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COTTON FIELDS AND TELECASTERS: 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. But pegging the Bakersfield Sound isn’t that simple. Even classifying it as strictly country music may not be wholly accurate. WHEN LEONARD FINALLY CAME TO CALIF0RNIA: Tommy Collins gave up on country music to preach the gospel, then gave up on God for booze, women and drugs. He gave up on his family and his career, too - and they on him. But, as Merle Haggard sang in a 1981 hit about his old musical collaborator, a song called "Leonard," Collins endured. THE DJ WITH THE PENCIL-THIN MUSTACHE: Ferlin Husky hosted his own radio show and his own dance-hall show. But perhaps his most important contribution to the Bakersfield Sound was his willingness host young musicians in his east Bakersfield home. Husky's unofficial boarding house opened its doors to people like Tommy Collins, Dallas Frazier, Jean Shepard and Tommy Williams. Along the way, Husky also recorded a song with historic implications for Bakersfield. He never had a hit record, never became a bona fide star. But it’s hard to imagine what direction the Bakersfield music phenomenon of the 1950s and ’60s might have taken without Bill Woods. Almost every prominent Bakersfield musician of that era seems to have crossed paths with Woods, a versatile entertainer and disc jockey who came to be a trusted and influential mentor. THE LIFE AND TIMES OF TINY TALLY: An abandoned artifact of music history stands alone, ringed with weeds, on a neglected lot in east Bakersfield. The faded lettering on an exterior wall identifies the empty building as an old auto-upholstery shop, but Charles "Fuzzy" Owen remembers it as a whimsical landmark in the evolution of the Bakersfield Sound. It was here in 1956, in this comically tiny building a half-block off East Truxtun Avenue, that Owen’s cousin, the late Lewis Talley, first opened the Tally Records recording studio. Rose Maddox, Bob Wills, Spade Cooley, Lefty Frizzell, Wynn Stewart
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