Buck Owens (born August 12, 1929) is an American country music singer who for many defined the gritty " Bakersfield sound."
Alvis Edgar Owens, Jr. was born in Sherman, Texas, the son of sharecroppers. He chose the nickname "Buck" after a family horse (or a mule — reports seem to vary). In 1937, his family joined many others fleeing the hardships of Dust Bowl farming during the Great Depression. They packed ten family members in a Ford sedan, and left Texas for California. Their trailer hitch broke in Mesa, Arizona, and there they stayed.
Buck, a big, strong boy, quit school at 13 to go to work in the fields and hauling produce. "That was where my dream began to take hold," he recalled years later, "of not havin' to pick cotton and potatoes, and not havin' to be uncomfortable, too hot or too cold." Christmas that year brought his first musical instrument -- a mandolin, which he taught himself to play. He worked a number of odd jobs, and eventually found work playing music in bars for $5 a night. In 1945 Owens hooked up with another guitar player named Theryl Ray Britten for a local radio show called "Buck and Britt." He also started playing steel guitar for the wonderfully named "Mac's Skillet Lickers", who had a singer named Bonnie Campbell. She soon became Bonnie Owens.
Over the next few years, if a local band needed a player, Buck taught himself how to play the instrument: steel guitar, saxophone, and harmonica. The work ethic and perfectionism he would later be famous for were already in place. He was 16 when he figured out the guitar.
