The wedding memories had barely had time to settle before Buck Owens tried to undo the marriage he had spent months chasing. Then regret hit with crushing speed. The proud Bakersfield star swallowed his pride, bought large spaces in local California newspapers and printed open love letters begging his bride to forgive him.
By then Jana Jae Greif had already packed and walked away. Being handed annulment papers only days after saying her vows left a wound that public apologies could not heal.
He had fought to win her heart and then panicked at the very future he had asked her to share
Owens was forty seven and a pioneer of the Bakersfield Sound when he married thirty three year old Jae on May 2, 1977. Three days later on May 5 he petitioned a California court to annul the union. They had returned from a brief honeymoon only twenty four hours earlier when fear of losing his independence overwhelmed him.
He withdrew the filing almost at once and spent months trying to repair what he had broken. The couple attempted an off and on reconciliation, but the shock and broken trust stayed with Jae. Their divorce became final in 1978.
Long before that painful chapter, music had shaped every part of her life. Born in 1943 to two violinists trained at Juilliard, she also carried country roots through a maternal grandfather who had been a champion country fiddler. She began playing at just two and a half years old and later earned scholarships to the Interlochen Center for the Arts and the International String Congress. She graduated magna cum laude with a music degree and continued her studies overseas at the Vienna Academy of Music.
Her move from classical halls toward country stages began in Redding, California, where she taught music at a local college and led her own bluegrass band called Clearcreek. When Owens and the Buckaroos performed at the school, he invited her backstage and asked her to join the second show for Orange Blossom Special. Playing beside lead guitarist and fiddler Don Rich, she earned a standing ovation and left a lasting impression.
That connection mattered even more after July 1974, when Rich died in a motorcycle crash. Owens lost his closest friend and musical partner, and the Buckaroos suddenly lost the man who had stood at their front for so long. The grief followed Owens for years and deepened his fear of emotional attachment.
Jae was performing with Clearcreek at a Sacramento restaurant when an urgent call reached her hotel from Owens manager Jack McFadden. She was told to pack immediately and get to Bakersfield. She then waited a full week in a hotel room, ordering room service and practicing every song in the Buckaroos repertoire. With only ten minutes warning, she was finally called to Owens studio for a four hour audition that moved from bluegrass breakdowns to classical works.
She was hired on the spot and sent straight to the airport for her debut run in Las Vegas, becoming the first female member in Buckaroos history. Owens bought her a custom blue violin made in Italy so she would shine under the television lights. That signature blue fiddle helped make her a familiar face on Hee Haw as she toured the world with the band.
Behind the spotlight, Owens pursued her romantically while still carrying the pain of losing Rich. Love won for a moment, but fear returned the moment their honeymoon ended. His desperate newspaper appeals could not persuade Jae to surrender her dignity or return to a marriage shaken at its very start.
She chose instead to build a life and career under her own name. Moving closer to her two children in Oklahoma, she founded Lark Record Productions and Jana Jae Enterprises. She released solo albums including The Devil You Say! and for a time kept a building on Music Row in Nashville. She wore out three tour buses while playing state fairs and concert halls alongside artists including Chet Atkins, Roy Clark, Ricky Skaggs and Mel Tillis.
Near Grove, Oklahoma, beside the fifty three mile shoreline of Grand Lake, she later created the nonprofit Grand Lake Festivals. Through it she launched the annual Grand Lake National Fiddle Fest and the Jana Jae Fiddle Camp, opening doors for younger generations of string players and passing along the craft that had defined her life.
Owens never married again after the 1978 divorce and spent his remaining decades in Bakersfield. Yet time softened what heartbreak had damaged. From far apart, he and Jae rebuilt a friendship that lasted for the rest of his life. Every Sunday until his death in March 2006, Owens would lift the telephone in California and call the woman in Oklahoma whose love he had won, lost and never quite stopped honoring.