Bonnie Owens RIP

[johnfoyle]

http://www.wkyt.com/Global/story.asp?s=4812926

Buck Owens' former wife dies

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. Bonnie Owens, the former wife of Bucks Owens and of Merle Haggard, has died at in a hospice in Bakersfield, California, at age 76 from Alzheimer's.

Owens was first married to Buck Owens, but later married Merle Haggard and after that, Fred McMillan.

Family spokesman Jim Shaw says her passing was not a shock, as her Alzheimer's was sufficiently advanced that she wasn't aware of Buck Owens' death last month.

She had two sons with Owens, Buddy and Michael, and performed as a duo with both Owens and Haggard at separate times.

Shaw says she remained friends with her ex-husbands over the years, and in fact funeral plans call for her ashes to be placed next to Buck Owens in the family mausoleum.

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http://www.emusic.com/album/10605/10605421.html

All Music Guide

( extract)


Laura Cantrell's debut album, Not the Tremblin' Kind, is a mix of originals and covers........... Cantrell's own "Queen of the Coast" tells the story of a female country singer from a bygone era who stands toward the back of a stage while her man basks in the spotlight. (Think Bonnie Owens: The mandolin line even slyly echoes one-time husband Haggard's signature "I Am a Lonesome Fugitive.")
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http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000977162

July 12, 2005

Laura Cantrell

By Tom Roland
McCabe's Guitar Shop, Santa Monica
Saturday, July 9

( extract)

"The Queen of the Coast" toasted the inimitable Bonnie Owens, who put her own aspirations on the back burner and literally stayed in the background as a vocalist for then-husband Merle Haggard. Lines about the "catch in her voice and the beehive on her head" lent a snapshot of the '60s-era Owens, nicely enhanced by a lyrical reference to "Swinging Doors" and mandolin player Jimmy Ryan's recapitulation of the hook from "The Fugitive."

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She was the Queen of the Coast back in nineteen sixty five,
Prettier 'n most, she could keep a room alive,
With the catch in her voice and the beehive on her head.
Do you remember anything she ever said.

Well, some stars fade faster than the rest,
And the promise wore off though she did her best.
She finally looked around for somethin' else to do.
What she found was a man who needed what she knew.

Have you forgotten? Have you forgiven?
Tell me are you livin' just a little in your past every day.
Time sure has changed you; it's walked right on by you.
Does it satisfy you to have so little to say?

For the next ten years she rode around on the bus.
She did washin' and ironin' and pickin' up.
She had a place to stand at the back of the stage.
She was there every night, lookin' her age.

She lent her voice, but she gave her heart.
And, I guess, that must've been the hardest part.
She figured out exactly what was goin' on,
All the love she had given for a song.

Then things unravelled like they usually do.
She got her old heart busted up by husband, number two.

Have you forgotten? Have you forgiven?
Tell me are you livin' just a little in your past every day.
Time sure has changed you; it's walked right on by you.
Does it satisfy you to have so little to say?

Instrumental Break.

I'm not quite sure when she got back on the bus.
But she's still washin' and ironin' and pickin' up.
If you look all the way to the back of the stage,
She's standin' at her mic, lookin' her age.

In a roadstop in Reno at supper time,
The waitress comes over with a look in her eye.
Says: "I saw you in Modesto almost thirty years ago,
"An' I can still remember every song in your show."

"Please Help Me, I'm Falling." "Don't Come Home A-Drinking."
Well, there's a pair of swingin' doors for every cowboy sweetheart tonight.
Time sure has changed you; it's walked right on by you.
Does it satisfy you to have so little to say?
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http://matadorbb.bway.net/archive/index.php/t-3719.html

Laura ( Word , Nov. '05) -
' If you want to try one of my songs I’d suggest Queen Of The Coast, which I wrote about Bonnie Owens, who was married to Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. I put a quote from Merle at the start — John Peel said that it was what persuaded him to give my record a chance.'


http://www.npr.org/programs/wesun/features/2002/cdpicks

December 2002

What are the best albums that never made it to CD?


Laura Cantrell, recording artist and host of WFMU's Radio Thrift Shop, chooses Don't Take Advantage of Me (Capitol, 1965), by Bonnie Owens.

Ms. LAURA CANTRELL (Host, "The Radio Thrift Shop"): My name's Laura Cantrell, and I'm the host of "The Radio Thrift Shop" on WFMU in Jersey City, New Jersey. I'm here today to talk about the album "Don't Take Advantage of Me" by Bonnie Owens, who's one of my favorite singers. And we're here to hear the song "You Don't Have Very Far to Go."

(Soundbite of "You Don't Have Very Far to Go")

Ms. BONNIE OWENS: (Singing) You always find a way to hurt my pride. If I'm not crying, you're not satisfied.

Ms. CANTRELL: She was originally from Oklahoma, and based in the Bakersfield, California, area. Was a yodeling star in her teens and at a very early age, she married another young performing artist who people would come to know as Buck Owens. And really grew up in that very fertile country music scene of Bakersfield, California, along with Buck and Merle Haggard. Incidentally, she was married to both of those gentlemen at certain points in her life.

(Soundbite of "You Don't Have Very Far to Go")

Ms. OWENS: (Singing) I already feel the sadness of a heartbreak settin' in.

Ms. CANTRELL: She really, in my mind, is the woman's voice of the Bakersfield scene of country music, talking about the sort of normal themes of country music women of the day: Why is their man out honky-tonking and we're here at home with the kids? And don't think I'm such a pushover, those kinds of themes in their music. I've chosen, actually, a really heartrending song that Merle Haggert wrote and Bonnie does to absolute note perfection, this sort of simple and direct kind of beauty of the country song that is not represented today in our commercial country music, that's for sure.

(Soundbite of "You Don't Have Very Far to Go")

Ms. OWENS: (Singing) I already feel the sadness of a heartbreak settin' in.


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http://www.bakersfield.com/static/FP/baksound/bonnie.htm

A undated profile/interview

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http://www.cmt.com/artists/news/1529430/04252006/owens_bonnie.jhtml

Obit./profile

[Paulw]

Nice tribute John. Thanks for that.

[johnfoyle]

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-owens26apr26,1,2215935.story?coll=la-headlines-pe-california&ctrack=1&cset=true

Bonnie Owens, 76; Singer and Ex-Wife of 2 Country Stars

By Steve Chawkins, Times Staff Writer
April 26, 2006


Bonnie Owens, a cocktail waitress-turned-singer who was married at different times to country music giants Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, died Monday in Bakersfield after a lengthy struggle with Alzheimer's disease. She was 76.

Her death came four weeks after that of Buck Owens, but she may have been too deeply gripped by Alzheimer's to know that he was gone, according to Jim Shaw, a close family friend.

A couple of years ago, Bonnie was brought to Buck's birthday party at his Crystal Palace nightclub in Bakersfield and was coaxed onstage for a duet with him, recalled Shaw, a longtime keyboard player for Buck Owens and His Buckaroos.

"It was then that Buck realized that what was happening to her was for real," Shaw said of her illness. "She got up there and didn't know the words to her own songs. She had the same radiant smile, the same sparkling eyes — she looked just like the Bonnie we'd all known — but Buck was devastated."

An award-winning entertainer in her own right, Bonnie Owens was a midwife at the birth of the Bakersfield Sound, the twangy country music that boomed out of the oil town's honky-tonks in the 1950s. A waitress at a popular bar called the Blackboard, she would sing from time to time and jot original lyrics on cocktail napkins.

"She was there in the middle of it," Shaw said. "She was kind of the glue for both these guys, right from the beginning when they were just nobody."

She and Owens were married in 1948, but their relationship crumbled several years later. Her marriage to Haggard lasted from 1965 to 1978, but they continued touring together as recently as 2000.

Despite the divorces, she remained friendly with both men.

In a 1999 interview with the Orlando Sentinel, Haggard praised her both as a performer and as a person.

"She's got a real unusual voice," he said. "Once you hear her talk, you'd know her in the dark 300 years from now."

Haggard said his former wife "sort of dropped the torch of her own career to stoke mine."

Born to a sharecropping family in Blanchard, Okla., Bonnie Campbell moved with her parents to Arizona when she was 12. Always musical, she became known in her teens as one of the state's best yodelers.

She met Owens at a roller-rink and sang with him on local radio shows, appearing with a group called Mac MacAtee and the Skillet Lickers. They married when she was 18 — perhaps too young, she told an interviewer years later.

The couple had two sons, Buddy and Michael. By 1951, they had settled in Bakersfield, but the exciting music scene did nothing for their marriage.

"We had one good thing in common," Bonnie told the Bakersfield Californian in 1997. "That was Buddy and Mike. We both wanted to make sure they had adjusted minds. It was a friendly parting."

Bonnie sang in clubs and on local TV and released several successful records, including "Why Don't Daddy Live Here Anymore?" and "Don't Take Advantage of Me." But she became best known after teaming with Haggard, whom she met at a Bakersfield bar in 1961.

The two recorded "Just Between the Two of Us" in 1964, and the song remained a hit on the country charts for more than six months. She was named best female vocalist by the Academy of Country Music in 1967.

After her marriage to Haggard dissolved, she served as a bridesmaid at his next wedding.

At the time of her death, she was separated from her third husband, Fred McMillen. She had moved to Missouri with him in the 1980s but returned to Bakersfield alone about three years ago.

According to Shaw, she belted out country songs even when she was living in a nursing home.

"I love to perform," she told an interviewer in 2000. "I'm a ham-and-a-half."

A public memorial service is set for 11 a.m. Thursday at Greenlawn Southwest Mortuary in Bakersfield.