Wit & Attitude Quote by Buck Owens

Buck Owens is drawing a family tree of American rule-breakers, then casually planting himself on the same branch. The name-drop pairing is the point: Bob Wills, the Western swing bandleader who treated genre boundaries like a suggestion, and Little Richard, the rock-and-roll detonator who turned gospel heat into secular spectacle. Putting them in the same sentence isn’t a history lesson; it’s Owens declaring that authenticity isn’t a sound, it’s an attitude.

The blunt phrasing - “did what the hell he thought” - matters. It’s not romantic “following your dreams” talk; it’s working-musician pragmatism with a little defiance baked in. Owens is signaling that his own music, often filed neatly under “country,” came from a more chaotic American bloodstream: dancehall swing, rhythm-and-blues charge, stagecraft, and the willingness to offend purists. That’s the subtext aimed at Nashville gatekeepers and critics who preferred “country” to behave like a museum.

Context sharpens it. Owens helped define the Bakersfield sound, a hard-edged alternative to the slick, orchestrated Nashville style of the 1960s. Bakersfield wasn’t just a sonic shift toward Telecasters and backbeats; it was a class-and-geography statement - California honky-tonks, migrant labor routes, bars that wanted volume and snap, not velvet polish. Invoking Wills and Little Richard is Owens insisting that country’s future comes from cross-pollination and nerve. His influences aren’t endorsements of genre; they’re permissions to be unruly.