Three days after Buck Owens married Jana Jae Greif on May 2, 1977, the papers arrived that would end the marriage almost before it began. On May 5, 1977, panic over losing his independence drove the 47-year-old country star to instruct his attorneys to file for an annulment in a California court. He regretted the filing almost at once and moved to withdraw the petition, but the papers had already been served. Jae packed her belongings and walked out of his Bakersfield home.
That shattering moment grew out of a grief that had never healed. When 32-year-old guitarist, fiddler, and bandleader Don Rich died in a motorcycle crash on California’s Highway 1 on July 17, 1974, Owens lost the musical partner who had stood beside him since 1958. Rich had been the right hand of the Bakersfield Sound, and Owens later admitted that a part of him died on that highway in 1974. For months, the spot beside Owens on stage remained an untouchable reminder of what was gone, and the 45-year-old star withdrew into isolation at his Bakersfield home after Rich’s funeral. His musical direction drifted, and the empty space at the front of the Buckaroos felt impossible for any male musician to fill.
A part of him died on that highway in 1974.
Rather than hiring another traditional country sideman who would invite nightly comparisons to Rich’s Telecaster and fiddle work, Owens and his manager, Jack McFadden, looked in an entirely different direction. They turned to 31-year-old classical and bluegrass violinist Jana Jae Greif, a musician trained by Juilliard-educated parents and honed on a full scholarship at the International Academy of Music in Vienna, Austria. She had already caught Owens’s attention while fronting her own band in Redding, California, and competing at the National Oldtime Fiddlers’ Contest in Weiser, Idaho, and she held the title of National Ladies Champion Fiddler in the United States.
Summoned to Bakersfield for a four-hour audition inside Buck Owens Studios on Chester Avenue, Jae ran through classical repertoire, Western swing, and breakdowns. That same afternoon she flew straight to Las Vegas to debut as the first female member in the history of the Buckaroos, a distinction that would make her the first and only woman to hold that place in the band. To mark her arrival on stage and on the nationally syndicated television program Hee Haw, Owens bought her a sky-blue fiddle that quickly became her visual trademark.
Inside his converted movie-theater recording complex in North Bakersfield, Owens poured his energy and resources into launching Jae as a solo instrumentalist. Serving as her producer at Buck Owens Studios, he worked with her to cut her 1975 debut album The Blue Fiddle featuring Jana Jae, which paired traditional breakdowns like Sally Goodin and Back Up and Push with her classical showcase Czardas. With her signature blue electric fiddle in hand, her youth, energy, and classical precision stood in sharp contrast to the grief hanging over Owens’s musical empire, and for a star struggling through profound isolation, her talent offered a lifeline back to the joy of making music.
Owens also secured her a recording contract with Capitol Records and billed her across the country as the First Lady of Country Fiddle. Between Buckaroos road dates and Nashville television tapings for Hee Haw, they spent long hours in the Bakersfield control room recording single releases for Capitol and later Plantation Records, blending Western swing arrangements with her conservatory technique. Owens threw his full commercial weight behind her, featuring her regularly on Hee Haw and producing her solo recordings at Buck Owens Studios in Bakersfield.
First Lady of Country Fiddle
Those sessions and tour dates brought momentum back to his musical camp. Drawn to the fiddler 14 years his junior by deep admiration for her artistry and a desperate hope for solace after years of darkness, Owens began pursuing Jae outside the studio and repeatedly asked her to marry him. After months of courtship, 47-year-old Owens and 33-year-old Jae were married on May 2, 1977. The union barely survived the trip home from a brief honeymoon.
Over the following weeks, the proud broadcasting executive and studio owner tried publicly to undo the damage. Owens purchased large advertisement spaces in local California newspapers, printing open apologies and love letters asking his bride for forgiveness and pleading for a second chance.
Although the couple attempted brief reconciliations over the next year, the shock of receiving annulment papers 72 hours after their wedding vows had severed the trust between them. When the divorce became final in 1978, Jae stepped out of the Buckaroos and left Bakersfield altogether, relocating to Oklahoma to establish her own record label, Lark Record Productions, and lead her own touring band.
Following the 1978 divorce, Owens never married again, spending the remaining 28 years of his life as a bachelor in Bakersfield. Even so, the anger from that three-day wedding crisis eventually gave way to mutual respect. Years after she left Buck Owens Studios behind, Owens picked up the phone in California every Sunday to check in on the fiddler who had carried his band through the aftermath of 1974.