Phoenix Sound, The:: A History of Twang & Rockabilly Music in Arizona by West Jim

Author:West, Jim [West, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2015-12-07T05:00:00+00:00

Buck Owens began his music career in the mid- to late 1940s in Mesa, Arizona. By the late ’50s, his Buckaroos band would begin to dominate the country music charts nationally. The band charted nearly fifty top-ten hits, including twenty-one number-one songs in Billboard magazine. Courtesy of author. All rights reserved .

Buck had developed his own unique twisted-note guitar style. It was a little off center but unique and fresh. By 1957, Capitol Records producer Ken Nelson, who had hired Owens as a sideman in the studio, offered him a recording contract when rumor had it that another label was interested. Owens’s first Capitol single was a flop and generated little interest.

Believing he’d had his shot and failed, Owens asked Nelson to cancel his contract. He then headed up to Tacoma, Washington, to be part owner of a small AM radio station, play nightclubs and, before long, host his own local country television show. One good thing that came out of living in Washington State was that Owens met and hired a young fiddle player by the name of Don Ulrich. This association would be beneficial in the future.

Ken Nelson at Capitol had no intention of canceling Owens’s recording contract, however, and soon invited him back to Hollywood to record several songs—such as “Second Fiddle” and “Under Your Spell Again”—that began to climb the charts. By 1959, several of Owens’s singles had hit the top ten on the Billboard charts. Owens soon divested his business interests in Tacoma and moved back to Bakersfield.

Over the next decade and more, Owens developed his style, which expanded on the Bakersfield Sound of twangy Telecaster guitars and heavy doses of fiddle and pedal steel. It was country music with a little bit of a rock-and-roll edge to it. The West Coast Sound was counter to what Nashville had been producing, which involved de-twanging the music with background singers, piano and all-but-muted steel guitar and fiddle to appeal and sell to a more middle-of-the-road consumer.

The Bakersfield Sound stylings of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard were widely successful and offered an alternative to Nashville’s brand of country. Starting with “Act Naturally,” Owens and his band, the Buckaroos, rolled out number-one hit after number-one hit. They had fifteen number ones in a row at one point, and all together, Owens had twenty-one number-one records and another twenty-six that hit the top ten.

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