'Hee Haw' host, singer Buck Owens dies

Country singer Buck Owens, a mainstay on the TV show Hee Haw, died Saturday at the age of 76.

Family spokesman Jim Shaw said Owens passed away at his home in Bakersfield, Ca. but did not divulge the cause of death.  Owens had throat cancer surgery in 1993 and was once hospitalized with pneumonia.

From the 1960s through the 1970s, Owens had 20 number one hits including Act Naturally, Together Again, I've Got a Tiger by the Tail, Love's Gonna’ Live Here, My Heart Skips a Beat and Waitin' in Your Welfare Line.

"I think the reason he was so well known and respected by a younger generation of country musicians was because he was an innovator and rebel," said Shaw, who played keyboards in Owens' band, the Buckaroos.

"He did it out of the Nashville establishment. He had a raw edge."

Owens may be best remembered as co-host of the variety show Hee Haw, playing on his trademark red, white and blue guitar.  He was on the show from 1969 to 1986.

"I'd like to be remembered as a guy that came along and did his music, did his best and showed up on time, clean and ready to do the job, wrote a few songs and had a hell of a time," he said in 1992.

Born Alvis Edgar Owens Jr. in 1929 outside Sherman, Texas to a poor sharecropping family, Owens had a hardscrabble childhood.  Around the age of three or four he nicknamed himself “Buck” after the family’s mule. The family moved to Arizona when he was eight but by the time he turned 13, Owens dropped out of school to harvest crops.

He was playing music in taverns by 16 and once reminisced that he used to dream about “playing the guitar and singing like some of those great people that we had the old, thick records of.”

The singer moved to Bakersfield, Ca., in 1951 hoping to find work in the jukebox joints that peppered the area between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Performing in flashy rhinestone suits with the Buckaroos, his honky-tonk twang became known as the “Bakersfield Sound.”

“We played rhumbas and tangos and sambas,” recalled Owens.  “And lots of rock ‘n’ roll.”

He started recording in the mid-1950s and hit it big in 1963 with Act Naturally — a song that would be recorded by Beatle drummer Ringo Starr, who recorded it again in 1989 with Owens.

Owens starred in The Buck Owens Ranch Show in the mid-1960s. The 30-minute shows were broadcast in 100 countries.

Owens went on to marry his first wife, Bonnie Owens, who also performed with him. One of her two sons she had with Owens, Buddy Alan, became a singer and even recorded some duets with his father.

After Hee Haw, Owens stayed away from the music scene and concentrated on his business interests, which included a TV station in Bakersfield and radio stations in Phoenix, Ariz..

He was known as a straight talker and once took a shot at American country music, decrying the syrupy arrangements of some singers.

“Assembly-line, robot music turns me off,” he said.

Owens was elected to both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1996 — the same year he opened Buck Owens' Crystal Palace, a restaurant, nightclub and museum in Bakersfield.

He is survived by his three sons.