Singer/songwriter Buck Owens, who died in 2006, was the quintessential exponent of country music’s Bakersfield Sound, a rock-infused, back-to-basics style that burgeoned in the 1950s around Bakersfield, California. His music influenced countless artists, ranging from Dwight Yoakam, whose albums include Dwight Sings Buck, to the Beatles, who recorded a version of “Act Naturally,” Owens’s first No. 1 hit.

“Buck took the shuffle beat and he took the lyrics and the style of honky-tonk, and he added the spunk, the vitality of rock and roll to his sound,” music historian Bill C. Malone has said. “He had a sort of a fusion of a honky-tonk sound and rock and roll energy.”

You can hear the result of that combination on the three-disc Adios, Farewell, Goodbye, Good Luck, So Long: On Stage 1964–1974, the latest in a series of Owens anthologies that has also recently included such albums as The Complete Capitol Singles1957–1966 and The Complete Capitol Singles 1967–1970. The clamshell-boxed set, which features 78 newly mastered and restored live recordings, suggests that he was even more compelling in front of an audience than he was in the studio.

Though at least nine live Owens albums have previously been issued, all but three of the new compendium’s tracks have never before appeared on CD. Twenty-five of them have not been available on any media in the U.S. until now, and another 20 have never been issued in any country before. Discs One and Two offer concerts from Virginia, New York City, Bakersfield, and Las Vegas and Reno, Nevada, while the third CD serves up 1974 shows from Japan, New Zealand, and Australia.

The collection comes with a 56-page booklet that includes photos, discographic information, and copious notes by Grammy-nominated writer and producer Scott B. Bomar. The program features many of Owens’s biggest hits of the sixties and seventies, including “Act Naturally,” “Love’s Gonna Live Here,” “I Don’t Care (Just as Long as You Love Me),” “My Heart Skips a Beat,” “Buckaroo,” “Waitin’ in the Welfare Line,” and “Sam’s Place.” Every one of these numbers topped country charts.

Owens once published a pledge in Nashville’s Music City News that read in part, “I Shall Sing No Song That Is Not a Country Song. I Shall Make No Record That Is Not a Country Record.” His rock roots ran deep, however, as evidenced by the inclusion in these concerts of such numbers as the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout,” the Coasters’ “Along Came Jones,” and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” and “Roll Over Beethoven.”

Also Noteworthy

Tami Neilson, Neon Cowgirl. Romantic moods permeate many of the lyrics on Tami Neilson’s Neon Cowgirl, which includes the word “heart” in three of its titles and “love” in two of the others. There’s also a great deal of rich and impassioned vocal work by Neilson, who recorded the CD live in an Auckland studio with a band that included guitarists, a pedal steel player, a keyboardist, a saxophonist, a cellist, and three violinists.

Neilson, a native of Canada who lives in New Zealand, accurately describes the material as “crossbreeds of [Elvis] Presley and Patsy [Cline], [Roy] Orbison and kd lang, the blues of Memphis, the twang of Texas, the cinematic torch of Judy Garland.” As this suggests, she lets no one genre define her; like her previous CDs, Neon Cowgirl finds her featuring songs that draw on pop, country, rockabilly, and more.

She’s at her best, though, on torch ballads such as “Foolish Heart” (one of five numbers written with her brother, Jay, to whom the album is dedicated) and the self-penned “One Less Heart.” Both those tracks recall Orbison, a lifelong influence. Also excellent is the title track, where Neilson sounds redolent of Karen Carpenter and shares vocal duties with fellow New Zealander and Crowded House leader Neil Finn. 

Maria Muldaur, One Hour Mama: The Blues of Victoria Spivey. Maria Muldaur hasn’t had a big hit record since 1974, when she scored with the Grammy-nominated “Midnight at the Oasis” as well as “I’m a Woman.” Anyone who tuned out after those numbers, however, has missed a long career that has eschewed commerciality and pop in favor of sublime roots music, blues, and jazz.

This latest album, Muldaur’s 44^th solo record, is a tribute to the late blues artist Victoria Spivey, who recorded from the mid-1920s to the mid-1960s. An illustrated 12-page booklet accompanying the CD includes Muldaur’s memories of Spivey, who mentored her when she was starting out, as well as a bio of Spivey and a piece Spivey wrote in 1964 in which she lauded Muldaur’s “fine blues voice.”

The album features playful, affectionate renditions of a dozen songs written by or associated with Spivey, three of which are remasters of recordings culled from previous Muldaur LPs. Highlights include the Porter Grainger title cut, Andy Razaf’s “My Handy Man,” and Spivey’s “No, Papa, No!” Also excellent are “Gotta Have What It Takes” and “What Makes You Act Like That,” which respectively find Muldaur dueting with Taj Mahal and Elvin Bishop, and “Organ Grinder Blues,” one of two tracks to feature Tuba Skinny, a New Orleans ensemble that recorded an entire album (Let’s Get Happy Together) with Muldaur in 2021.

Various artists, Something There – Remembering Jeffrey Foskett. It’s likely that you don’t know Jeffrey Foskett’s name, but just as likely that you’ve heard his voice. The power-pop singer, songwriter, arranger, and producer, who died of throat cancer in 2023 at age 67, toured extensively with the Beach Boys and, in the 1990s, led the touring band of Brian Wilson, who called him “one of the top five greatest voices I’ve ever heard.” Foskett also sang on every track of That’s Why God Made the Radio, the Beach Boys’ 2012 comeback album, and contributed to recordings by America, Christopher Cross, Roy Orbison, Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, and many other acts.

Though a little uneven, this career retrospective makes clear why so many artists employed his talents and why he was a particularly good fit for the Beach Boys, whose influence imbues the program. Its 25 tracks include 15 previously unreleased recordings and material dating from as far back as 1980. Among the contents: Wilson’s “Mary Honey,” a heretofore unissued 1994 duet by Foskett and the composer; the bright, catchy “You Remind Me of the Sun”; “The Word Go,” a duet with singer/songwriter Jeff Larson; and four brief acapella selections that show off Foskett’s range and falsetto.

Also featured are several numbers by other artists that Foskett produced or co-produced, among them America’s “Remembering,” which could be mistaken for a lost Beach Boys standout; and “I Can Hear Music,” which is beautifully sung by Foskett’s daughter, Katie.

Various artists, That’ll Flat…Git It! Vol. 50 – Rockabilly & Rock ‘n’ Roll from the Vaults of Columbia & Epic Records. The 50^th volume in the Bear Family label’s gargantuan That’ll Flat…Git It! series is the fifth to be devoted to material from Columbia Records and its Epic subsidiary. The Columbia focus isn’t surprising, given the vastness and richness of its artist roster in the 1950s, the period on which this series mostly concentrates.

The 30 tracks on this release include numbers from some of the label’s biggest acts of the era. Many of them are known primarily for country recordings, but the program here emphasizes their rock and rockabilly leanings. Selections include Johnny Horton’s “Lover’s Rock,” “Let’s Take the Long Way Home,” and “The Wild One”; Johnny Cash’s “What Do I Care”; Lefty Frizzell’s “From an Angel to a Devil”; Marty Robbins’s “Long Tall Sally”; and Carl Perkins’s “Pointed Toe Shoes,” which served as a follow-up to his classic “Blue Suede Shoes.”