Country Music

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ON JULY 17, 1974, DON RICH LEFT BUCK OWENS’S BAKERSFIELD STUDIO ON A MOTORCYCLE TO JOIN HIS FAMILY FOR VACATION. HOURS LATER, HE WAS DEAD AT 32—AND BUCK SAID THE JOY WENT OUT OF HIS MUSIC WITH HIM. Before the red, white, and blue guitars, before Hee Haw, and before Buck Owens became one of country music’s most recognizable men, there was a young fiddle player from Washington named Don Ulrich. Buck first heard him in Tacoma near the end of the 1950s. Don was considering college and a career teaching music, but Buck saw a musician who could anticipate every turn in a song and make two voices sound as if they had been raised together. Don shortened his name to Don Rich and followed Buck south. Together, they built a country sound far removed from the polished records coming out of Nashville: Fender Telecasters, hard drums, sharp fiddle breaks, and harmonies strong enough to cut through crowded dance halls. Buck sang the lead. Don answered from just over his shoulder. When “Act Naturally” reached No. 1 in 1963, Don was there. He remained beside Buck through “Love’s Gonna Live Here,” “Together Again,” “I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail,” “Buckaroo,” and the run of records that turned Bakersfield into Nashville’s loudest rival. Don led the Buckaroos, played guitar and fiddle, arranged harmonies, and supplied the high tenor voice behind many of Buck’s biggest records. Even listeners who did not know his name knew the sound he made possible. Their partnership also extended beyond the stage. They hunted together, worked side by side in the studio, and became close to one another’s families. Buck later described Don as a brother, a son, and a best friend. But there was one part of Don’s life Buck feared. Motorcycles. Don loved riding them. Buck had reportedly spent years asking him to stop. On July 17, 1974, Don finished working at Buck’s Bakersfield studio and prepared to ride north toward the Central Coast, where his wife and children were waiting for him to join a fishing vacation. Buck reportedly urged him not to take the motorcycle. Don left anyway. That evening, while traveling north on Highway 1 near Morro Bay, his motorcycle struck the center divider at Yerba Buena Street. Investigators reportedly found no skid marks and no clear mechanical failure explaining the crash. Don was taken to Sierra Vista Hospital in San Luis Obispo and pronounced dead at 10:55 p.m. He was thirty-two. Buck continued recording, appearing on television, and performing with new versions of the Buckaroos. From the outside, the career kept moving. But the voice and guitar that had answered him through his greatest years were gone. For years, Buck spoke little publicly about Don’s death. When he finally opened up in the late 1990s, he admitted that although he had continued working, his musical life had largely ended the night Don died. The records made after July 1974 still carried Buck Owens’s name. What they could no longer carry was Don’s high harmony, the bright Telecaster beside Buck’s own, and the man who had helped turn a California oil town into one of the capitals of country music

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.”

DON RICH LEFT BUCK OWENS’S STUDIO ON A MOTORCYCLE. HOURS LATER, BUCK LOST THE VOICE THAT HAD MADE BAKERSFIELD SOUND LIKE BAKERSFIELD.

Before the red, white, and blue guitars, before Hee Haw, before Buck Owens became one of country music’s most recognizable men, there was a young fiddle player from Washington named Don Ulrich.

Buck first heard him in Tacoma near the end of the 1950s. Don was thinking about college and a career teaching music, but Buck heard something different. He heard a musician who could anticipate every turn in a song.

More than that, he heard a voice that could rise beside his own and make two men sound like they had been singing together since childhood.

Don shortened his name to Don Rich.

Then he followed Buck south.

Buck Did Not Just Find A Band Member

Don Rich was never only a sideman.

He became the sound just over Buck Owens’s shoulder. The high harmony. The sharp guitar. The fiddle break. The clean answer to Buck’s lead vocal.

Together, they built a country sound far removed from the polished records coming out of Nashville.

Fender Telecasters.

Hard drums.

Sharp fiddle lines.

Harmonies strong enough to cut through crowded dance halls and car radios without losing their edge.

Buck was the name out front.

But Don was the spark that made the sound burn brighter.

Bakersfield Started Fighting Nashville

When “Act Naturally” reached No. 1 in 1963, Don was there.

He stayed beside Buck through “Love’s Gonna Live Here,” “Together Again,” “I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail,” “Buckaroo,” and the run of records that turned Bakersfield into Nashville’s loudest rival.

Don led the Buckaroos. He played guitar and fiddle. He arranged harmonies. He carried the high tenor that lifted many of Buck’s biggest records.

Even listeners who did not know his name knew what he made possible.

They heard it when Buck’s voice rose and Don’s came in above it.

They heard it when the Telecaster snapped.

They heard it when the band sounded too bright, too hard, and too alive to belong to the smoother Nashville machine.

The Bond Went Past The Records

Buck and Don were not only tied together by hit songs.

They worked side by side in the studio. They hunted together. Their families grew close. The years on the road and in the recording room turned the partnership into something deeper than star and bandleader.

Buck later described Don as a brother, a son, and a best friend.

That kind of connection is hard to explain from the outside.

But the records explain part of it.

Buck did not sound like a singer being backed by hired musicians. He sounded like a man being answered by someone who already knew where the song was headed before it got there.

There Was One Thing Buck Feared

Don loved motorcycles.

Buck hated that he loved them.

He had reportedly spent years asking Don to stop riding. Maybe it was worry. Maybe it was instinct. Maybe Buck simply understood that the whole Bakersfield machine depended on Don Rich making it safely from one place to the next.

On July 17, 1974, Don finished working at Buck’s Bakersfield studio.

His wife and children were waiting on the Central Coast for a fishing vacation.

Buck reportedly urged him not to take the motorcycle.

Don left anyway.

Highway 1 Took Him Before He Reached His Family

That evening, Don was riding north on Highway 1 near Morro Bay.

At Yerba Buena Street, his motorcycle struck the center divider.

Investigators reportedly found no skid marks and no clear mechanical failure explaining the crash.

Don was taken to Sierra Vista Hospital in San Luis Obispo.

He was pronounced dead at 10:55 p.m.

He was thirty-two years old.

A man who had spent the day inside Buck Owens’s studio was gone before he could reach the vacation his family was waiting for.

Buck Kept Moving Because The Business Kept Moving

From the outside, Buck Owens’s career did not stop.

He kept recording. He kept appearing on television. He kept performing with new versions of the Buckaroos. The name still carried weight, and the industry still knew how to keep a famous man working.

But the sound beside him was gone.

The high harmony was gone.

The bright Telecaster line was gone.

The man who had helped Buck turn Bakersfield into a country-music capital was no longer standing just behind his shoulder.

For years, Buck spoke little publicly about Don’s death.

When he finally opened up later, he admitted that although he had continued working, the joy had largely gone out of the music.

What Don Rich Really Took With Him

The deepest part of this story is not only that Don Rich died young.

It is that he died while the sound he helped build was still alive, still powerful, and still unfinished.

A Tacoma fiddle player.

A Bakersfield studio.

A motorcycle Buck feared.

A family waiting near the coast.

Then Highway 1.

Buck Owens kept going because the records, cameras, and crowds kept asking him to.

But after July 17, 1974, the music could no longer carry the same answer.

Don Rich had not just played in Buck Owens’s band.

He had been the voice beside Buck’s voice, the guitar beside Buck’s guitar, and the man who helped make Bakersfield sound like it had finally found its own country language.

When he died, Buck Owens did not only lose a musician.

He lost the joy that had been singing back to him.

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CARTER STANLEY DIED IN 1966. RALPH STANLEY COULD HAVE LET THE BROTHERS’ SOUND DIE WITH HIM. INSTEAD, HE WALKED BACK INTO THE CLINCH MOUNTAINS AND KEPT SINGING LIKE THE GRAVE WAS STILL LISTENING. Before Ralph Stanley became the old mountain voice that startled a new generation, he was one half of a brother sound. Ralph and Carter Stanley came out of southwestern Virginia with banjo, guitar, gospel harmony, and a kind of lonesome singing that did not polish the sorrow out of country music. They were not trying to sound smooth. They sounded like church benches, coal roads, family cemeteries, and hard mornings in the mountains. Then Carter died in 1966. For Ralph, it was not only the loss of a brother. It was the loss of the voice beside him, the front line of the Stanley Brothers, the man who had helped carry their songs through radio stations, schoolhouses, theaters, and bluegrass stages. A lesser musician might have stopped there, or tried to soften the sound for a different age. Ralph did the opposite. He kept the Clinch Mountain Boys going. He leaned deeper into the old mountain style. He sang gospel. He sang death songs. He brought younger musicians into his band — men like Ricky Skaggs and Keith Whitley — and sent part of that mountain sound forward through country music again. Decades later, when O Brother, Where Art Thou? carried old-time and bluegrass music into millions of homes, Ralph Stanley’s voice on “O Death” did not sound like a comeback trick. It sounded like something that had never left. By then, he was an old man. But the strange thing was this: the older his voice became, the closer it seemed to the ground. It had cracks in it. It had air in it. It had the weight of Carter’s absence, the church songs of Virginia, and the long road of a man who kept singing after the family harmony was broken. Ralph Stanley did not replace his brother. He made room for the silence beside him — and let the mountain answer back.

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DAVID BOWIE RELEASED “BLACKSTAR” ON HIS 69TH BIRTHDAY — TWO DAYS LATER, THE WORLD REALIZED HE HAD BEEN TURNING HIS OWN DEATH INTO ART. New York, January 2016. Nobody knew how close he was. The mask was never just costume. The secrecy was never just style. For decades, David Bowie had turned transformation into a language — Ziggy, the Thin White Duke, the alien, the gentleman, the ghost. Then came the final transformation, and he kept that one private until the work was finished. Blackstar arrived on his birthday. Fans heard mystery. Jazz. Darkness. Strange beauty. They did not yet know they were hearing a man leave instructions from the edge. Then came “Lazarus.” The hospital bed. The blindfold. The thin body moving like it was already halfway between worlds. Bowie sang from inside an image no one fully understood until January 10, when the news came: he had died after an 18-month battle with liver cancer. Suddenly the album changed shape. It was a door he had built, stepped through, and left behind for everyone else to stare at. Most artists say goodbye after the world knows they are leaving. Bowie did it before anyone knew there was a goodbye to hear. Was Blackstar his final album, or the last character David Bowie ever created?

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In 1988, long before the world knew the roar of Ten, a 23-year-old gas station attendant named Eddie Vedder was just a shy guy with a notebook full of lyrics and a battered surfboard. While the San Diego rock scene was loud and chaotic, Eddie found his anchor in Beth Liebling. By day, he hauled equipment for local bands; by night, he poured his soul into a microphone at dimly lit dive bars. Beth was the one who saw the fire behind the flannel. During a particularly rough set at a cramped club, Eddie stepped off the stage, grabbed Beth’s hand, and whispered a melody he’d just written—a song about a man who had nothing to give but his “better man” self. The jukebox was humming, the air smelled of stale beer and salt water, and for a moment, the rock star of the future was just a boy promising the world to the girl who believed in him first.

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CARTER STANLEY DIED IN 1966. RALPH STANLEY COULD HAVE LET THE BROTHERS’ SOUND DIE WITH HIM. INSTEAD, HE WALKED BACK INTO THE CLINCH MOUNTAINS AND KEPT SINGING LIKE THE GRAVE WAS STILL LISTENING. Before Ralph Stanley became the old mountain voice that startled a new generation, he was one half of a brother sound. Ralph and Carter Stanley came out of southwestern Virginia with banjo, guitar, gospel harmony, and a kind of lonesome singing that did not polish the sorrow out of country music. They were not trying to sound smooth. They sounded like church benches, coal roads, family cemeteries, and hard mornings in the mountains. Then Carter died in 1966. For Ralph, it was not only the loss of a brother. It was the loss of the voice beside him, the front line of the Stanley Brothers, the man who had helped carry their songs through radio stations, schoolhouses, theaters, and bluegrass stages. A lesser musician might have stopped there, or tried to soften the sound for a different age. Ralph did the opposite. He kept the Clinch Mountain Boys going. He leaned deeper into the old mountain style. He sang gospel. He sang death songs. He brought younger musicians into his band — men like Ricky Skaggs and Keith Whitley — and sent part of that mountain sound forward through country music again. Decades later, when O Brother, Where Art Thou? carried old-time and bluegrass music into millions of homes, Ralph Stanley’s voice on “O Death” did not sound like a comeback trick. It sounded like something that had never left. By then, he was an old man. But the strange thing was this: the older his voice became, the closer it seemed to the ground. It had cracks in it. It had air in it. It had the weight of Carter’s absence, the church songs of Virginia, and the long road of a man who kept singing after the family harmony was broken. Ralph Stanley did not replace his brother. He made room for the silence beside him — and let the mountain answer back.

Country Music

A TEXAS RANGER HEARD JOHNNY RODRIGUEZ SINGING FROM A JAIL CELL. TWO YEARS LATER, THE KID FROM SABINAL HAD A NO. 1 RECORD IN NASHVILLE. Johnny Rodriguez was eighteen when he landed in jail in 1969. The old story says he and some friends stole a goat and cooked it. Other accounts say it was an unpaid fine. Either way, he was locked up in Texas with no record deal, no manager, and no reason to think anybody outside Sabinal knew his name. Then he started singing. Texas Ranger Joaquin Jackson heard him from the cell and told promoter Happy Shahan. Shahan brought Johnny out to Alamo Village, the western movie set and tourist town outside Brackettville. Rodriguez sang there for visitors, cowboys, families, and whoever happened to stop long enough to listen. In 1971, Tom T. Hall and Bobby Bare heard him at Alamo Village. They told him to go to Nashville. Johnny arrived with a guitar and fourteen dollars. Hall put him in his band, helped him find songs, and got him in front of Mercury Records. Less than a year later, Rodriguez had a contract. Then the records started coming. “Pass Me By” hit the Top 10. “You Always Come Back (To Hurtin’ Me)” went No. 1 in 1973. So did “Ridin’ My Thumb to Mexico.” He became one of the first Mexican American singers to break through nationally in country music, singing in English, slipping Spanish into the records, and making Nashville listen to a voice that had come out of South Texas. The first room that heard Johnny Rodriguez sing was a jail cell. The next rooms had country radio playing him all the way across America.

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ON JULY 17, 1974, DON RICH LEFT BUCK OWENS’S BAKERSFIELD STUDIO ON A MOTORCYCLE TO JOIN HIS FAMILY FOR VACATION. HOURS LATER, HE WAS DEAD AT 32—AND BUCK SAID THE JOY WENT OUT OF HIS MUSIC WITH HIM. Before the red, white, and blue guitars, before Hee Haw, and before Buck Owens became one of country music’s most recognizable men, there was a young fiddle player from Washington named Don Ulrich. Buck first heard him in Tacoma near the end of the 1950s. Don was considering college and a career teaching music, but Buck saw a musician who could anticipate every turn in a song and make two voices sound as if they had been raised together. Don shortened his name to Don Rich and followed Buck south. Together, they built a country sound far removed from the polished records coming out of Nashville: Fender Telecasters, hard drums, sharp fiddle breaks, and harmonies strong enough to cut through crowded dance halls. Buck sang the lead. Don answered from just over his shoulder. When “Act Naturally” reached No. 1 in 1963, Don was there. He remained beside Buck through “Love’s Gonna Live Here,” “Together Again,” “I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail,” “Buckaroo,” and the run of records that turned Bakersfield into Nashville’s loudest rival. Don led the Buckaroos, played guitar and fiddle, arranged harmonies, and supplied the high tenor voice behind many of Buck’s biggest records. Even listeners who did not know his name knew the sound he made possible. Their partnership also extended beyond the stage. They hunted together, worked side by side in the studio, and became close to one another’s families. Buck later described Don as a brother, a son, and a best friend. But there was one part of Don’s life Buck feared. Motorcycles. Don loved riding them. Buck had reportedly spent years asking him to stop. On July 17, 1974, Don finished working at Buck’s Bakersfield studio and prepared to ride north toward the Central Coast, where his wife and children were waiting for him to join a fishing vacation. Buck reportedly urged him not to take the motorcycle. Don left anyway. That evening, while traveling north on Highway 1 near Morro Bay, his motorcycle struck the center divider at Yerba Buena Street. Investigators reportedly found no skid marks and no clear mechanical failure explaining the crash. Don was taken to Sierra Vista Hospital in San Luis Obispo and pronounced dead at 10:55 p.m. He was thirty-two. Buck continued recording, appearing on television, and performing with new versions of the Buckaroos. From the outside, the career kept moving. But the voice and guitar that had answered him through his greatest years were gone. For years, Buck spoke little publicly about Don’s death. When he finally opened up in the late 1990s, he admitted that although he had continued working, his musical life had largely ended the night Don died. The records made after July 1974 still carried Buck Owens’s name. What they could no longer carry was Don’s high harmony, the bright Telecaster beside Buck’s own, and the man who had helped turn a California oil town into one of the capitals of country music

Country Music

GRAM PARSONS DIED IN ROOM 8 AT THE JOSHUA TREE INN. ONE DAY LATER, HIS FRIEND STOLE THE BODY FROM LAX AND DROVE IT BACK TO THE DESERT. By September 1973, Gram Parsons had not become a stadium name. But inside the roots of country rock, he had already left a scar. He had pushed country music into The Byrds, helped build the Flying Burrito Brothers, and called his sound “Cosmic American Music” — country, soul, gospel, and rock all tangled together. Then he went back to Joshua Tree. Parsons had loved that desert for years. After finishing the sessions that would become Grievous Angel, he traveled there with friends and checked into the Joshua Tree Inn. On September 19, 1973, at only 26 years old, he died after a drug overdose. His body was prepared to be flown to Louisiana for burial. But Phil Kaufman remembered a promise. Parsons had once told Kaufman he did not want a formal funeral. He wanted to be cremated in Joshua Tree. So Kaufman and Michael Martin showed up at Los Angeles International Airport in a borrowed hearse, posed as mortuary workers, and managed to take the coffin before it could be shipped east. They drove the body back into the desert. Near Joshua Tree, they opened the casket, poured gasoline inside, and set it on fire. The cremation was crude, illegal, and unfinished. Authorities recovered the remains, and Parsons was eventually buried in Louisiana. Kaufman and Martin were punished not for stealing a body, but for stealing the coffin. The story became almost too strange to separate from the music. But underneath the madness was the shape of Gram Parsons’ whole life: a man born near money, pulled toward country songs, never fully claimed by Nashville, never fully owned by rock, and finally carried back to the desert by someone who believed he was keeping a promise. His grave ended up in Louisiana. But the myth stayed in Joshua Tree.