By ROBERT PRICE

Californian staff writer

She was married to the two best-known instigators of a 20-year music phenomenon. She sang in the two smokiest, twangiest honky-tonks of the era. Heck, she even served drinks to the fruit-pickers and oil-field workers who truly made the Bakersfield Sound what it was.

Bonnie Owens, the former wife of both Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, had a front-row seat for a wild, influential chapter in American music history, and she’s grateful for it.

But talk about coincidences.

Bonnie Campbell was born in Oklahoma City to a pair of sharecroppers, one of eight children. She first got to know Alvis Edgar “Buck” Owens Jr. at the Mazona Roller Rink in Mesa, Ariz., in about 1945. “He was a pretty good roller skater,” said Bonnie, just 15 or so at the time. “But I liked him because he played guitar.”

The two dated, but Buck, who is six weeks older, was surprised nonetheless when he showed up for his daily 15-minute radio show, “Buck and Britt,” co-starring Theryl Ray Britten, and there was Bonnie. “What’re you doin’ here?” he asked, assuming she’d come to watch him. “Singin’,” she answered. He didn’t even know she could carry a tune.

In 1947, Buck helped Bonnie get a job singing with him on another radio show, this one starring Mac MacAtee and the Skillet Lickers.

By January 1948, they were married. Son Alan Edgar “Buddy” Owens arrived on the scene five months later, and Michael Lynn Owens, their second son, was born in March 1950. Buck picked oranges; Bonnie stayed home with the kids.

But by 1951 it became evident that the marriage wasn’t working. Bonnie and the two boys left for Bakersfield, moving in with Buck’s favorite aunt and uncle, Vernon and Lucille Ellington. Buck arrived soon afterward, closely followed by his parents.

Buck set out to look for work in the local saloons, and it didn’t take long for him to hook up with steel guitarist Dusty Rhodes and, four months later, Bill Woods and the Orange Blossom Playboys.

It wasn’t quite so easy for Bonnie, who had to take a job carhopping at a hamburger joint at Union and Truxtun avenues. Buck’s aunt took care of the boys while Bonnie served up chili dogs and chocolate-malteds.

Buck and Bonnie remained legally married, though they were separated, because neither could afford a divorce.

“And besides,” Bonnie said, “we had one good thing in common. That was Buddy and Mike. We both wanted to make sure they had adjusted minds. It was a friendly parting.”

One day, Thurman Billings, the owner of the Clover Club, came into the drive-in with his wife and asked if Bonnie would like to be a cocktail waitress. They knew Bonnie already, having seen her sneak her way onto the Clover Club stage more than once to sing alongside Fuzzy Owen and his cousin, Lewis Talley. He knew she had also sung a little at the Blackboard, with Bill Woods’ permission. “Anytime you want to sing,” Billings told Bonnie, “you get up and sing.”

And so she did, setting down her cocktail tray once or twice a night to perform next to Fuzzy, Lewis and other performers: Sometimes fiddler Jelly Sanders, sometimes guitarists Billy Mize or Roy Nichols. She did the same at the Blackboard, where Woods was the boss up on the stage and senior cocktail waitress Anna Mae Carlson was boss down on the floor. Bonnie’s sister, Betty Spence Bryant, was one of the veteran waitresses.

When Cousin Herb Henson, a prominent local disc jockey and occasional honky-tonk piano player, landed his “Trading Post” TV show on KERO in September 1953, the entire Clover Club band, Bonnie included, became the program’s house band.

Bonnie sometimes picked up her children from school and brought them to the television station for the live broadcast, which started at 5 p.m. Afterward, she’d go home and cook dinner for the boys before leaving for her waitressing job.

Bonnie eventually recorded songs on the Mar-Vel label with sometime boyfriend Fuzzy Owen and his band, the Sun Valley Playboys. She later cut a well-received duet album with Owen on Lewis Talley’s label, Tally Records (later released on Capitol Records), titled “Just Between the Two of Us.”

But even after she began placing records on the charts, she continued waitressing at the Clover Club and the Blackboard when she wasn’t out performing on the road.

In 1961, while slinging screwdrivers and Schlitz beer at the Blackboard at night, she caught a young singer she’d seen once before, at a Lefty Frizzell concert at the old Rainbow Gardens dance hall. It was Haggard, whom Frizzell had allowed up on stage that night in 1953. But Haggard had been out of circulation for a while, with good reason - he was just a few months out of San Quentin prison, having serving a 21ø2 year sentence for burglary.

She introduced herself to Haggard that night, but the two didn’t get to know each other well until Haggard put in a guest appearance on Cousin Herb’s “Trading Post.”

Soon afterward, Fuzzy, who by this time had become Haggard’s manager, suggested that Bonnie and Merle re-cut “Just Between the Two of Us,” and in 1964 they did just that.

“We’d sent records to disc jockeys all over the country, and we’d include hand-written notes in each one,” Bonnie said. “I was in touch with every disc jockey in the country. When we started doing it, we’d put Merle’s record in with mine. It wasn’t long until I was putting my record in with Merle’s.”

“Just Between the Two of Us” was their first and only hit together, spending 26 weeks on the charts before it was overtaken by “(My Friends are Gonna be) Strangers,” which proved to be Haggard’s breakthrough song.

The two songs got the attention of Ken Nelson, the A&R man for Capitol Records, and in April 1965, with Fuzzy’s blessing and encouragement, Haggard signed with the label. But not all was well with Haggard. His marriage to Leona Hobbs was in a shambles, and his four children were living with Merle’s mother. Bonnie was touring in Alaska, and Haggard missed her. He flew to Seattle and called her: Could he visit, and maybe look for some club work? She said OK. Two weeks later, on June 28, 1965, they were married in Tijuana.

Bonnie had remained good friends with Buck, touring with his band on at least one occasion, in 1963. In 1965, the two crossed paths again, professionally speaking, when the newly formed Strangers (Merle, Bonnie, Fuzzy, Roy Nichols, bassist Jerry Ward and, soon afterward, “girl drummer” Helen “Peaches” Price, from Wynn Stewart’s band) signed with Omac Artist Corp., a booking agency owned by Buck and his manager, Jack McFadden. Merle and the rest of the Strangers agreed they could do far worse than to retrace the footsteps of Buck Owens, who by this time was an undisputed chart-buster.

Things were never tense among Buck, Bonnie and Merle, though no doubt their fans wondered about the trio’s apparently overlapping love lives.

“There was never animosity with Buck,” Bonnie said. “Buck and Merle have always gotten along well ... I was broken up with Buck long before I ever met Merle, and there was a whole lot in between. I can’t fathom either one, Buck or Merle, even thinking about it.”

Bonnie had done some songwriting before she married Haggard, but under his tutelage, she began to blossom. She wrote whole songs, partial songs, small pieces of songs - and sometimes even got composer credit for writing nothing at all.

“Merle wrote every verse of the song, ‘Today I Started Loving You Again,’ but he had another verse there that I thought didn’t add anything,” Bonnie said. “In fact it took something away. I talked him out of putting in those four lines, and he gave me half-writer credit.”

Their marriage lasted until 1978, although it was as good as over in 1974, when Bonnie stopped touring with the Strangers. The two separated for good in 1975, with Merle doing his best to romance Dolly Parton, whose “In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad)” he had recorded seven years earlier, at Bonnie’s suggestion.

But when Merle married Leona Williams in October 1978, the ink on his divorce decree barely dry, Bonnie was a bridesmaid. She eventually resumed touring with the Strangers.

“I had a lot of fun being married to Merle, but we never should have been married,” Bonnie said. “We were too good a friends. I was older, seven years older, and there was like a big sister thing going on. But there was a lot of mutual respect, too.”

Today, Bonnie, 67, lives in rural Missouri, not far from the Arkansas line, with her husband of 16 years, Ridgecrest native Fred McMillen. She still tours regularly with Haggard and the Strangers, flying from Springfield to whatever city kicks off the tour; she then hops about the band’s tour bus and sleeps in her own hotel room. Fred understands.

She is thoroughly and genuinely modest about her own contributions and her own career, which include six solo albums and two duet albums with Haggard, including one of gospel songs, as well as Haggard’s staggering catalog of recordings, most of which include her backing vocals.

“I was a follower; Buck and Merle were leaders,” she said. “I did what was needed and I did what I could. It was a great time, though. We thought we were as big as Nashville. We didn’t have their recording studios and we didn’t have the big radio stations, but we had the thing that was more than anything: We had the music.”

She admits her diary could be a hot-seller, given her intimate association with Bakersfield’s most two prominent musicians.

“I‘m very honored to be friends with both of them,” she said. “But I never knew they’d be big stars, and I didn’t care. When I like somebody, I like ‘em all the way.”