Remembering Buck

Dwight Yoakam Pays Tribute To The Top Buckaroo On New Album

Mark Williams
Music Editor

On March 25, 2006, when Dwight Yoakam got the sad news that his close friend Buck Owens had passed away, it was a shock. Only four days earlier, the honky-tonk compadres had spent four hours on the phone catching up while Yoakam was amid a 17-month world tour. "Buck was just full of life," Yoakam remembers. "We'd known each other since 1987, and somebody had asked him about me, and he said, 'People think we have dinner together every night.' And I said, 'I know, they act like we're just down the block from one another,' and he said, 'Well, it always will be like that, Dwight.' Ours was a friendship that was a combination of parent, sibling and peer..."

Immediately, Yoakam and his band, who'd been playing Dwight and Buck's 1988 duet "The Streets of Bakersfield" as an encore, added several Owens classics to the set. "It became part of our musical embrace with the audience every night," says Yoakam. "It was almost as if they let me have a moment with him every night - like we were able to take him on tour with us."

By the fall of '06, he and his label, New West Records, agreed that Yoakam's next album would honor the architect of the Bakersfield Sound. "Dwight Sings Buck," which was released October 22, reprises and re-imagines fifteen of Buck Owens' greatest, including 11 top five hits, eight of which reached #1 on the country charts, spanning 1956 to 1967, with stunning results.

Excluding their hit duet, which had initiated Buck's return to music after a lengthy hiatus, Yoakam had never cut an Owens song. "As much as anything in my life, I'm happy to have encouraged him to want to play music again," Yoakam explains. "That's why I'd never, ever considered cutting a Buck song. Buck was still doing them and had recorded them wonderfully. I never, ever thought that I would re-record Buck's music and certainly never as an album that I did alone. But then I realized, it wasn't unlike the solo tribute album that Buck did for Tommy Collins, or Merle for Lefty Frizzell. After his death, it was the clearest way I could express my love for him and acknowledge the depth of our friendship."

That friendship originally blossomed in 1987, when Dwight, who'd been name-checking Buck since his 1986 breakthrough, got Owens onstage with him and urged him to play music again. Since his collaborator Don Rich's tragic death in a 1974 motorcycle accident, Owens had "suffered such a long period of being depressed and confused and hurt," he later said, that he "just went through the paces," eventually retiring from music-making. In Yoakam, Buck found the musical soul mate that had been missing for so long; in addition to hitting the charts again, Owens also returned to recording his own albums and opened the Crystal Palace in Bakersfield, where he performed nearly every weekend - including the night he died.

With his new tribute album, Dwight Yoakam has given us Owens back again -- the young Buck whose music could set hay bales on fire. Yoakam was a fitting heir to Owens' legacy: after migrating to Los Angeles following an unsuccessful stint in Nashville, Yoakam became a California rabble-rouser who sang country with rock and roll in his belly. The Kentucky native grafted himself on to the Bakersfield sound, shaking up the declining Nashville establishment with a string of chart-toppers in the '80s and '90s. 

Most of the songs on "Dwight Sings Buck" are faithful recreations of Owens' originals. Owens' songs wouldn't tolerate stiff, note-for-note duplication, however. Yoakam manages to sound like he's channeling Owens at his peak, while his band eerily summons the spirits of Don Rich and the rest of the Buckaroos with classics like "My Heart Skips a Beat", "Cryin' Time", and "Above and Beyond". 

Yoakam isn't afraid to open up Owens' style when his spirit moves him. One of best songs on the album, "Close Up the Honky Tonks", combines the Bakersfield sound's Telecaster and pedal steel with Latin percussion courtesy of former Motown session artist Bobby Hall. Yoakam also deviates from Owens' original version of "Together Again", the album's final track. But where "Close Up the Honky Tonks" reinterprets the song, "Together Again" recomposes it. There is no stylistic departure -- Buck Owens could have sung the song the way Yoakam does, albeit with a pared-down band; but Dwight Yoakam sings an entirely new melody that gestures only faintly at the original. Owens' legacy, Yoakam seems to be saying, is broader than the individual notes he sung, but a force that animates a much wider range of music. 

Thanks to Dwight Yoakam for reviving Buck Owens' soul now that his body has been laid to rest; and all country music fans - especially those moved by America's restless spirit -- should thank him, too…

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