At the time of Haggard's first top-ten hit "(My Friends Are Gonna Be) Strangers" in 1965, Owens was actually the better known performer, a fixture on the Bakersfield club scene who had recorded and appeared on television.

[citation needed] As Haggard recalls in the American Masters episode dedicated to him, Owens set her career aside to help make his name: "She had records in the charts and she was directly responsible for telling people, you know, 'You need to book this guy in Bakersfield because he's gonna be a star.'

Haggard and Owens, who would eventually marry, scored a minor hit with the duet "Just Between the Two of Us" in 1965 on Tally Records.

The LP was a forerunner of the male-female country duet golden age that would emerge in the years ahead, featuring teams like Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton, Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn, and George Jones and Tammy Wynette.

In a retrospective review by Mark Deming for AllMusic, Deming wrote that the album is for "Haggard completists" and notes, "while Bonnie Owens was a good honky tonk singer, she was hardly a great one like Haggard, who seems to be holding himself back a bit musically as he defers to his spouse.