In 1989 The Circle Closed In The Most Unlikely Studio Pairing Imaginable
Buck Owens and Ringo Starr stepped up to record Act Naturally together and completed a journey that had begun with a rejected demo nobody else wanted
The biggest fool that ever hit the big time
That playful line first caught Owens at the end of a stack of demo tapes in 1963 where a voice sang about being put in the movies and he stopped listening for material and wanted the song immediately
Act Naturally had already spent roughly two years looking for a home and Johnny Russell who wrote it with Voni Morrison later recalled that he had been unable to persuade anyone to record it before Owens finally did
The delay is easy to miss now because the version by Buck sounds almost inevitable with dry humor and clean guitar and the harmony of Don Rich and a beat that moved with the same uncluttered force as the Bakersfield dance halls that had shaped him
A Road Band Built A Sound Nashville Could Not Copy
The song became the first No. 1 country single for Owens in 1963 and opened a remarkable run in which he would place at least one song at No. 1 every year for six years
More unusually Owens made those records largely with the musicians who traveled with him rather than relying on the rotating studio system of Nashville and that choice helped give the Buckaroos a recognizable sound from record to record
A Bakersfield Hit Entered The World Of The Beatles
Two years later the same song surfaced in a place Buck could hardly have expected when he first heard the demo
The Beatles recorded Act Naturally with Ringo Starr singing lead and in August 1965 they performed it on British television during Blackpool Night Out alongside Ticket to Ride and Help and the first British television performance of Yesterday by Paul McCartney
A Bakersfield country song was now sitting inside one of the most visible pop repertoires in the world
Owens and Don Rich were not dismissive of the British group that had borrowed from them and Owens later remembered that they were serious Beatles fans and carried Beatles records on their bus
His first reaction to the version by Ringo was actually puzzlement over why Lennon or McCartney had not sung it though he said the performance grew on him
A rejected demo had traveled from Bakersfield across the Atlantic and eventually back into the studio with both men who had made it famous
The exchange did not end in 1965 and the 1989 recording by Owens and Starr proved how durable a simple and sharp country song could become when the right singer finally heard its promise