About The Song
“Congratulations, You’re Absolutely Right” is an album track recorded by Buck Owens & His Buckaroos and first issued on the 1966 LP Open Up Your Heart. The album was released by Capitol on December 27, 1966, and became one of Owens’s chart-topping country LPs during a very fertile period for the Buckaroos. The song sits comfortably among the short, sharply arranged tracks that make up the record and reflects the concise storytelling style Owens favored in the mid-1960s.
The songwriting credits for “Congratulations, You’re Absolutely Right” are shared among Buck Owens, his long-time bandmate Don Rich, and Red Simpson, a frequent collaborator from the Bakersfield scene. Buck’s own version was cut during sessions in 1966, but the song also circulated among other country acts that year: a recording by Dick Curless with Kay Adams appeared around 1966, and the track was later taken up in the early 1970s by Tony Booth, demonstrating how the tune fit neatly into the repertoire of Bakersfield-style country singers of that era.
Musically the piece is brief and direct — under three minutes — and its lyrics deploy a wry, somewhat bitter congratulation to someone who assumed the singer would be undone by a breakup. Rather than wallow, the narrator offers an almost sarcastic “congratulations,” turning the expected lament into a compact, self-possessed refusal to be reduced to tears. The arrangement leans on twangy Telecaster guitar lines and tight vocal harmonies that mark the Buckaroos’ approach: economical, melodic, and built for radio and honky-tonk stages alike.
The song’s place on Open Up Your Heart ties it to the producer Ken Nelson and the Capitol studio sessions where Owens and the Buckaroos refined their Bakersfield sound — a rawer, more rhythmic counterpoint to the contemporaneous Nashville productions. Don Rich’s role as lead guitarist and harmony partner is central to that aesthetic; his interplay with Owens became a signature and helped define the group’s identity during these mid-sixties recordings.
Although “Congratulations, You’re Absolutely Right” was not promoted as one of Owens’s high-charting singles in its own right, the album that contains it reached No. 1 on Billboard’s country albums chart, and other songs from the same sessions were pushed as singles and enjoyed major airplay. The track’s afterlife in covers — notably by Dick Curless & Kay Adams and, later, Tony Booth — indicates that it resonated with other performers who appreciated its punchy phrasing and classic Bakersfield ingredients.
Today the song is remembered less as a headline single and more as a tidy example of Buck Owens’ craft in the 1960s: concise songwriting, collaborative authorship with trusted players, and arrangements that prized rhythm and sharp guitar tone. For listeners interested in the Bakersfield era, it’s a small but revealing piece of a larger album that captures Owens at a productive and influential point in his career.
Video
Lyric
If you see me walking round in circles
If you see me staring at the sky
If you think I still miss you since you left me
Congratulations, you’re absolutely right.
If you think life’s been empty since you left me
If you think that I cry for you at night
If you think I take you back in a minute
Congratulations, you’re absolutely right.
— Instrumental —
If you think that I try to call your number
If you think I drive by your house at night
If you think I still love you like I used to
Congratulations, you’re absolutely right.
If you think life’s been empty since you left me
If you think that I cry for you at night
If you think I take you back in a minute
Congratulations, you’re absolutely right…