Requiescat in Pace

Longtime readers of The Swill know that we believe in letting the dead bury the dead, and have no truck with nostalgic eulogies. Consistency has never been our strong suit, however, and it's somehow just too bad that Buck Owens has passed on.

Over the past decade, unrepentent fans of country music could converse amicably with even the most fashionably disenfranchised musical fascisto, so long as the topic remained Johnny Cash. It was Okay to like Cash, and maybe alright to dig some Hank Williams (Senior or III), but the young hipsters never really got the now-late, always-great Buck Owens.

Perhaps this was because Buck's persona didn't encourage flights of tough-guy fantasy on the part of the voluntary outsider. Perhaps he would have done well to sing more frequent tales of shooting people, or perhaps he should have been less of a business tycoon. Perhaps the bad hair and retro-hickdom of "Hee Haw" weighed him down publicly as much as the death of guitarist Don Rich slowed him down musically. Perhaps he didn't seem pre- or anti-commerical enough to make an attractive commodity.

Whatever. We wish people knew more than "Tiger by the Tail," we wish we could see him play live, and we wish we had the right words to salute his music. R.I.P.