BONNIE OWENS LINER NOTES
Bonnie Owens, a fine country singer and songwriter in her own right, will forever go down in history as the woman who was married to both Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. Although this association alone would get her mentioned in the Country Music Who’s Who, it is also true that as a solo performer Bonnie Owens recorded an impressive body of work, enough material to make up the box set that you are now holding. Whether or not she would have been more or less famous had her life not been intertwined with two of country music’s biggest giants is a mystery, and even though she never had any huge hits to her name, Bonnie Owens is still known today as one of the genre’s finest underrated female singers.
Bonnie Owens was a woman everyone liked; not one person has anything bad to say about her. Over and over again, that sentiment was echoed by every single person interviewed for this box set, not only Merle Haggard and her sons with Buck Owens, Buddy and Mike, but also people that Bonnie met only in passing.
Bonnie would ultimately find her greatest success as Merle Haggard’s harmony and duet singer, a job she would keep long after her marriage with Merle had ended. It was this professional role that most country music fans and historians will forever associate with her, but on her own she left behind an impressive discography of singles and albums that place her as one of the most important female artists of the West Coast brand of country music that came to be known as the Bakersfield sound.
This box set represents everything that Owens ever recorded as a solo artist in her golden era of 1953 to 1971, from her first single on the tiny Mar-Vel label, through one-offs on small labels like X, Del-Fi, Pike, and fine early efforts for the Tally label of Bakersfield, to her six albums that she recorded for Capitol Records. When added to the incredible volume of work that she recorded with Merle Haggard during their forty-year association, it becomes apparent that Bonnie was one of the most recorded female singers in country music history.
So why didn’t she become a star? It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why it never happened for her. If you ask the key players in the Bonnie Owens saga, a complex picture emerges, with no clear answers.
Merle Haggard: “I have no doubt that my success overshadowed Bonnie—it had to. Bonnie would be the last one to bring that up. She never complained. We were married and she was happy to tour and sing and write with me.”
Fuzzy Owen: “There are a lot of great singers who never made it big. I think Bonnie’s problem was that she never had that song, that one hit song that would have made her.”
Ken Nelson: “Bonnie’s problem was that she was timid—she was just too darn shy.”
Michael Owens: “Mom had the talent to be a recording star, but she just didn’t have the cold heart and the cutthroat attitude that it takes to make it.”
We’ll never know the real reason why Bonnie didn’t make it big on her own, but the fact remains that she was one of the finest female country singers of all time. The recordings on this box set attest to this fact.
PART ONE: THE EARLY YEARS
Bonnie was born Bonnie Maureen Campbell on October 1, 1929, in Oklahoma City, the fourth of six girls and two boys in a typical Depression-era family. Like many families of the day, they worked the land as sharecroppers and did lots of other odd jobs to make ends meet. The family moved to Blanchard, Oklahoma, when Bonnie was just a baby, and that is the town that Bonnie usually cited as her hometown. In those Dust Bowl hard times, the family also moved around to Middleburg and Tuttle, Oklahoma, and eventually migrated to Gilbert, Arizona, near Phoenix.
Bonnie’s father, Wallace Campbell, was a jack of all trades and worked many different jobs, including stints as an iceman and then as a carpenter at the nearby Williams Air Force Base. Wallace played fiddle, piano, and harmonica, and he sang; he loved music and he fostered the musical abilities of all the kids in the family. Although he never played professionally, Wallace was by all accounts Bonnie’s first musical inspiration.
From a very young age, Bonnie was always singing. Her sister Betty recounts that as a little girl, Bonnie talked endlessly about wanting to be a singer. She was fond of yodelers like Patsy Montana, and she practiced yodeling constantly. An early family memory of Bonnie is of her singing while standing on bales of hay in their barn, using a broomstick as a microphone. A typical rural family, the Campbells listened to the Grand Ole Opry on the weekends, and country music singers were the centers of their musical universe. Bonnie’s sister Loretta remembers that “there was always music around us; we were surrounded by music.”
Bonnie was so sure about her future as a singer that she attempted to drop out of school in the seventh grade. Her father talked her into returning, which she did, even though it meant starting over and repeating the seventh grade. Bonnie’s lack of interest in school was so intense that she failed the eighth grade, which suited her just fine, as the setback landed her in the same grade as her sister Betty, who was two years younger. Betty remembers that one of the only things Bonnie liked about school was the orchestra, where she played both the trombone and French horn. She also sang in some of the school assemblies. Ultimately, their schooling mattered little because both Bonnie and Betty would drop out of high school in their junior years.
Bonnie’s father suffered the first of many heart attacks in the late 1940s, and on doctor’s orders to go to a milder climate, he moved the family to the Oakland/Alameda area (near San Francisco) in 1949. He died in 1958, after years of bad health. Bonnie, meanwhile, stayed in Arizona because she had fallen in love with a man named Buck Owens.
PART TWO: ENTER ALVIS “BUCK” OWENS JR.
Years before the hit records, decades before his Hee Haw television stardom, Alvis “Buck” Owens Jr. was just another hardscrabble hillbilly kid in love with music, with a head full of what seemed at the time like unreasonable dreams of stardom. He was six weeks older than Bonnie (Buck’s birthdate was August 12, 1929) and born in Sherman, Texas, but living in Mesa, Arizona, since 1937. Buck could pick a hot guitar, and he wasn’t a bad singer either. He worked picking oranges during the day and played music on the weekends with a duet act known as Buck and Britt (featuring Buck’s friend Theryl Ray Britten as Britt). The pair had a fifteen-minute radio show on KTYL in Mesa, which made them famous, at least to their friends and family members.
Bonnie met Buck at the Mazona Roller Rink in Mesa around 1945, when she was just fifteen or sixteen years old. Bonnie’s sister Betty recounts that the two girls would take the bus into Mesa to go roller skating, which in their teenage years was their only form of socializing. Buck knew Bonnie from school, but at first Buck’s romantic interest was directed toward Betty. One day Bonnie turned up unannounced at the Buck and Britt radio show. When Buck asked her why she was there, Bonnie replied that she was there to sing. Before that day Buck didn’t even know Bonnie had any desire to be a singer, and soon he began dating Bonnie.
Bonnie was included in Buck’s next musical endeavor, a local combo headed by gas station owner “Mac” MacAtee called Mac’s Skillet Lickers. The group was a typical hillbilly act of the day, with Buck playing steel guitar and Bonnie contributing vocals where needed. It was the first real professional band either of them had been in, and it gave both of them invaluable experience.
Mac’s Skillet Lickers are rumored to have recorded, either radio station acetates or an actual 78 rpm record release, but nothing has turned up, even after a search through Buck Owens’s music vault. At the time of this writing, there is nothing to document what the band sounded like, although a good guess would be the Maddox Brothers and Rose, then one of the biggest acts on the West Coast. Rose Maddox was one of the most popular and influential female country music singers in those years. Far from the demure, submissive female singers who were popular in the Southern states, Rose was a brash-voiced honky-tonk queen who could hold her own around a group of rowdy boys and whose loud nasal drawl could cut through a band of electrified instruments and a set of drums. She influenced an entire generation of female country singers who owed less and less to the old school of Kitty Wells and Patsy Montana and more to the rowdy rhythm and blues singers of the post–World War II era such as Ruth Brown and LaVern Baker.
In the late 1940s the Maddox Brothers and Rose also featured a new teenage guitar sensation by the name of Roy Nichols. Though young and fairly inexperienced, Nichols could dash off hot jazzy licks in the style of Jimmy Bryant and Junior Barnard. His presence with the Maddox Brothers and Rose was positively electrifying to a new generation of young guitar players, after the days of Gene Autry strumming open chords on an acoustic guitar, at the dawn of a new world where electric guitars could bring jazz into country music.
One memorable night, the Maddox Brothers and Rose, featuring Roy Nichols, played a local dance in Chandler, Arizona. In the audience were a teenage Buck Owens and Bonnie Campbell. In an interview with Robert Price published in the Bakersfield Californian, Bonnie remembered, “I never took my eyes off Rose Maddox—and Buck never took his eyes off of Roy Nichols.” Roy Nichols, of course, would eventually wind up being Merle Haggard’s guitar player for more than twenty years and is the lead guitarist on most of the tracks in this box set.
Buck married the four-months-pregnant Bonnie in January 1948, and soon they had two baby boys, Alan Edgar “Buddy” Owens, born in May 1948, and Michael Lynn Owens, born in March 1950. In interviews Bonnie would always say that her boys were her proudest accomplishment.
The marriage had its problems from the beginning. The young couple struggled to make ends meet, and soon after Michael was born it became obvious the union was not going to last. Bonnie moved to the Bakersfield area, where Buck’s aunt and uncle, Vernon and Lucille Ellington, had offered to help take care of the boys. Buck followed soon after, with his parents in tow. Amazingly, Buck and Bonnie had an amicable parting and remained friends. They wanted to give their two boys the best possible upbringing and worked together to share responsibility for their care. For the time being they were separated, but they remained married since neither of them could afford a divorce.
PART THREE: BAKERSFIELD
Bakersfield is the place in California where a country person can feel right at home. Miles away physically and culturally from Los Angeles and San Francisco, it was a destination for Okies and other migrant workers. With its oilfields, cotton fields, and other agricultural industries, work was plentiful, if not financially rewarding. Many of the farm workers lived in labor camps, tent cities, and other temporary housing that allowed them to follow the crops by the season.
With the influx of hillbillies, Mexicans, African Americans, Native Americans, and Chinese into the region, a new “crop” of music came into being that was as much a melting pot as the other facets of this new society. There was country music, to be sure, but it was a different kind of country music. Loud, electrified, and exciting, new acts such as Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, Spade Cooley’s Orchestra, and the aforementioned Maddox Brothers and Rose brought a completely different style to the region. It was a strong foreshadowing of what would ultimately be called rock ‘n’ roll, but in the late 1940s and early 1950s it was simply called hillbilly music.
Bakersfield developed a lively music scene centered in the rough dives and juke joints frequented by these new workers. Places like the Lucky Spot, the Clover Club, the Barrelhouse, and the Blackboard Cafe had live music seven nights a week. Big shows would come touring through town at places like the Rainbow Gardens and the Pumpkin Center Barn Dance.
Bonnie Owens found herself working as a carhop at a hamburger drive-in located at the intersection of Union and Truxton. Buck’s aunt Lucille cared for the boys during the day while Bonnie worked. Bonnie was already known around town for her singing talent, having already done a guest spot or two at the Blackboard Cafe and the Clover Club. Buck, in the meantime, had become lead guitarist for Bill Woods and his Orange Blossom Playboys, who played six nights a week at the Blackboard Cafe.
One day Thurman Billings, owner of the Clover Club, stopped with his wife at the drive-in asked if Bonnie would be interested in working at the Clover Club as a cocktail waitress. He also mentioned that anytime she wanted to sing at the club, she would be welcome. Bonnie’s sister, Betty, was already a waitress there, so Bonnie accepted the offer.
Bonnie became known as the singing waitress, a nickname that stuck for years. When she worked a shift, several times a night the house band would get Bonnie up to sing. It was great experience for her professional singing career, but terrible for her waitressing job—she lost tips every time she got up on the bandstand.
The challenge of being a single mother in the early 1950s was fraught with huge obstacles for Bonnie, but she never let anything stop her from taking care of her boys, or from pursuing her musical career. Buddy and Michael remember that they literally had dozens of babysitters who took care of them while their mother worked at night. Bonnie never had a car, and the family constantly moved from place to place. It was a hand-to-mouth existence, yet Buddy and Michael remember that whatever they lacked in money, Bonnie and their relatives made up in love and devotion for the two young boys.
It was while working at the Clover Club that Bonnie met a young steel guitar player by the name of “Fuzzy” Owen who had just returned from the Army.
PART FOUR: “FUZZY” OWEN AND TALLY RECORDS
Although he is barely mentioned in most history books, Charles “Fuzzy” Owen was every bit as important to the history of Bakersfield country music as his much better known peers Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. And, along with Buck and Merle, Fuzzy was the other important romantic and professional partner in Bonnie Owens’s career.
Fuzzy Owen, no relation to Buck, hailed from Arkansas and even today the years have not softened the Arkie lilt to his accent. After moving to Bakersfield in the late 1940s, leaving for the army, and then returning around 1952, Fuzzy began playing steel guitar and singing in local bands. He was by all accounts a talented steel guitarist and a good vocalist, but his greatest talent would come to be as a manager, recording studio engineer, record label owner, spiritual advisor, and generally tireless promoter of country music around Bakersfield. He is credited with starting the career of Merle Haggard, and he has been Merle’s manager from the beginning until the present day.
Fuzzy came to know Bonnie Owens soon after her arrival in Bakersfield; the town was small and the music scene highly incestuous. Buck Owens was immediately snapped up by Bill Woods and His Orange Blossom Playboys as a hot young lead guitar player and Fuzzy and Buck played together on Tommy Collins’s highly influential recordings for Capitol in the early 1950s (the first time that any of these men ever set foot in a professional studio, not to mention their first contact with their future employer, Capitol Records, and Capitol’s A&R man Ken Nelson).
Fuzzy was playing steel guitar in the house bands at such Bakersfield hot spots as the Lucky Spot and the Clover Club, and soon he and the “singing waitress” began singing and playing together through their constant contact. When Bonnie and Buck separated, Fuzzy and Bonnie began a romantic and professional relationship that would continue for more than a decade. It was Fuzzy who eventually helped Bonnie through the legal process of getting a divorce from Buck.