In the darkest summer of his life, Buck Owens could not imagine stepping back onto a stage. His closest friend and musical right hand was gone, his world in Bakersfield had gone quiet, and the man who had once filled arenas with joy was lost in grief. The person who stayed beside him through those silent months was not a fellow star or a manager. It was Lisa Todd, the calm and steady woman who had walked out of the Hee Haw cornfield and into his private life.
Owens had reached that painful turning point after the end of his fifteen year second marriage to Phyllis Buford in 1971. The divorce closed a chapter built at the height of commercial fame, and it left behind a quiet isolation that few people on the Nashville set could see. Todd saw it. Away from the bright lights and recorded laughter, she brought patience and a grounded, unhurried presence that slowly became his refuge.
Born Lisa Taylor in Santa Barbara, California, Todd had already built a busy Hollywood career through the 1960s. She appeared on television series such as The Beverly Hillbillies, The Wild Wild West, and Love, American Style, and she worked in feature films including Hello, Dolly! and Dirty Dingus Magee. While she was performing on The Jonathan Winters Show, Canadian television producers Frank Peppiatt and John Aylesworth, the creators behind Hee Haw, noticed her talent and charm.
She joined the Hee Haw cast in 1970 during the program’s second season. At five foot eleven, the brunette stood out immediately among the predominantly blonde lineup of Hee Haw Honeys. Taping seasonal blocks of episodes at WLAC-TV Studios in Nashville alongside co-hosts Owens and Roy Clark, she soon became a familiar face in millions of American living rooms as the show moved from CBS into a massive national syndication run.
On screen, Todd anchored some of the show’s most beloved recurring comedy segments. She played the comic strip parody character Sunshine Cornsilk, spending years in a tongue-in-cheek and unsuccessful pursuit of portly castmate Junior Samples. She hosted Advice to the Loveworn, deadpanning romantic tips to viewers with perfect comic timing. She also traded rapid-fire one-liners in the cornfield and played the playful nurse opposite Owens’s doctor in the show’s medical sketches.
Behind the studio cameras, that easy workplace chemistry grew into an open multi-year romance after his 1971 divorce. Todd shared a home with Owens in Bakersfield and Nashville, bringing calm to a life crowded with an expanding network of radio stations, publishing companies, and touring obligations. She did not seek the spotlight for herself. She simply stayed, steady and patient, while he carried the weight of a growing empire.
Their bond deepened in July 1974 when thirty-two-year-old lead guitarist, fiddler, and closest friend Don Rich was killed in a motorcycle crash on California’s Highway 1. Owens withdrew from public life in Bakersfield and struggled to imagine performing again without his right-hand musician. Todd remained beside him through the first raw months of grief, offering the quiet companionship that no applause could replace.
By May 1975, their love was comfortable enough to share with the whole country. The couple traveled to CBS Television City in Hollywood and appeared together for a full week of episodes on the daytime game show Tattletales. Host Bert Convy introduced them to national viewers in the warmest and simplest way possible.
Buck Owens and his gal Lisa
They competed alongside celebrity couples Gary Collins and Mary Ann Mobley and Pat and Marjorie Harrington, showing America a partnership built on warmth rather than show business glamour.
Despite living together for years and appearing as a couple on national television, Owens and Todd never married. Owens had already lived through two divorces, first with Bonnie Owens during his early working-class years in the 1950s, and then with Phyllis Buford after building his commercial fortune. The scars of those losses left him deeply wary of legal commitment and afraid of hurting someone he loved again. Todd never turned his hesitation into an ultimatum and never pressed him for a wedding ring. She chose to walk beside him without demands.
Even when their romantic relationship eventually wound down and Owens entered his brief and turbulent marriage to Buckaroos fiddler Jana Jae in May 1977, there was no bitter falling-out between Owens and Todd. Neither allowed the change in their private lives to disrupt their work on the Nashville soundstage. Their friendship proved stronger than the end of their romance.
Throughout the late 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, whenever the cast gathered twice a year in Nashville to tape a new season of Hee Haw, Owens and Todd stepped right back under the studio lights together. While other performers cycled in and out of Kornfield Kounty, Todd remained a fixture on the program for sixteen seasons, logging more than one hundred and forty episodes before departing the cast parallel to Owens himself in 1986.
After leaving Hee Haw in the mid-1980s, Todd returned occasionally to film roles, appearing in movies such as 1987’s Blood Hook and the 1996 comedy Galaxies Are Colliding. Across sixteen years of scripts, rehearsals, and personal loss, the actress who stepped into the studio cornfield in 1970 remained one of the few partners in Owens’s life who arrived as a friend and left as one too.