They parted as husband and wife in 1953 at just twenty three years old yet they never truly parted as a family and the music they built together outlived their marriage by more than five decades
When Buck Owens and Bonnie Campbell divorced in Bakersfield the two young musicians stayed in the same town and kept raising the two sons they had brought west from Arizona
Their story did not end with a divorce paper because their boys and their songs kept pulling the same circle of people back to the same stages year after year
The beginning was pure desert struggle in Mesa Arizona where two broke eighteen year olds married on January 13 1948 four months before their first child arrived
Buck was playing guitar and mandolin in the house band at radio station KTYL while Bonnie was already turning heads in local talent contests with a clear yodeling voice that set her apart
Their son Alan Edgar Owens was born on May 22 1948 and a second son named Mike followed in 1950 leaving the young parents to stretch tiny radio paychecks far beyond what they could cover
By day Buck hauled produce in trucks picked cotton and worked as a mechanic under the Arizona heat and by night he carried his guitar into smoky honky tonks while Bonnie stepped back from the microphone to wait tables and raise the boys in cramped rented homes sneaking back onto local stages whenever she could find care for the children
Searching for steadier work they moved in 1951 to Bakersfield California a booming oil and farming town where Buck chased club dates and Los Angeles recording sessions late into the night
The strain of early parenthood and constant poverty wore the marriage down and in 1953 they divorced while both were still in their early twenties parting without bitterness and refusing to split their family into rival camps
Bonnie kept the Owens name professionally took cocktail waitress shifts at the Blackboard Cafe to support Alan and Mike and resumed singing with new determination
That same year she recorded her debut single A Dear John Letter alongside Fuzzy Owen a close friend and business associate of Buck for the local Mar-Vel label
Buck soon rose to national stardom in the early 1960s with the Buckaroos and built Buck Owens Enterprises in Bakersfield yet he remained an active presence in the lives of both boys
Bonnie built a pioneering career of her own helped launch a rising Kern County singer named Merle Haggard and won the very first Academy of Country Music Award for Female Vocalist of the Year before marrying Haggard on June 28 1965
Growing up between the households of two architects of the Bakersfield Sound young Alan absorbed music from every side
At fourteen he formed a teenage rock group called the Chosen Few then switched to country under the stage name Buddy Alan and stepped straight into the family business
In 1968 at twenty years old Buddy Alan made his chart debut on Capitol Records with Let the World Keep On A-Turnin a father and son duet with Buck that climbed to number seven on the Billboard country chart
That same year he released his debut solo album Wild, Free and Twenty-One which featured two songs written by his stepfather Merle Haggard
Through the late 1960s and 1970s Buddy Alan bridged both halves of his family on record and on television joining Buck and his right hand guitarist Don Rich for the 1970 Top 20 duet Cowboy Convention and recording the 1972 duet album Too Old to Cut the Mustard? with his father before becoming a regular beside Buck on the nationally syndicated show Hee Haw
At the 1970 Academy of Country Music Awards Merle swept multiple categories while twenty one year old Buddy Alan earned a nomination for Most Promising Male Vocalist with both his mother and his father cheering him on
After charting eight Top 40 country singles Buddy Alan retired from touring in 1978 to finish college and became an award winning country radio music director later moving back to Arizona while staying close to his parents in California
Bonnie and Merle divorced in 1978 yet she continued touring for years as a harmony singer in his band and she remained on warm terms with Buck as well
When Buck opened his $6.7 million Crystal Palace restaurant museum and music hall in Bakersfield in October 1996 Buddy Alan returned to perform beside his father in a hall that honored the early Bakersfield pioneers
The final chapter closed with heartbreaking symmetry in the spring of 2006 when Buck died at his Bakersfield ranch on March 25 and Bonnie died in Bakersfield hospice care on April 24 less than a month later
Both were seventy six and both left behind the two sons they had first carried into Bakersfield from Mesa in 1951 and a shared legacy that proved a marriage can end while a family and a sound can keep growing stronger