Buck Owens, KUZZ, and the Radio That Built the Sound

The honky-tonks along Edison Highway in the nineteen fifties were not recording studios. They were bars, and the music played in them was designed to be heard over crowd noise, over the clink of bottles and the shuffle of boots on wood floors. Buck Owens understood this in a practical way. He came to Bakersfield in the early nineteen fifties after a stint playing in Phoenix, and he immediately recognized that the audience in Kern County, the displaced Okies and their grown children, the oil workers and the field hands who packed into places like the Blackboard and the Lucky Spot on Friday and Saturday nights, wanted something specific and were not getting it from Nashville.

What they wanted was the sound that was actually in the room: loud, electric, rhythmically hard, with lyrics that talked directly about working, drinking, leaving, and losing. Owens and his band the Buckaroos built that sound methodically, recording in Los Angeles studios that the band drove to from Bakersfield and back again on the same weekend. The Fender Telecaster was the instrument that made it work: bright, cutting, capable of being heard over a full bar at volume.

Owens also understood distribution. He recognized, earlier than most country artists of his generation, that radio was the mechanism by which a regional sound became a national one. He bought KUZZ radio in Bakersfield in nineteen sixty-six, a country station that broadcast to the Kern County audience but also served as his laboratory for understanding what worked and what didn't with the specific population he was making music for. The KUZZ call letters predated him, adopted in nineteen sixty by a local country star, Cousin Herb Henson. The station and the sound became the same project.

Starting in nineteen sixty-three, Buck Owens strung together fifteen number one country hits in a row, and twenty-one in all over his career. It was achieved not from Nashville or New York but from a radio station in Bakersfield and a set of amplifiers that the Buckaroos adjusted to cut through bar noise.

The Beatles, after recording a version of Act Naturally in nineteen sixty-five, said publicly that they had been listening to Buck Owens. Nashville, which had largely ignored Bakersfield, began paying attention. It was too late to be the originators of what Owens had built. They could only be its imitators.