Buck 'Em

 

Excerpted from Buck 'Em: The Autobiography of Buck Owens with Randy Poe, ©2013:

Back in February of '64, while "Love's Gonna Live Here" was still sitting at the top of the country charts, the Beatles were having their first number one pop hit in America with "I want to hold your hand." Oh man, I can't tell you how angry some country artists got when the Beatles started having so much success. There were plenty of older country stars going all the way back to the '50s that thought rock & roll was the worst thing that ever happened. They said it was the Devil's music. They didn't just think that it was turning kids into juvenile delinquents-- they thought was turning kids away from country music. Which it was. And when the Beatles came along, you can bet that teenagers wanted to hear the Beatles a lot more than they wanted to hear Eddy Arnold or Ernest Tubb.

If you were a country singer, you weren't supposed to like rock & roll. But I never was one to follow other people's rules, and I never believed that you had to like one kind of music to the exclusion of all other kinds. I like Bill Monroe and Bob Wills and Lefty Frizzell and George Jones, but I like Little Richard and Elvis and Chuck Berry and the Beatles, too.

I like pretty much every genre of music. The key thing for me is that I want an emotional element-- I want to feel the love or the happiness, or the loss or frustration. I want to really connect with the song.

I remember watching American Bandstand all those years ago and the dancers would rate a song they had just danced to: "It has a really good beat, I give it a nine!" Without exception, I hated those songs.

(An aside: it is never terribly difficult to figure out what book I'm reading.)