s businesses, but also the people still working in the building years later. Buck himself remembered how it felt to walk into their offices without much to do. Somewhere between those two recollections sits the small ad he answered in 1985: an invitation to take on work that would need doing again the following week.

Video

Related Post

Country Music

On his 1971 recording of “The Pilgrim: Chapter 33,” Kris Kristofferson begins by explaining that the song started with his friend Chris Gantry. Then the names keep coming. Johnny Cash. Dennis Hopper. Jerry Jeff Walker. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. Before the first verse, the portrait has already outgrown the person who prompted it. Gantry belonged to the Nashville circle Kristofferson had entered in the 1960s: writers trying to make a living from songs while figuring out what kind of lives they wanted. He wrote “Dreams of the Everyday Housewife,” which Glen Campbell recorded in 1968. But in Kristofferson’s song, a friend would become something more complicated than a successful songwriter with a recognizable credit. Gantry’s Nashville background, FolkWorks The man in “The Pilgrim” has ability and failings, memories of better circumstances, and a stubborn attachment to the course he has chosen. Kristofferson gives him no tidy transformation. The damage remains visible alongside the qualities that make him worth knowing. Years later, Kris explained why so many people had entered the song. He had begun with Gantry and others, but he was also writing about himself. The distance between the singer and the man he described was smaller than the introduction suggested. Kristofferson’s interview, Lone Star Music Even the number in the title came from that shared life. Speaking to Terry Gross, Kristofferson recalled being thirty-three in Peru with Dennis Hopper and hearing people connect the age with Christ. The association stayed with him. “Chapter 33” placed the song in a particular season of adulthood, when a man could already have made consequential mistakes without knowing where they would lead. Fresh Air interview The song appeared on The Silver Tongued Devil and I. Years afterward, Kristofferson performed it with Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Willie Nelson as the Highwaymen, the four men taking turns through its portrait of an imperfect life. Official biography · Live: American Outlaws liner notes, PBS Cash had once been a name in the introduction. Now he helped sing the character into being. The song had become something its writer could share with the people he had been trying to understand—without asking any of them to pretend they had lived more neatly.

Country Music

In 1989, Waylon Jennings began studying for his high school equivalency exam on his tour bus. When he struggled with the math, his young son Shooter helped him. Waylon had been telling the boy that education mattered. Eventually, he became uncomfortable with the unfinished business behind his own advice. He had left school decades earlier, and a successful recording career had never changed his opinion of that decision. Now he was asking his son to finish something he had walked away from himself. Recovering from heart surgery gave him time to think about it. In a later interview, he explained that the lectures had begun to feel like words he had not earned. So he enrolled in Kentucky Educational Television’s GED program and worked through the lessons. Fractions and algebra brought a reversal neither a concert audience nor a record company would normally see: Waylon needed help, and Shooter had something to teach him. Waylon’s account, Phoenix New Times He passed the examination in December 1989. The certificate followed in 1990. At fifty-two, the achievement belonged beside a career’s worth of honors, although it had required a kind of work his audience had never bought a ticket to watch. Contemporary report, Los Angeles Times The decision also belonged to a larger effort at home. Waylon spoke openly about having been too occupied with making a living and becoming successful when his older children were growing up. He could not recover those years. With Shooter, he was trying to pay closer attention while there was still time. By 1993, he was visiting schools, speaking about education, and performing for children—including his son’s classmates. He wore a ring from Littlefield High School, the Texas school he had left. Those classroom visits gave his old advice a different weight. When Waylon asked children to stay in school, he could tell them where he had struggled, who had helped him, and how long he had waited. Shooter had heard the advice at home. He had also helped his father do the homework.

Country Music

By the mid-1980s, Susan Walker was looking at a country-music career that had generated famous songs, hundreds of road dates—and an American Express debt of roughly $90,000. The card had absorbed hotel rooms, airline tickets, meals and the daily expense of keeping Jerry Jeff Walker’s band moving. American Express eventually sued. The IRS was also demanding unpaid taxes. Jerry Jeff could joke about how astonishing it was that the company had allowed the balance to climb so high. Susan had to help determine how they were going to pay it. A decade earlier, Jerry Jeff had stood near the center of the Texas progressive-country movement. He recorded ¡Viva Terlingua! in Luckenbach, wrote “Mr. Bojangles,” championed songs by Guy Clark and surrounded himself with the musicians who helped make Austin an alternative to Nashville. During the busiest years, he released eight albums and played as many as 200 dates annually. Jerry Jeff later acknowledged that much of the pace had been sustained by alcohol and drugs. Susan saw the other machinery: invoices, taxes, contracts, hotel bills and a catalog whose ownership and availability depended upon decisions being made far from the stage. When record sales and performance fees weakened in the early 1980s, she did more than ask her husband to slow down. Susan began studying contract law, music publishing, copyright, booking practices and road logistics. She gathered the scattered pieces of a career that had been run as though the next concert would somehow settle the previous night’s bill. In 1986, the couple formed Tried & True Music. It was a record company, management office, booking operation and publishing center constructed around one client: Jerry Jeff Walker. They temporarily let the band go, and Jerry Jeff toured alone with his guitar. Because much of his older catalog was out of print, Tried & True assembled twenty-four songs as Gypsy Songman. The collection was issued on cassette, light enough to carry and simple enough to sell directly after solo performances. Rykodisc later picked it up for international CD distribution. Susan built the rest through paper newsletters, mailing lists and direct contact with listeners who became known as the Tried & True Warriors. The audience no longer waited for a major label to decide whether Jerry Jeff deserved another release. His family could record the music, tell fans it existed and place it directly into their hands. The songs still wandered through Luckenbach, Austin, New Orleans and Belize. Behind them, Susan kept the contracts current, the bookings organized and the catalog in print. By then, Jerry Jeff’s career no longer depended upon behaving like an outlaw. It depended upon envelopes leaving the office with the correct names and addresses.

You Missed

Country Music

On his 1971 recording of “The Pilgrim: Chapter 33,” Kris Kristofferson begins by explaining that the song started with his friend Chris Gantry. Then the names keep coming. Johnny Cash. Dennis Hopper. Jerry Jeff Walker. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. Before the first verse, the portrait has already outgrown the person who prompted it. Gantry belonged to the Nashville circle Kristofferson had entered in the 1960s: writers trying to make a living from songs while figuring out what kind of lives they wanted. He wrote “Dreams of the Everyday Housewife,” which Glen Campbell recorded in 1968. But in Kristofferson’s song, a friend would become something more complicated than a successful songwriter with a recognizable credit. Gantry’s Nashville background, FolkWorks The man in “The Pilgrim” has ability and failings, memories of better circumstances, and a stubborn attachment to the course he has chosen. Kristofferson gives him no tidy transformation. The damage remains visible alongside the qualities that make him worth knowing. Years later, Kris explained why so many people had entered the song. He had begun with Gantry and others, but he was also writing about himself. The distance between the singer and the man he described was smaller than the introduction suggested. Kristofferson’s interview, Lone Star Music Even the number in the title came from that shared life. Speaking to Terry Gross, Kristofferson recalled being thirty-three in Peru with Dennis Hopper and hearing people connect the age with Christ. The association stayed with him. “Chapter 33” placed the song in a particular season of adulthood, when a man could already have made consequential mistakes without knowing where they would lead. Fresh Air interview The song appeared on The Silver Tongued Devil and I. Years afterward, Kristofferson performed it with Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Willie Nelson as the Highwaymen, the four men taking turns through its portrait of an imperfect life. Official biography · Live: American Outlaws liner notes, PBS Cash had once been a name in the introduction. Now he helped sing the character into being. The song had become something its writer could share with the people he had been trying to understand—without asking any of them to pretend they had lived more neatly.

Country Music

In 1981, Buck Owens began wandering through the offices on the Bakersfield block that carried his name. The studios were still working. His radio stations were still broadcasting. People had desks, calls and deadlines. Buck would sit with them for a while, then move to another room. Two years earlier, he had stopped recording. In 1980, he stopped touring. After decades of airports and late shows, he had expected to enjoy the freedom. He played golf, then tennis, then more golf. The empty hours kept coming. Buck later spoke plainly about that period: he had grown bored and deeply depressed. His wife Jennifer could see that retirement was wearing on him. At the offices, he sensed that the people around him could see it too. Owning a busy business was different from having work that required him to get up and meet a particular day. Late in 1985, he noticed a small advertisement seeking an investment partner for a local publication. Buck bought 51 percent of the business, then purchased the remaining 49 percent the following month. He turned the monthly publication into a weekly shopper delivered around Bakersfield. There was no stage in it for him. A shopper had to be filled, printed and sent out again whether its owner felt inspired or not. Buck took to the work with an energy that surprised him. In a 1987 interview, he called the publishing venture a lifesaver; by then, he said, the weekly was going to 110,000 homes. The familiar account of Buck’s quieter years usually runs from the loss of Don Rich to his eventual return alongside Dwight Yoakam. Both belong to his story. So do the years between them, when a man who had spent much of his life making records discovered that golf could not organize a week. By the time another generation was ready to hear Buck Owens sing again, Bakersfield households had already been receiving something from him every seven days.

Country Music

In 1989, Waylon Jennings began studying for his high school equivalency exam on his tour bus. When he struggled with the math, his young son Shooter helped him. Waylon had been telling the boy that education mattered. Eventually, he became uncomfortable with the unfinished business behind his own advice. He had left school decades earlier, and a successful recording career had never changed his opinion of that decision. Now he was asking his son to finish something he had walked away from himself. Recovering from heart surgery gave him time to think about it. In a later interview, he explained that the lectures had begun to feel like words he had not earned. So he enrolled in Kentucky Educational Television’s GED program and worked through the lessons. Fractions and algebra brought a reversal neither a concert audience nor a record company would normally see: Waylon needed help, and Shooter had something to teach him. Waylon’s account, Phoenix New Times He passed the examination in December 1989. The certificate followed in 1990. At fifty-two, the achievement belonged beside a career’s worth of honors, although it had required a kind of work his audience had never bought a ticket to watch. Contemporary report, Los Angeles Times The decision also belonged to a larger effort at home. Waylon spoke openly about having been too occupied with making a living and becoming successful when his older children were growing up. He could not recover those years. With Shooter, he was trying to pay closer attention while there was still time. By 1993, he was visiting schools, speaking about education, and performing for children—including his son’s classmates. He wore a ring from Littlefield High School, the Texas school he had left. Those classroom visits gave his old advice a different weight. When Waylon asked children to stay in school, he could tell them where he had struggled, who had helped him, and how long he had waited. Shooter had heard the advice at home. He had also helped his father do the homework.

Country Music

By the mid-1980s, Susan Walker was looking at a country-music career that had generated famous songs, hundreds of road dates—and an American Express debt of roughly $90,000. The card had absorbed hotel rooms, airline tickets, meals and the daily expense of keeping Jerry Jeff Walker’s band moving. American Express eventually sued. The IRS was also demanding unpaid taxes. Jerry Jeff could joke about how astonishing it was that the company had allowed the balance to climb so high. Susan had to help determine how they were going to pay it. A decade earlier, Jerry Jeff had stood near the center of the Texas progressive-country movement. He recorded ¡Viva Terlingua! in Luckenbach, wrote “Mr. Bojangles,” championed songs by Guy Clark and surrounded himself with the musicians who helped make Austin an alternative to Nashville. During the busiest years, he released eight albums and played as many as 200 dates annually. Jerry Jeff later acknowledged that much of the pace had been sustained by alcohol and drugs. Susan saw the other machinery: invoices, taxes, contracts, hotel bills and a catalog whose ownership and availability depended upon decisions being made far from the stage. When record sales and performance fees weakened in the early 1980s, she did more than ask her husband to slow down. Susan began studying contract law, music publishing, copyright, booking practices and road logistics. She gathered the scattered pieces of a career that had been run as though the next concert would somehow settle the previous night’s bill. In 1986, the couple formed Tried & True Music. It was a record company, management office, booking operation and publishing center constructed around one client: Jerry Jeff Walker. They temporarily let the band go, and Jerry Jeff toured alone with his guitar. Because much of his older catalog was out of print, Tried & True assembled twenty-four songs as Gypsy Songman. The collection was issued on cassette, light enough to carry and simple enough to sell directly after solo performances. Rykodisc later picked it up for international CD distribution. Susan built the rest through paper newsletters, mailing lists and direct contact with listeners who became known as the Tried & True Warriors. The audience no longer waited for a major label to decide whether Jerry Jeff deserved another release. His family could record the music, tell fans it existed and place it directly into their hands. The songs still wandered through Luckenbach, Austin, New Orleans and Belize. Behind them, Susan kept the contracts current, the bookings organized and the catalog in print. By then, Jerry Jeff’s career no longer depended upon behaving like an outlaw. It depended upon envelopes leaving the office with the correct names and addresses.