The Buck Owens Collection (1992)

Before he became the pickin' and grinnin' rube of Hee Haw, Alvis Edgar ''Buck'' Owens was the hippest country cat ever to sport a Nudie suit and a Fender Telecaster. Owens wasn't the architect of the Bakersfield sound — honky-tonk served with shrill guitars, pedal steels, scrappy fiddles, and stratospherically high harmony voices — but he helped to define and refine it in the '60s. The Buck Owens Collection includes not only the predictable hits — ''Act Naturally,'' ''I've Got a Tiger by the Tail,'' ''Waitin' in Your Welfare Line'' — but also his first charting single, ''Second Fiddle,'' and duets with Rose Maddox, Emmylou Harris, and Dwight Yoakam. As a songwriter, Owens was never at his best after the early '70s, but as this set shows, his sweeping trademark vocals saved many a cornball turn. A-