A Younger Artist Did Not Simply Cover The Bakersfield Sound And He Brought Buck With Him
Buck Owens had not had a No. 1 country hit in more than fifteen years and then Dwight Yoakam asked him to sing one old Bakersfield song and put him back on top
This sound did not begin with me and the man who helped build it should be standing here too
By the mid 1980s Buck Owens no longer needed another hit to prove anything
He had already built one of the defining catalogs in country music and taken the Bakersfield sound national and recorded with the Buckaroos and spent years on television through Hee Haw
But his recording career had faded badly during the 1970s and by the time a younger Kentucky born singer named Dwight Yoakam started making noise in Los Angeles Buck was largely outside the center of country radio
Yoakam was not and his 1986 debut Guitars Cadillacs Etc. Etc. helped bring hard edged honky tonk back into mainstream country
And the sound he was reviving owed a clear debt to Owens and Yoakam spoke openly about the influence of Buck and helped introduce Bakersfield country to listeners who had not been around for its original run
The Song Was Already In The Past Of Buck
Then Yoakam reached backward and he wanted to record Streets of Bakersfield a song Buck had already cut years earlier
This time Yoakam asked Buck to sing it with him and Owens agreed
The pairing worked because neither man tried to make the record sound like a museum piece and the voice of Buck sat beside the voice of Dwight as if the fifteen plus years between their chart peaks were not there
The Old Voice Fit The New Moment
Released in 1988 Streets of Bakersfield went all the way to No. 1 and it gave Dwight another major hit
For Buck Owens it was something else and his first country chart topper since the early 1970s and a return to the very radio audience that had moved on from him years before
The success pulled Buck back into recording for a time and new albums followed including Hot Dog! and Act Naturally
It gave him the sound of his own legacy coming back through the radio with a younger voice beside him not replacing him but carrying him home
But the bigger consequence had already happened because a younger artist had not simply covered the Bakersfield sound and he had gone back to one of the men who built it and put him beside him at the microphone and carried him back to No. 1