Like other California artists, Buck had many friends in Nashville but never considered moving there even at his peak. He loathed its politics and Music Row’s tendency to minimize the contributions of West Coast artists.

"The beef I had with Nashville was they thought they spoke for all country performers and that just wasn’t true. It seemed they never wanted to give the West Coast musicians the credit we deserved. A lot of things that came out of the West Coast - not necessarily by me, but by country people here - Nashville took and applied. I was at odds with them right from the beginning; Merle came along and he was at odds with them. They wanted to control what we did on the West Coast, I felt."

"I’m from the Bob Wills and the Little Richard school of music. Bob Wills did what the hell he thought, Little Richard did what he thought, and those were my big influences. I didn’t like the music in Nashville: soft, easy, sweet recordings, and then they pour a gallon of maple syrup over it...so contrived. I disliked the fact that musicians who had their own bands could not record with their bands. Nashville producers wouldn’t let ‘em."

" I’m not going to beg and compromise what I believe in just because somebody in Nashville don’t approve. Screw that. I am who I am, I am what I am, I do what I do and I ain’t never gonna do it any different. I don’t care who likes it and who don’t."

Still, Buck was not a disinterested observer. "I never expected to record again. I knew I had done everything I ever wanted to do. I was satisfied. But...all the time I’m watching the country music horizon. And I’m sayin’ 'Lord, is there anybody gonna come?'"

A backlash against Nashville’s pop-country excesses was brewing even while the Urban Cowboy fad was peaking. Early-’80s hits by young, solidly traditional singers like Ricky Skaggs, John Anderson, and George Strait were the vanguard. On September 17, 1985, a front page New York Times story discussed the panic on Nashville’s Music Row as country record sales plummeted. The story pointed out the public’s weariness with sound-alike pop-country records and the over-emphasis on recording songs designed primarily to please radio programmers.

A slew of younger performers followed Anderson, Strait, and Skaggs. Some were the young people who grew up in the ‘60s with The Beatles and Rolling Stones, who also saw integrity and soul in the music of George Jones, Johnny Cash, Lefty Frizzell, Hank Williams Sr., Buck Owens, and Merle Haggard. By the mid-’80s some of these young people – Randy Travis, Dwight Yoakam, Ricky Van Shelton, and others – began to wipe away the maple syrup in Nashville.

Kentucky-born, Ohio-bred Yoakam had been rejected as "too country" when he went to Nashville in search of a recording contract. He gained his following in Los Angeles among young fans who loved rockabilly, hard country and New Wave Rock. Yoakam got a recording contract with Reprise and in the spring of 1986 had his first hit with a driving, stops-out revival of Johnny Horton’s 1956 hit "Honky-Tonk Man."

Buck heard Dwight singing "Honky-Tonk Man." Then KUZZ program Director Evan Bridwell told him that a Buck revival seemed to be brewing. "People would be sending me interviews from newspapers where they interviewed Dwight; I kept seein’ these things and he would say, ‘All you guys forgot about Buck Owens. Do you know who Buck Owens is?" Then all of a sudden he releases a song called ‘Little Ways,’ sounded exactly like me. It started takin’ off here."

Yoakam and other New Traditional performers gave Buck Owens a hope that though his career had wound down, his music was in caring hands. After Buck met Dwight and they performed at the fair in 1987, the two stayed in touch and sang Buck’s 1972 recording of "Streets Of Bakersfield" together on a 1988 CBS-TV special

Buck toured with Dwight that summer and for the first time in years, audiences saw Buck Owens not as the former star of Hee Haw, but in his true role as a master hard-country and honky-tonk singer. "I played dates with Dwight in Memphis and Atlanta, and Dwight would say, ‘Well you kinda gettin’ the bug, think you’re gonna record now?’ And I’d say, ‘No, Dwight, I told I’ve already done it." Buck pushed Dwight to record "Streets Of Bakersfield" and Dwight asked Buck to join him. That fall it hit #1, a place Buck hadn’t seen since 1972.