CBMS Profile – Dan (Buck) Buckner

By Bill Donaldson

This profile has to start with a description of The Room. It is Buck Buckner’s study at his home in Boulder CO. The walls and shelves all around The Room are covered with some twenty years of bluegrass memories including pictures, newspaper articles, and awards featuring Buck and just about everybody who is anybody in the field of bluegrass. There are pictures of Tony Rice, the Left Hand String Band, Hot Rize, Mark Vann, Doc Watson, the Yonder Mountain String Band. The list seems endless, all the way from here to there. There is a shot of Buck dressed in choir robe leading singers at the CBMS Gospel Jamboree. Two awards stand on a shelf; one honoring Buck as DJ of the year in the Rocky Mountain region, and another for having the best bluegrass radio show of the year. Another wall has a Pow’r Pickin’ article featuring Buck and the Order of Dobro Bullies.

Daniel Buckner was born in Los Angles and raised in South Pasadena. In those days, although only fifteen miles from the center of Los Angeles, Pasadena was a secluded white enclave, not yet enveloped by the surrounding Los Angeles metropolitan area. "So I was raised in a small town atmosphere. Dad was a reserve chief of police. Essentially kind of an Ozzie and Harriet life. We didn’t have gang wars or problems with drugs."

At seven years old, he spent time at summer camp reading Jack London’s Call Of The Wild. When the other kids tried to snooker him with the old snipe hunt scam, little Danny turned the tables. He went along with the gag and then sneaked back to his tent to read while the other kids searched in vain for him for the next several hours.

"Mother started me on piano lessons at five and clarinet lessons at seven. I entered professional boys choir at eight. Alto! Moved on to saxophone by the time I was in junior high. My dad played sax so I had one in the family. I had a Dixieland band in junior high. Dixieland and rock and roll, which at that time was ‘dirty music.’ I was in the high school band and head cheerleader."

As a lifeguard during the McCarthy era, Dan was required to swear an oath that he had never been a member of any group planning to overthrow the government. "No overthrows occurred at the pool, so I assume the oath was effective."

In high school Dan became a foreign exchange student to Denmark. A Swedish exchange student, Tom Jedenberg, came to stay with Dan’s family in 57-58. Dan and Tom became fast friends and remain close to this day.

"I got into college and had been playing ukelele since I was fifteen and got into that whole folk movement. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Kingston Trio, Peter Paul and Mary. I was in the folky thing pretty heavy and I bought a twelve string guitar. I was fingerpicking the twelve string when I ran into the Dillards in Pasadena in about ’62. I opened for them at the Ice House. I’d never heard bluegrass before and it just bowled me over."

Today, Buck plays a 1934 Regal dobro. "I visited this man’s house (in 1962), first and last time I’d ever been there, and I admired (the dobro) he had hanging on the wall in a secret dugout room behind a bookcase." Buck recognized the instrument as valuable and told the man so. But the man claimed he couldn’t play it because it hurt his fingers. He had been trying to play it Spanish style even with the high string action. The man wound up giving the dobro to Buck. "So I went down to the barrio (Bernardo’s in East Los Angeles) and dickered for a $50 Mexican classical guitar and sent that to him in trade for it. And I’m still playing the instrument." A satisfied grin crosses his face. "Gotta keep your karma clean."

Dan didn’t hear a lot of bluegrass in the early years. "My dad was into Dixieland and swing. Duke Ellington. A lot of Bing Crosby in our house. He liked the jazz elements, too. Dixieland and bluegrass have an awful lot in common if you look at the way the bands are set up and how they take their leads."

Dan taught school at Escalon, a private school for highly intelligent, but disturbed, kids. "I taught school for six years. Disturbed kids in the Pasadena School District. Completed all but the dissertation for a Masters in education." He left teaching, though, to go to work for Mattel Toys as a designer for educational toys. He soon left Mattel and moved on to Eldon Industries’ toy division.

"Through Eldon Industries I met a toy inventor named Chuck Ogsbury, who also is the owner of the Ome banjo factory here in Boulder CO." They struck up a friendship and Chuck was the impetus for Buck to come to Colorado. "I ended up buying his house in Gold Hill.

"I moved to Gold Hill in 1970 with three little kids and became a photographer. Joined up with the Sky Blue Water Boys. The name came because we all brought Hamm’s beer to rehearsal. We played for three or four years before we drifted off to different bands. One of the other Sky Blue Water Boys and I joined up with his girl friend and called ourselves Just Add Water."

But the photography business didn’t really put much food on the table, and in 1975 Dan and his dog, Frisky, went to seek adventure and fortune in the oil fields of Wyoming working triple derrick rigs. "Rawlins had lots of bars, a state prison, and a genuine old-fashioned brothel." Remembering how jazz legend, Jelly Roll Morton, had played in New Orleans brothels in 1910, Dan got the notion it would be cool to play at Fat Willy’s. Alas, Willy would have none of it. Seems the girls could make extra money getting the johns to feed the jukebox. They couldn’t do that if some Colorado hippie guitar player was picking in the lobby.

Dan came back to Boulder CO in 1977, got married, and took a job in maintenance at the university. In 1979, Dan and Shari bought their home in Boulder CO Heights. By 1981, Dan had enough of the university and moved on to become Building Maintenance Supervisor with the City of Boulder CO. During this time, he started doing a weekly show at the Red Balloon pre-school for handicapped kids. He did the show every week for the next seven years.

Along the way Buck’s interest migrated to radio. He first came to KGNU radio in Boulder CO to advertise the open jams he was organizing. "It got to be a pretty regular thing for me because I was trying different places, different venues. Over eighteen years it’s just grown like topsy." In 1986, he started hosting regular shows on KGNU. "I do well on the radio because I really love it. KGNU really opened the door for me. It’s given me the name recognition I need to get the jobs as MC."

By 1992, however, Buck was ready to give up working as a performer in bands. "I decided I was going to work with jams and support bluegrass that way rather than try to work on the performance end.

"I prefer to teach. I’ve always been a service oriented kind of guy. If you’re going to leave your mark behind, I don’t want my mark to be money, I don’t want it to be recordings. I want it to be people who say, ‘I’m in this business because Buck helped me once.’ I’ve had a half a dozen people tell me, ‘If it hadn’t been for your welcome I’d have walked out.’ I know how easy it is to be discouraged in these situations."

Buck says he prefers to push the beginning level jams, "because that’s where people’s confidence is low. It’s where they need the help. So that’s where I put my efforts."

He wrote an article that appeared in the November, 2000 issue of Bluegrass Unlimited. The article, entitled No Bread – Just Jam, offers detailed guidance on how to organize jams.

"I started open mikes downtown in the mid 70’s. I was one of the founders of the Millsite jam. It’s been up there for 17 years. I’ve adopted that one. I’m the one that shows up every time ready to go at 8:00. That’s been my role for the last ten years. I think I’m a good teacher, a good encourager. It’s a role I take to naturally and I enjoy it."

But traditional ideas of success, with the big house and fancy car, haven’t suited Buck. "I wanted to do something that was personal. I like people a lot. Things aren’t so important to me. Money isn’t very important to me. You gotta have enough to eat. I’ve never looked to amass piles of anything except respect and the feeling that something I’ve done makes a difference. That’s my high."

Buck doesn’t worry that evolution of the music will make the traditional stuff disappear. He describes how we can always peel back the layers and find the traditional source. "Change is inevitable. I don’t mind change at all. String Cheese, Yonder Mountain, and my buds Leftover Salmon, Single Malt Band. All these guys are deviants from the ‘true path.’ You bet they are, and I salute them for it. There are plenty of people like Open Road who will keep to the true path. You don’t ever have to worry about that true path ever being lost. But I’m delighted at what the spin-offs have been." In spite of all the musical evolution, "There is no danger of bluegrass evaporating in the wind. Variations aren’t threatening the core.

"The pump is primed for all these young people to get into music, but the old folks are saying, ‘but that ain’t bluegrass.’ Well so what? And you can count on it that some of those young people are being drawn to it because of the old-timey sound, and they’ll keep going back down through the layers until they find (the traditional sound) and isolate it."

Buck has been the MC for Ken Seaman’s MidWinter Festival since it began. This year would have been Buck’s ninth year hosting at RockyGrass. Buck Buckner had also committed to host festivals this summer in Pueblo and at Crystal Meadows, but is unable to continue due to weakness from cancer. So others are taking over the reins of the radio programs, the jams, and the festivals, carrying on what Buck Buckner started.

"Life is way too serious to be serious about," he says. "I never figured on living long. I always figured I’d have a short, fat life. It’s certainly been full of stuff."

What’s the legacy Buck wants people to remember? "Same as it’s always been: Turn off the TV and go out and pick."

See NO BREAD, JUST JAM, The Cure for the Bluegrass Blues by Dan "Buck" Buckner

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