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By ROBERT PRICE In 1951, Buck Owens paid $30 for a used Fender Telecaster, and American music was never quite the same. That particular type of electric guitar, created just three years earlier by Leo Fender, gave Owens’ music a distinctively raw edge that set apart both the guitarist and, more significantly, the musical flavor of his adopted city. The Bakersfield Sound - as this area’s raucous, outlaw strain of country music would eventually be called - was a gumbo of diverse and even debatable ingredients. But one thing is certain: The Telecaster stirred that stew, almost from Day One. Owens rarely played anything else. Same for Roy Nichols, the legendary lead guitarist for Merle Haggard and the Strangers. Ditto for the late Don Rich, who was to Owens what Lennon was to McCartney. “They should make a Fender Telecaster the size of the Washington Monument,” said country singer Marty Stuart, “and stick it right in the middle of Bakersfield.” Even today, musicians from Pete Anderson (Dwight Yoakam’s lead guitarist) to Chuck Seaton (the Bakersfield-bred guitarist for Big House) play the solid-body Telecaster, a central icon of the city’s music heritage. But pegging the Bakersfield Sound isn’t that simple. Even classifying it as strictly country music may not be wholly accurate. Some would argue that the stripped-down, bandstand sound associated with Bakersfield, and Owens in particular, is as much rock as country, as much Chuck Berry as Eddy Arnold. Certainly the Beatles thought so: They issued a standing order that all new Buck Owens albums be sent their way immediately upon availability. Yet, to many observers, the Bakersfield Sound is one of the dominant influences in country music today - an ironic twist of market-manufactured fate, considering the stylistic ocean that separated Nashville from Nashville West 35 years ago. But as wide as that gulf might have been, any history of the Bakersfield Sound must include a rough sketch of Nashville, too. In the 1950s and early ‘60s, the two cities were parallel worlds: Nashville was Bakersfield’s antithesis and, simultaneously, its fondest aspiration. Bakersfield has always measured itself against Nashville, even while thumbing its nose at the music capital’s pretensions and predictability.
Why Bakersfield? Why the 1950s? How could so much talent have gravitated to one city so far from the capital of country music for such a concentrated period of time? Good questions. How did Ernest Hemingway end up in Paris in the 1920s, sharing Pernod with Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Picasso? “Why do certain places on Earth become touchstones of the moment? Sometimes you can’t explain why the cast assembled and started working toward greatness, unbeknownst to them at the time,” Stuart said. One answer is in the pages of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” a novel that chronicles the westward migration of Oklahoma dirt farmers whose livelihoods were obliterated by drought and other economic forces in the 1930s. Not all of the musicians who fueled and fostered the Bakersfield Sound were actually the children of those itinerant dirt farmers, but many of them were - and every last one of them, poor or not, understood that sort of life and that sort of desperation. Blackboard bandleader Bill Woods, born in Denison, Texas, in 1924, was the son of a Pentecostal minister who worked the desolate oil-field tent-camps of east Texas. Owens, born in Sherman, Texas, in 1929, was the son of sharecropper whose family’s exodus from the Red River region was delayed more than a decade after their trailer hitch broke in Phoenix in 1937. Haggard, born in 1937 in a converted boxcar in Oildale, was the son of a Santa Fe Railroad worker from Checotah, Okla., who died when Merle was 9.
Those men, and dozens of other prominent Bakersfield musicians like them, first glimpsed their life’s calling by the light of a campfire or a front-porch lantern as the sweat from a harsh day in the fields dried on their backs. They could have thrown their guitars over their shoulders and gone elsewhere to make a living at music - freight trains were free, if you knew how to board them. But the fact was, the audiences most likely to appreciate their songs about cotton fields and empty cupboards were here in Kern County. They, too, were a displaced people miles from who they were and what they had once been. “Those Bakersfield musicians had a story to tell,” said Herb Pedersen, a music historian and singer-songwriter-guitarist for the Desert Rose Band. “That’s how they would write the songs. Working, being turned away - that was their experience. They might have made it out here to California, to find work, with little or nothing.” And that shared experience - give a listen to Haggard’s “Hungry Eyes” - clicked with the crowds in the dance halls and honky-tonks of Bakersfield. “The (Bakersfield) music was simple but powerful, played by simple-living people who had to leave their farms to come west,” said Tommy Collins, an Oklahoma native who wrote his first hit songs after moving to Bakersfield in 1951. “There’s quite a history to the camaraderie that developed between those Dust Bowl people. They weren’t apt to go for fancy music.” Not that Bakersfield performers had a monopoly on poverty. Many of the past century’s country musicians, from all corners of North America, seem to have risen up from dirt floors and second-hand clothes. But there was a remarkable similarity in the experiences of the people who lived or played in Bakersfield in those days, from Rose Maddox to Dallas Frazier to Red Simpson. “All those Okies and Arkies and Texans had a lot of hard times and good material for beer-drinkin’, tear-jerkin’ music,” said Ferlin Husky, the country-music performer who coined “whangy-dangy” to describe the singing style of Owens and others. “For them, it was just a natural thing.”
In some ways, the Nashville of the mid-1950s was not that much different from today: Things often tended to sound the same. Nashville record producers of that era - people like Don Law of Columbia Records, Steve Sholes of RCA and Owen Bradley of Decca - had been heavily influenced by the Big Band sound of the previous decade, and in some cases they had helped mold that sound themselves. As a result, the Nashville Sound, largely created by guitarist-producer Chet Atkins, came to represent a warm, rich sound often textured with soft horns, soothing strings and lush backing vocals. “Chet Atkins would eliminate instruments like the fiddle and steel guitar,” said country music historian Cary Ginell, who has written about the Exeter-based Farmer Boys and numerous other early-’50s performers. “Atkins was going after a more uptown, cosmopolitan kind of sound to combat rock ‘n’ roll, because rock ‘n’ roll was taking away the young listeners.” Indeed, something big was happening in popular music at that time: Elvis. The Pelvically Gifted One might have been a country-music sensation if he (or his manager, Col. Tom Parker) had so chosen, and in fact Elvis, an early protege of Hank Snow, scored on the country charts before finding his place in history as a pop-rock star. Nashville reacted to Elvis’ resounding arrival on the American music scene by moving away from the rockabilly influences that had always loitered on its fringes. Violins were in; twang was out. But not in Bakersfield. The vibrant club scene here was developing a new set of stars and a new hard-driving style, full of Telecaster twang, prominent steel-guitar leads and bold, dominant drums. A poor kid named Haggard was idolizing teen-age guitar prodigy Roy Nichols at the Pumpkin Center Barn Dance, and Owens was playing the Telecaster alongside Woods at the Blackboard. Billy Mize was at the Lucky Spot, Lewis Talley and Fuzzy Owen at the Clover Club. Nashville and its picky record producers might as well have resided in Tibet. “The Nashville Sound was always more formulaic,” said Paul Wells, director of the Center for Popular Music, an independent music archive and research center based at Middle Tennessee State University. “There was always more of a self-consciousness about trying to reach a broader audience, about trying to make new (commercial) inroads. With Buck and Merle, they were just doing what they did. Of course they wanted to reach a broad audience, but they did it on their own terms.” Starting with “You’re for Me,” in 1961, Owens and Don Rich put to vinyl a clean, clear sound that hit listeners, as Owens liked to say, “hard as a freight train.” “Their vocals were always up front, shoved along in two-by-four rhythm by regular doses of steel, nervy electric guitar runs, and more drums than anyone else in country music was using,” writes Nicholas Dawidoff in his 1997 book, “In the Country of Country: People and Places in American Music.” “There was no thought put into it,” Owens told Dawidoff. “The sound just came about. I had a big old Fender Telecaster guitar, the walls of the buildings were hard, the dance floor was cement, the roof was sheet metal. There was considerable echo in there. ... It was just the sound that people wanted.” And somehow, Owens managed to get the cement-floor sound into his recordings. Part of it was studio technique: Owens seemed to reproduce better on monophonic AM radio than many country contemporaries because, in the studio, he turned up the treble and cut back on the bass. It was a perfect formula for the single-speaker car radios in all those Ford Fairlanes and Dodge Darts. The
It was the sound Tommy Collins wanted on his records, too. When Collins recorded in Hollywood for Capitol in the 1950s, he insisted on using a guitar player who favored a Telecaster - the man who would eventually become Mr. Bakersfield, Owens. But when Collins recorded in Nashville for Columbia Records in the 1960s, producer Don Law laid it down: minimal twang, please. “I don’t remember guys like Chet Atkins or Grady Martin using Telecasters,” Collins said. “I don’t remember anybody in Nashville using them, except when I hired one guy named Fred Carter. But I got the message pretty quick that they were going to do things their way in the studios in Nashville.” Carter, who played lead guitar on Bob Dylan’s “Nashville Skyline” album, among many other studio credits, realizes he had more in common with Bakersfield than with Nashville. “Nashville was just a better place to be,” he said. “It was clear the teamwork was there and the future was there, while Bakersfield was mostly a club scene ... But Bakersfield was kickin’ hard with the rock ‘n’ roll sound, and that just kinda clicked with me.” The “gentlemanly” guitar work of people like Atkins and Martin was widely preferred in Nashville at the time, but Carter, who got his professional start playing at the Louisiana Hayride, the Grand Ole Opry’s Bayou brother, was sold on the Telecaster’s finely hewn edge: It could cut right through a bass line, through a flourish of drums, through just about anything. Of course, Carter - whose 22-year-old son, Jeff Carter, is now playing a lead Telecaster for his sister, Deana Carter (“Strawberry Wine”) - may have initially latched on to the Telecaster for less aesthetic reasons: It was relatively inexpensive and, as he put it, “almost indestructible.” “You could play and defend yourself at the same time without hurting the guitar,” Carter said. Bakersfield artists saw many of those benefits in Telecasters, too, but convincing Nashville of the guitar’s merits in the recording studio was another matter. It wasn’t until Owens and others achieved commercial success - and, curiously, rock ‘n’ rock underwent a significant change - that Music City was finally won over. Sappiness
Rather than pushing the record-buying public toward rock ‘n’ roll, as Nashville might have feared, Owens seemed to start bringing former rockers into the country fold. Pedersen believes that happened because rock ‘n’ roll changed again dramatically just as the Bakersfield Sound was enjoying its first commercial success. “In the early 1960s, rock ‘n’ roll was getting kind of sappy,” Pedersen said. “We’d grown up with Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard and the Everly Brothers. Then came Frankie Avalon and the Italian crooners. Sappy stuff. People started switching over. I switched over.” Stuart, who is president of the Country Music Foundation, put it this way: “Line up Little Richard and Pat Boone next to each other, and listen to them both singing ‘Tutti Frutti,’” he said. “It’s the same comparison. Nashville was making Pat Boone-kinda ‘Tutti Frutti’ records and Bakersfield was making Little Richard.” So, while Atkins was taking the steel guitar and fiddle out of Nashville recording studios, Bakersfield artists like Owens were insisting that they stay. The idea in Nashville, after all, was to sell records, and if minimizing the Hillbilly Factor proved a successful strategy, so be it. “The Nashville Sound is just a sales tag,” Atkins told Dawidoff. “If there is a Nashville Sound, it’s the Southern accent. You speak with it, maybe you play with it, too. I don’t know if there is such a thing as Nashville Sound. We took the twang out of it ... What we did was, we tried to make hit records. We wanted to keep our jobs.” The two types of country music were different in other respects as well. Most obvious was Nashville’s tendency to hire studio musicians from a pre-approved pool of regulars, people who could record with all sorts of artists. Stars’ regular bands would be relegated to the sidelines until it was time to tour. “You had to use the Nashville A-team,” said Buckaroo keyboardist Jim Shaw, “if you wanted to record in a Nashville studio.” Those studio musicians were the best in the country, at least from a technical standpoint, but some wondered if that sort of systematic approach tended to make those recordings derivative of previous successes - a case of creativity and spontaneity sacrificed for proven results. “Anytime a Skeets McDonald came to Nashville to record, or a Wynn (Stewart), or a Tommy (Collins), or a Buck (Owens), or a Red (Simpson), their music came out sounding watered down,” Stuart said. Maybe it was Dust Bowl camaraderie, but Bakersfield musicians didn’t care for that way of doing things. Owens insisted on using his Buckaroos in his recording sessions; Haggard insisted on using his Strangers. And because they usually recorded in Hollywood for Capitol Records’ Ken Nelson, a man who believed in that approach, Bakersfield musicians got their way - and their distinct Bakersfield Sound. Songs written by and for Nashville musicians often had a different feel to them even before they got to the studio. In the 1950s and ‘60s, as it is today, songwriting was a full-on profession for many musicians, and writers based in Nashville, in particular, came to develop a special sense for what was commercially palatable and what wasn’t. Nashville had “that commercial treadmill, where you develop a feel for what might sell and write to that feeling,” said Dallas Frazier, a Nashville-based member of the National Songwriters Hall of Fame who started his career in Bakersfield. To an extent, songwriting has always been an exercise in salesmanship, even in Bakersfield. But Nashville, any publishing-house executive will tell you, has always had the sales volume. Bakersfield, 52 hours away by Greyhound bus, has always had a tendency to miss most of the important sales meetings.
Bakersfield’s two giants of country music had an unprecedented run of success during their respective heydays, rivaling the chart-busting domination of rock artists like the Rolling Stones and Elvis. Between 1966 and 1987, Haggard recorded 38 songs that reached No. 1 on the Billboard country charts and another 33 that reached the top 10. Between 1967 and 1976 alone, Haggard had 23 chart-toppers. Owens’ success was more concentrated but no less phenomenal: Between 1963 and 1967, according to Billboard and Radio & Records, he released an unprecedented 19 consecutive No. 1 songs, and by 1974 another five more had gone all the way to the top. Twenty-six other songs made the top 10 between 1963 and 1974, and in 1964, he managed to get No. 1 songs out of both sides of the same 45-rpm release: first “Together Again,” and then the flip side, “My Heart Skips a Beat."
Over the 28-year period ending with Haggard’s 1987 hit “Twinkle, Twinkle Lucky Star” and Owens’ 1988 re-release of “Streets of Bakersfield” with Dwight Yoakam, the two Bakersfield recording artists combined for at least 112 top 10 songs, including 63 that went to No. 1. The two men have little in common as far as style is concerned. Haggard is the more traditional of the two, Owens more exuberant and rockabilly. In fact, if Buck had burst onto the scene in 1969 rather than 1961 - brace yourself for a blasphemy - perhaps he would have been elbowing the Byrds or Buffalo Springfield for top position on the rock charts. Whether at its core the Bakersfield Sound was rock ‘n’ roll or country, it’s clear something unique was happening here in the 1950s and ‘60s, and on into the ‘70s - something that continues to make a difference in country music today. “It has always been, for 50 or 60 years now, that the more imaginative country music has been created away from Nashville,” said Ginell, the country music historian. “And that’s been true, whether it’s been in Texas, Chicago or Bakersfield, because Nashville has always had a ruling class that puts parameters on the sound.” Bakersfield, at the pinnacle of its musical greatness, was about as far from Nashville’s “ruling class” as a city could get. In the Bakersfield of 1951, the only parameter that meant much was the volume-knob on a guitar amplifier. Bakersfield pickers kept theirs on “10,” and America, much to its satisfaction, eventually noticed.
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Californian staff writer
