One of the most famous bands in country music history was named by a man who barely stayed long enough to learn the set list. Around 1962, Buck Owens was putting together a group of his own, and the new band still had no name. His bass player at the time, a young Bakersfield ex-convict named Merle Haggard, shouted one out: the Buckaroos. It stuck for the rest of Buck’s life.
Merle himself told that story on March 25, 2006, the day Buck Owens died. To understand why it mattered to him that night, it helps to go back to how the band came together.
A band built out of frustration
In the early 1960s, Buck Owens already had hits on Capitol Records, but he did not have a steady band. He and Don Rich, the young fiddler he had met in Tacoma, Washington, toured in an old Ford with acoustic guitars and a fiddle, playing clubs with whatever local musicians were available that night.
By 1962, Buck had had enough of those pickup bands. According to country music historian Rich Kienzle, he started forming a group of his own that year. The early lineup changed often. Steel guitarist Jay McDonald and drummer Ken Presley were among the first regulars, and Don Rich was moving from fiddle to lead guitar, learning the Telecaster style Buck was teaching him.
The ex-con on bass
Merle Haggard came to the job with a past most bandleaders would have worried about. He had been sent to San Quentin in 1958 after a burglary conviction and an escape attempt from the county jail. Paroled in 1960, he went back to Bakersfield, dug ditches for his brother’s electrical business, and worked his way into the honky-tonks at night. He had also played bass for Wynn Stewart in Las Vegas.
His time with Buck Owens was short. Rich Kienzle, writing in Vintage Guitar, put it at two weeks. A 1999 profile in Salon said three. Either way, it was a matter of weeks, and Merle was using the work to get his own career moving.
But during that short stretch, the band needed a name. As Merle remembered it, Buck asked the musicians what they ought to call themselves, and Merle hollered out “The Buckaroos.” Buck kept it. Merle soon moved on, and Doyle Holly later became the Buckaroos’ longtime bass player.
What the name went on to carry
On February 12, 1963, Buck Owens recorded “Act Naturally” with the Buckaroos. It became his first No. 1 country single and the start of a long run at the top of the charts. With Don Rich’s twangy lead guitar and a hard, driving beat, the Buckaroos became the sound people meant when they said “Bakersfield.”
Merle Haggard went his own way. After his Liz Anderson-written single “(My Friends Are Gonna Be) Strangers” became his first national Top 10 record, he named his own band the Strangers. In 1965, he married Bonnie Owens, Buck’s former wife and a fine singer in her own right. The two bands, led by two men who had once shared a stage for a few weeks, became the core of the Bakersfield sound.
The Buckaroos never forgot who named them. In 1971, they released an instrumental album of Merle Haggard songs, including “Mama Tried” and “Okie from Muskogee.”
The night Merle told the story
On Friday night, March 24, 2006, Buck Owens took the stage with the Buckaroos at his Crystal Palace in Bakersfield, as he had on most weekends since the club opened in 1996. He went home afterward and died in his sleep early the next morning. He was 76.
That Saturday night, Merle Haggard spoke with Chicago writer Dave Hoekstra. He pointed out that he and Buck came from the same town, and said they had fought plenty of battles over the years, always on the same side. Then he told the story of shouting out the band’s name. He added that the two of them had grown closer in recent years than either had realized, and that Buck had even flown up to Portland, Oregon, in March 2005 to watch him open for Bob Dylan.
He summed up their history in four words.
“We were outlaws together.”