Musician was one of the architects of the Bakersfield Sound
Charles “Fuzzy” Owen was a steel guitar player and vocalist in a Bakersfield country band before he met Merle Haggard and recognized the singer’s potential for soaring greatness. Axfter that, everything changed. Owen put away his guitar to become Haggard’s recording engineer, record producer, booking agent, promoter, road manager, and for more than five decades, his friend.
One of the architects of the Bakersfield Sound, Owen became one of the last pillars of the generation that changed the face of country music in America. He died Monday evening at his home in Bakersfield. He was 91.
“He passed away at 6 p.m. Monday at home. We were with him,” said Owen’s daughter Cindy Blackhawk, who, with her sister, Robin Martens, attended to their father during his final days.
Until the past few months, Owen had always been vital and healthy, never needing a walker or a cane. It was kidney failure, Blackhawk said, and it came on suddenly.
According to Jason Ankeny’s AllMusic biography, Owen was born in Conway, Ark., in 1929. He was barely out of his teens when he arrived in Bakersfield, working in the fields during daylight hours and the honky tonks at night with his cousin Lewis Talley.
After a two-year stint in the Army, Owen returned to Bakersfield where he recorded a duet with Buck Owens’ ex-wife, Bonnie, recalled Norm Hamlet, another steel player who later joined Haggard’s band, the Strangers, and stayed for 49 years.
While the single didn’t get much air play, Owen and Talley obtained the copyright to the song. That
ownership later helped the cousins finance their own record label in Bakersfield. They dropped the “e” and called it Tally Records.
“Fuzzy and my dad go all the way back to the Blackboard club in 1948,” recalled Nashville guitarist Eugene Moles, whose father, the late Gene Moles, was a much-admired guitarist and luthier in Bakersfield.
“Fuzzy used my dad on many recordings for his Tally label on records with Bonnie Owens, Merle Haggard, Johnny Barnett, and many others,” Moles said.
The younger Moles crossed paths with Fuzzy again in 1978, long after Owen had become Haggard’s right-hand man. Moles was playing music in a little bar on Pierce Road (now Buck Owens Boulevard), when Owen called the phone behind the bar and asked for Moles.
“He asked if I could be at Six Flags in Texas overnight,” Moles recalled. “They had a first-class ticket waiting for me. Fuzzy said, ‘All you have to bring is your guitar.’”
As Moles looks back at Fuzzy Owen’s career, he realizes Fuzzy had a vision for Merle. His skills at production and management were exactly what the rising star needed. The music they chose to record, the musicians they included on all those hit records and deep cuts.
Merle needed Fuzzy, and Fuzzy needed Merle.
“Fuzzy did help get Merle going,” said Hamlet. “He recorded him, and helped him get that contract with Capitol Records.”
In those days, an artist or promoter could carry a newly-cut single into a local radio station and ask the disk jockey to play it. And Owen did just that in the early days.
Hamlet, now 85, joined the Strangers in 1967. Was he ever in for a ride.
Fuzzy could be hilariously funny. But when he was serious, you knew it.
“He really took care of business,” Hamlet said.
But one of Fuzzy’s greatest legacies, the veteran steel player said, was recognizing there was a mega-country star hidden beneath the surface of the young singer from Oildale.
“If it hadn’t been for Fuzzy,” Hamlet said, “there might not have been a Merle Haggard.”
Carol Knapp, who for many years has been an avid fan and supporter of country music, especially that which was born and bred in Bakersfield, has been friends with Owen since the 1990s.
Knapp’s birthday falls on April 29, Owen’s on the 30th. So a few years ago, the friends held a joint birthday celebration at Buck Owens’ Crystal Palace. They began doing it every year, but this year, the coronavirus lockdown made it impossible.
“Fuzzy began asking me in October about our party in April,” she said. “That’s how much he was looking forward to it.”
“I am still in shock at how fast a vibrant man’s health could go down so quickly,” she said. “He was going out to breakfast at Spencer’s daily (a longtime tradition). Then I would see him come into the gym wearing his street clothes and get on the treadmill and walk for minutes, longer than I lasted on the treadmill.”
On April 29, she called to wish him a happy birthday, because she was leaving for the mountains and she would not have cell service. But his voicemail was full.
Fuzzy called and left a voicemail wishing Knapp a happy birthday.
He said it was too bad they couldn’t celebrate together, but there were more years ahead for more parties.
Then he left a second voicemail. Knapp could hear that his voice was weak. She kept both messages.
The loss was sudden and jarring. But Owen’s daughter noted that her father lived a long and fruitful life, with much to be thankful for. He was blessed with good health and great music, his late wife, Phyllis, and two devoted daughters.
“He has had a really great year,” she said. The publication of his memoirs, titled “Merle Haggard, Bonnie Owens and Me,” unleashed a new wave of interest in the multi-facetted Fuzzy Owen.
It’s a story of a man who took the ride of his life alongside one of the greatest talents in the history of American music.