Before You Go / No One But You (studio album) by Buck Owens And His Buckaroos

I can’t recommend this studio LP enough. Heart-on sleeve country songs with sweet harmony vocals, gutsy electric guitars, snarling drums and solid pedal steel. That’s the Bakersfield sound in a nutshell.

The Before You Go/No One But You LP follows the same strategy of Owens’ other studio albums during his peak Capitol period. Place the single at the top, with B-sides and instrumentals and fillers to complete the package. The single at the top is the #1 hit Before You Go, with the excellent B-side No One But You fronting side 1. Another excellent B-side Gonna Have Love (Top 10 hit) is also included here. The rest of the songs are of high to medium quality. All but three tracks are credited to Owens, and they range from sweet and heartfelt to palatable down-and-outers. Perhaps the weakest track, Getting Used to Loving You, is played to the executed quite well. Anything trite, banal, or mawkish is refreshingly absent, tactfully reserved for the cover of Charlie Brown at the close of the LP.

Instrumentalist Don Rich dominates this album. His fiddle adds a nice touch to the weepy ballads and his guitar really energizes the fast-paced songs (listen to him tactfully filling in the gaps on There’s Gonna Come a Day. I’m not a big fan of the instrumentals, but they are short, lightning fast, and executed so well that I don’t mind them being tucked into both sides of this fine LP.

Before You Go/No One But You is such an underrated gem and a crackerjack example of the shimmering Bakersfield Sound at its absolute peak. Just listen to the closer, an amusing cover of The Coasters, and you’ll hear that that band was truly on fire! The production on this LP is pristine too.

Essential.