Keeping the Bakersfield Sound Alive - Meet Johnny Owens

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Alvis Edgar Owens, Jr. was born in Texas in 1929, where he lived on his family farm. At about age three or four, he declared his new name to be “Buck,” just like a donkey on the farm. The name stuck and he became the Buck Owens the world would come to know. Owens was a founding father of the popular Bakersfield Sound, named after Bakersfield, California, the city he moved to as an adult. What is the Bakersfield Sound? I’ll have Owens’ son, Johnny Owens, give you the description shortly. 

I had the great pleasure of speaking with Johnny Owens recently. What a fantastic guy. So engaging and so happy to talk about his own musical career and not one bit hesitant about telling stories about his dad either. It was such a fun, informative conversation and I will always remember it fondly.

You know it’s going to go well when the call starts with some back and forth joking around. Johnny informed me that I was his sixth interview of the day. My response? “Sixth? Wait a minute! I want to be first, or at least a respectable second.” He laughed and said, “Well, of course you’re number one, at least until we get off the phone and I go to the next one and have to say they are.” 

We jumped right into his new single, a remake of Buck Owens' number one hit, “Act Naturally.” The song was originally released in March 1963 and was written by Johnny Russell and Voni Morrison. Johnny Owens’ version released on August 7, 2026 and if you haven’t heard it yet, just wait. I would encourage you to give the Buck Owens’ original a spin before listening to the new one, there’s no doubt that the familial DNA is strong when it comes to vocals. 

I told Johnny that he sounded a lot like his dad. He laughed and said, “Well, I appreciate that. I don’t try to, I think it’s just I’ve sung it so many times that it just comes pretty natural. We have a lot of fun with all these songs and Merle (Haggard) songs as well. They’re iconic songs and I’m so blessed that I get to do this.” 

Listen to “Act Naturally” by clicking HERE. 

As a kid who grew up in the 1970s, I remember watching Hee Haw every week like clockwork. My parents were big fans of the show that starred Buck Owens and Roy Clark and if you wanted to watch TV back then, your parents ruled the dial. Remotes were definitely not a thing in those days. You watched whatever they put on. I actually enjoyed Hee Haw a lot. It was corny (pun probably intended), but there was also so much good music, with all kinds of future superstars featured. I knew who Buck Owens was from about the age of 4. Johnny and I had a lively discussion about watching the show as kids. 

“Funny story,” shared Johnny, “as you said, it was a ‘must watch’ show in your house, and for us kids growing up, the Hee Haw thing started in 1969 and we had to watch it on Saturdays, that’s when it was on for us where we were anyway.” He went on, “Then we had to watch The Lawrence Welk Show! If we didn’t watch those two, we didn’t get to watch The Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday. It was funny, we were like, ‘Why do we have to watch these? Why don’t you watch these and we’ll watch our Disney movie on Sunday?’ My mom would say, ‘Because you earn the right to do this and you’re gonna watch your dad on TV.’ We’d say, ‘Well, dad’s not on Lawrence Welk,’ and she’d come right back with ‘I watch Lawrence Welk and you’re gonna watch that too.’ She was funny, but you look back on it now, how mom was like that, but it was a lot of fun even though we thought it was corny.”

In our home, The Lawrence Welk Show was also required viewing. Oh, those Champagne Singers! I could relate to every part of his story, especially Sunday nights with The Wonderful World of Disney. What a special show that was growing up. I asked Johnny if nowadays he’s thankful that his mom set the TV rules down the way she did. “Oh yeah, you have to be. After 17 years of Hee Haw being syndicated, I mean, it took over for Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, and Laugh-In was so huge! Then Hee Haw came up and sort of knocked it out of its spot and sat at number one for so many years. Still to this day, it’s the longest running variety show ever. They didn’t expect that, not at all. I don’t think my dad did either. I don’t think Roy Clark did and I don’t think the producers or anybody else did. Needless to say, it succeeded and what’s funny is you can still find it in reruns sometimes (there are also full episodes available on YouTube). Every once in a while I’ll do a show and people will say, ‘Oh, I got to watch Hee Haw on Sunday,’ and I’m like, ‘What?’”

Johnny Owens no longer resides in his hometown of Bakersfield. He and his wife moved to an area up near Yosemite National Park about 15 years ago. He explained, “We bought a vacation house, but it didn’t look like a vacation house and it certainly has changed over the last 15 years. We’ve redone every single room and we were fortunate to be able to do that. It’s right in the middle of the mountains and all the trees. We’re about eight miles outside of the park. We call it ‘God’s Country’ and it’s a great place to be. It’s very low-key and slow, but we have a couple of grocery stores and a couple pharmacies, fast food and gas stations. Of course we have about 10 to 12 million people driving through this town every year. We live up above the town, so we’re not in that mix and we don’t see all the traffic too much. We’re about four miles outside of town and that’s why we like it so much,” he said with a chuckle. “We drive into town every couple of weeks and go to Costco and do all that stuff.”

Does he get recognized when they do their Costco runs? “No I don’t. I haven’t done a show up here and my wife doesn’t want to. She says it’s so nice to walk in stores and not have to stop and talk for 20 minutes to this person and then 20 minutes to that person. You know, because I’m never gonna be rude and say, ‘Excuse me, I’m gonna go grocery shopping.’ That’s one thing my dad taught me. He’d say, ‘You be nice to people and people will be nice to you.’ I do the same thing my dad did and I talk to people before the show, during the show and after the show. They’re the ones that continually make this thing happen. It’s all about the fans and my dad knew that. He treated his fans with respect because that’s who made him and he knew it.”

You see? Class act. I told you he was a really good guy. So many celebrities tend to forget where they came from after a while. Not Johnny Owens, and he had a superstar dad who showed him the ropes really well. Fans can go as fast as they came in if they feel disrespected. Elaborating on that, Johnny commented, “If you don’t take care of the fans and don’t give ‘em their due time, they’ll be gone. I give ‘em their due time. It’s great when we do these performing arts places because it’s so nice, you can come off stage and go right out into the audience and talk with people. We usually do an encore, which is nice and I’m blessed, trust me I know it. We’ll do our encore and come off stage and fans will come up to me and say, ‘We heard that song you did’ and they’ll say it gave them some kind of memory. That is the biggest compliment to me, if I can put a memory back in their head. They’ll look at each other and say, ‘Where were we when we saw Buck and such and such happened?’ I enjoy talking to the fans more than being on stage.”

He’s so totally grounded and I complimented him on that, to which he replied, “You have to understand, I’m blessed to be able to do this and my biggest thing is to make my dad proud. I believe that he’s up there and he’s very proud of me. I bet his chest is probably really big,” he added with a laugh. He continued, “When I sing his songs I hope that I can connect with somebody. That’s what I hear when I come off stage, things like, ‘I heard that song when we were here,’ or ‘I heard it when I was 12,’ or ‘I heard it when I was 20.’ What’s really cool is now we’re starting to hear, ‘Hey, I heard that song when I was five.’ The younger crowds are starting to come out a little bit more because traditional country music is pushing its way back in a bit.”

Buck Owens created quite a legacy and Johnny is carrying it on into future generations. He’s pushing it to the front burner. As we spoke I realized that maybe younger fans aren’t aware of what the Bakersfield Sound means, so I asked him to give his best description. He gladly responded with, “In the very early 60s, 1960 I guess, in Nashville the country music was sort of ‘polished,’ it was sort of ‘smooth.’ You probably remember Roy Rogers and others, like Gene Autry. The fiddle sounded more like a violin, nice and smooth. They didn’t really care too much for the steel guitar at that point and the guitars were just sort of laid back. There wasn’t really any bass to speak of. You just had nice smooth country music. My dad didn’t dislike it, but he was just a little bit different. Then Merle, he wanted to hear the guitars and the bass behind them. He wanted to hear that drum kick. The same with my dad, that’s what created that Bakersfield Sound. It wasn’t just my dad and Merle, it was a lot of other people that were involved.”

He seemed to enjoy sharing what he knew on the subject, so he went on, “Probably clear back into the 1940s, my dad and Merle used to play in those labor camps (farms where refugees and migrants would work tirelessly for very low wages amid harsh conditions). I think that was where the Bakersfield Sound kind of came from. It was the Fender Telecaster guitars that turned it up and the bass guitar finally put some bass into the songs. The steel guitar didn’t just sit there and get played lightly, they jumped on the song, and the fiddle, they wanted it to be heard. I think that was the main difference.”

According to Johnny, he felt that his dad and Merle Haggard didn’t want to get caught up in the Nashville scene, they wanted to do their own thing. At that time, Nashville was trying to control everybody and everything and they just wouldn’t subscribe to that. He said, “Bakersfield, California was called ‘Nashville West.’ Some people called it ‘California West,’ but that didn’t even make sense. Nashville West made a lot of sense because you had two different types of country music. People ask me about the Bakersfield Sound and it’s really close to the same, but it’s a tiny bit different. My dad said the Bakersfield Sound probably started in the 40s in the labor camps, where the fiddle and the guitars were loud, and the Big Ten round bucket was actually the bass drum. They just carried that on to stages in the later 50s and the 60s and 70s. There were a lot of people involved in what transitioned into the Bakersfield Sound. My dad said as bad as those labor camps were, there was music every single night.”

We skipped ahead to one of my random questions, just to get to know Johnny better. I asked him, “If you had to write your own personal definition of the word ‘SUCCESS,’ what would it be?” He gave it several seconds and finally said, “Probably smiles on faces and I think the fans have everything to do with that. I don’t think I can be a success if the fans aren’t enjoying the shows. When the fans stop enjoying the show, I’m gonna stop. I’m not gonna push it. I’m not gonna try and make something out of it or anything else. I do it for a few reasons. If there’s enough fans that wanna hear it and go to the shows, then I’m gonna continue to do it. I wanna make my dad proud of me being his son.”

Our talk went back to what’s going on for the not-so-far future as far as music. He shared the scoop on upcoming projects. “‘Act Naturally’ is the first song on an album that we’re gonna release in March or April 2027. I have ‘Together Again,’ that’s coming out in October. I’m also doing a Christmas song, ‘Santa Looked A Lot Like Daddy’ for December. They’re gonna start putting some shows together for 2027 and people can go to my website and listen to music, I think they put about five songs on there. My bio is there and booking information too. We’re gonna continue doing this as long as we can. We enjoy it and we love the faces that we see and the comments that we get afterwards. It’s crazy. It makes you feel so great when people are on their feet wanting to hear more.”

“We’ll play another song and they’ll tell us to do another. We’ll end up with three or four more. These performing arts venues, they want you to do 90 minutes and get off the stage. Our shows typically run about two hours. The venues will say ‘That was a long set,’ well, it wasn’t our fault, the people won’t stop. When the people don’t stop, you just keep going. I think that’s why people are liking these shows, they haven’t heard these songs live in a while, or ever. We just enjoy the heck out of it.”

The last thing Johnny wanted to do was thank the media for always being so supportive. He was so sincere, and he didn’t just mean me, he meant all the media outlets allowing him to share his stories and what’s happening with him currently. He revealed, “I really do appreciate all you guys and girls, keep up the great work. We love doing it and love talking to you guys.” I replied, “That’s really sweet of you to say that because we appreciate you talking to us too. I know it’s a grind and you have to answer a lot of the same questions over and over.” His response? “Don’t mind, don’t mind at all.”

Finally, as we are Center Stage Magazine, I asked Johnny what in his life he felt was his most memorable “Center Stage” moment? He said, “I’ll be very honest, I think getting the comments back from the fans, I really do. I’m blessed and I believe that with my whole heart. Everything I get to hear makes my heart feel great. Now if we’re talking about music and songs, my ‘Center Stage’ moment has to be ‘Big in Vegas.’ I got to watch my dad sing that song from a piece of paper, playing it in a chair, to the studios, to the radio and finally to Las Vegas. I got to go to Las Vegas once as a kid and listened to him singing that song. Then later, we played in Las Vegas as a group and I got to perform that song on stage. It sort of made me tear up because I remember watching my dad singing ‘Big in Vegas’ on stage. Then I got to go there and do it myself. I was at John Ascuaga’s Nugget in Sparks. Every time I sing that song it just reminds me that I got to listen to it from the time it was on a piece of paper to the time I got to watch him doing it on stage.”

Just when I thought he was done sharing, he added a bit more and I would be crazy not to include this part for his fans. He wanted to clarify something that related to what he said above. “You know, we didn’t get to see dad very much, he was gone a lot. He averaged 320 days a year on tour. Him, Merle, George Jones, all those guys, they were on the road 280 to 300 days. My dad, just because him and the band (The Buckaroos) were the number one artist in the 60s for so many years, they were booked a little bit more. It was hard growing up because he was always gone, but he always made sure he was home for Christmas. He’d miss your birthday, but he was there for Christmas. You just had to deal with it. It was still nice. We were dead broke until I was probably almost nine, and then all those songs started hittin’. Then things started changing and things like that, but I started painting fences at eight so I could get a pair of tennis shoes and maybe a pair of pants. If I was lucky to work enough, I might make the money to buy a couple of t-shirts from JC Penney. It was all a lot of fun.”

To sum it up, every story has a pre-story, or many of them. Most of us live multiple lives within one life. Buck Owens did and so did his family. We don’t all get the chance to talk about every chapter we’ve lived, or maybe I should say, “survived.” They aren’t all pretty, but they’re ours. I consider myself so fortunate to listen to these stories firsthand, but I’m even luckier to be able to share some of them with the world. Give it some thought. How many lives have you lived before today? Which ones are you most proud of? Which ones do you wish you could bury? They all made you who you are right now. Write them down, tell them to someone younger than you. Don’t let yourself vanish after you’re gone. You have the chance now. Keep that in mind and give Johnny Owens a follow on his social media sites, and check out his website for what’s coming next, including new show dates. Tell him Center Stage Magazine sent you!