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Californian staff writer Six musicians, colorfully gaudy in their matching sequined shirts, white cowboy hats and Roy Rogers scarves, are pickin’ and twangin’ to a good ol’ hillbilly standard. Sister Rose is up there too, all sparkles and fringes, yippin’ and howlin’ into the microphone: “Ya fought all the way, Johnny Reb, Johnny Reb, ya fought all the way, Johnny Reb ...” Suddenly, life erupts into an imitation of art, and a chaotic tumult of elbows and fists rolls across the dance floor, carving a swath of destruction through the saloon like Lee’s army through Fredericksburg. Dancers scatter and unattended longneck bottles foam over and rattle onto the worn wooden dance floor. Two men, then three, then six, maul their way toward a side door. And the Maddox Brothers and Rose play on, just as fast and loud as before. When you perform at Bakersfield’s most popular country music honky-tonk, that’s Rule No. 1: Don’t stop when a fight breaks out - just put your head down and play, man, play. That’s the way it was at the Blackboard, the biggest, loudest, roughest bar in Bakersfield for the better part of a quarter-century. The bar that would eventually become known as the freewheeling cradle of the Bakersfield Sound, the most legendary of the city’s half-dozen country-music incubation stations, wasn’t always a safe place to be. Its heyday, 1952-63, generally coincided with Buck Owens’ tenure as the lead guitar player for Bill Woods’ Orange Blossom Playboys and assorted other local bands, including his own. But well into the 1970s, long after Owens found national fame, the Blackboard hosted first-rate pickers - and first-rate punchers. Nashville had the slick studios and the celebrity mansions, but Bakersfield had raw-edged Telecaster guitars, raw-edged codes of conduct, and the vague sense that something special was happening here - at places like the Blackboard. Joe Maphis wrote his 1952 hit “Dim Lights, Thick Smoke (and Loud, Loud Music)” while driving to his home in the San Fernando Valley following his first performance on the Blackboard stage, alongside Owens and Woods. “It was the loudest band I had ever heard in my life,” he said in a 1973 interview. He wasn’t accustomed, either, to the low, hazy fog of cigarette smoke or the near-darkness, but Maphis (who eventually moved to Bakersfield with his singing wife, Rose Lee) came to understand why things were like that. “They kept it dark on purpose,” said Bakersfield singer-guitarist Tommy Hays. “A lot of people didn’t want to be recognized.” Being recognized by the wrong person - one’s spouse, for example - could be hazardous, especially if a third party was involved, and a baseball game or quilting bee was supposed to have been on the calendar that night. It was that kind of place.
The Blackboard began, first and foremost, as a cafe where truckers, oil-field workers and other blue-collar types met for breakfast. While they shoveled in corned-beef hash or biscuits and gravy, they read messages scrawled in chalk on the “blackboard” walls – notices about job openings, can’t-miss ponies scheduled to run in the races that day, anything and nothing in particular. So, in 1949, when two local men bought the business at 3601 Chester Ave., the Blackboard already had a faithful built-in clientele. Joe Limi, 38, was a short, stocky Italian
who had come to the United States as a 9-year-old. He had
met Frank Zabaleta, 36, before the war, while driving a
truck for his family’s liquor distributorship.
Zabaleta, a tall, good-natured California-born Basque,
had worked at a liquor store on Limi’s route. When, in 1951, the building seemed almost ready to come crumbling down under the collective weight of a billion termite eggs – “You could just about grab a handful of door, it crumbled so bad,” is the way Limi’s younger brother, Adolph Limi, remembered it - Limi and Zabaleta knocked the place down and started over, building it bigger and better. This time the bar, not the cafe, was to be the main attraction. Over time, the bar swallowed up the small restaurant, and the only bill of fare at the Blackboard was pickled eggs. It reopened later that same year, and within a short period of time, it was the hottest night spot in town. People like Tommy Collins, Fuzzy Owen, Lewis Talley, Billy Mize, Bonnie Owens, Jean Shepard, Wanda Jackson, Roy Nichols and Red Simpson performed regularly. “You couldn’t miss a night,” said Rosa Dykes, who always feared she’d lose out on something good by staying home. Every night after work, she and the other switchboard girls from the telephone company would push their way through those palm-stained double doors and hit the dance floor. If Rosa had stayed home one particular night in 1952, she might have missed the chance to meet Hershel, her future husband.
The bare-knuckled bravado of a few prominent patrons came to represent a vital part of the Blackboard’s redneck glamour - and an undeniable aspect of its legacy. Legend suggests that the bar had three fights a night, but those who spent a considerable amount of time there say it was not nearly that wild - perhaps just one fight a week. In any case, the shrewd Blackboard patron developed good peripheral vision: You never knew when you might spot somebody sharing a pitcher of Schlitz with somebody he or she was not supposed to be sharing pitchers with. And you never knew when a fist might come at you from a crowd of gathering onlookers right after you’d made a big scene about that ill-advised pitcher of beer. “We had one fight this Saturday night ... where the whole place was going at it,” said Greg Limi, Joe’s nephew, relishing the memory of a particularly stellar evening at the Blackboard. “The sheriff was there, the Highway Patrol, you name it. They were dragging people out by their feet and stuffing them into patrol cars, four at a time. “We went to break up this one fight - these two women were fighting - and a guy stepped in and tapped us on the shoulders. He says, ‘Nah, let ‘em fight. The gal on the bottom is my wife, and she deserves it.’ So we let ‘em go at it for another couple of minutes.” Most any reason for a fight would suffice, and sometimes no reason was required at all. “There were these same five guys who always caused trouble,” said Adolph Limi, who, as a backup bartender, poured 40-cent drafts off and on until about 1953. “They’d just walk up to a table and if a guy didn’t look right, they’d knock him down, right there, while he sat at the table,” Limi said. “O’course they were permanently 86’d. But people would let them back in through the escape doors.” “It wasn’t so bad,” said Al Cordero, the off-duty sheriff’s deputy, now retired, who worked the door as a bouncer for 11 years. “Once in awhile you’d get a fight. There was one murder, where they shot a guy. Took a couple shots at me, too.” Often, if the brawlers were not too punch drunk, they would all collapse amicably at the same table and whistle for a barmaid. “It wasn’t like it is today,” said cocktail waitress Wanda Markham, the wife of trumpeter/saxophonist Don Markham. “Back then, you had a fistfight and then one bought the other a drink. These days they start shooting.” Of course, it was like that at most Bakersfield clubs, including the Blackboard’s chief rivals: the Clover Club, the Lucky Spot and, later on, Tex’s Barrel House. And it sometimes didn’t matter whether the band was Bill Woods and the Orange Blossom Playboys, Bob Smith and the Bluebonnet Playboys, Jolly Jody and his Go-Daddies or young Merle Haggard, just a year or so out of San Quentin.
Beyond the beer and over the noise of the brawling, a new sound was taking shape, a new attitude evolving. This was the germination period for the Bakersfield Sound - born in the 1930s from the Bob Wills-Jimmie Rodgers school of country and western, brought to full flower in the 1950s and ‘60s by the likes of Haggard, Owens and Freddie Hart, reaped and resown in the ‘90s by Dwight Yoakam, Junior Brown, the Mavericks and many others. The earliest strains of the Bakersfield Sound emanated not from the rowdy Blackboard, but from the Beardsley Ballroom in Oildale, the Rainbow Gardens and Rhythm Ranch, both on South Union Avenue, and the Pumpkin Center Barn Dance just south of town.
But the Blackboard was the first serious, grown-up, saloon-style dance hall where the music was as hot as the beer was cold. Wednesdays and Thursdays were guest-star nights. George Jones played one night, Glen Campbell another. The Blackboard, in fact, was the must-stop spot in Bakersfield for Bob Wills, Roger Miller, Patsy Cline, Little Jimmie Dickens, Connie Smith, Tex Ritter, Dallas Frazier, Ferlin Husky, Lefty Frizzell, Tommy Duncan, and, until he went to prison for stomping his wife to death, Spade Cooley. Young Buck Owens got a job at the Blackboard in 1952, playing with Bill Woods’ band and making $12.50 a night, enough money to make a dent in his bills for the first time in his life. How young was Owens? “After a few days watching that guy walk around with his guitar,” Cordero said, “I decided to check his ID. He only needed a couple of months to be of age. I figured that was close enough.” It was at the Blackboard in 1956 that singer Wynn Stewart introduced Owens to Harlan Howard, the man with whom Owens would co-write such songs as “Excuse Me (I Think I’ve Got a Heartache)” and “Foolin’ Around.” Howard, quoted in Nicholas Dawidoff’s new book, “In the Country of Country,” remembers watching Woods smoke his pipe and flirt with girls, while Buck was “working his ass off getting a menial wage.” The singing
The Blackboard was the kind of place that had mirrors at the back of the bar, a jukebox, a wooden dance floor and a long shuffleboard table that Owens visited during most every break, usually facing off against Markham, his fiddle player. It also had a bevy of gum-popping cocktail waitresses, a few of whom had been recruited by Zabaleta himself. He stopped in at places like Little Sweden’s Drive In, at Union and Kentucky, and pitched jobs to the fountain girls. “He’d always come in and order a French dip and a peanut butter milkshake,” former Blackboard waitress Jeannie Robbins said. “And he’d ask me, ‘When are you going to come to work for me?’ ” The best-known among the Blackboard’s hired help, however, was undoubtedly Bonnie Owens, the singing cocktail waitress. Buck’s former wife (and Merle’s future bride) worked on and off at two Bakersfield night spots for the better part of a decade, even after she became the regular “girl singer” on Cousin Herb’s “Trading Post” TV show and as a recording star in her own right. The money was better at the tables than onstage; Bonnie lost money every time she set down her tray and picked up a microphone. She was primarily a relief waitress: If someone was too sick to come to work at the Clover Club or the “Board,” where her sister Betty Campbell worked, and if her touring schedule as a singer permitted it, Bonnie would put on her waitressing shoes and go to work. “Bonnie would write songs right there on the job,” Robbins said. “If her section was slow she would stop and grab a cocktail napkin and write down a few lines right there. Then later on some different night she’d get up on the bandstand and sing it.” Bonnie still remembers the words to one such song, “No Tomorrow.” “That’s the very first line I wrote in Bakersfield, and it started there at the Blackboard,” Bonnie said. “I’d think of a line. I’d hear something, a little piece of a song, and I’d say, ‘Well, I haven’t heard that before,’ and I’d write it down. I don’t think I took songwriting that seriously until I met Merle (in 1961). I didn’t really understand the dynamics of writing a song at that time. But I did try.”
Drinking drivers had little to fear from the law in those days, at least in comparison to the tough laws and strict enforcement so common today. Bar patrons would zip across town to the Lucky Spot, where Billy Mize might be performing, or just a few blocks down the street to the Barrelhouse, where for a time Haggard was on the playbill. The Blackboard hosted an open-mike jam session every Sunday afternoon from 3 to 7, and it was usually packed. “Then they’d close for two hours and we’d all go over to the Lucky Spot or the Clover Club and party for two hours ‘til the Blackboard opened again at 9,” Hershel Dykes said. More likely, though, they’d just head next door to Sammy’s Smoke Shop, which had pool tables and cheap beer, at least until the place was turned into a parking lot.
“It was just a beer joint, but I could tell you a lot of things about it,” said the smoke-shop’s owner, Sammy Hambaroff, who prefers to keep most of the stories about his former establishment to himself. Among its other attractions, the Smoke Shop was a short walk from the local “cat house,” an ill-kept secret that for years remained a last-chance option for many male bar-goers. The Blackboard closed quietly in the late 1970s or early ‘80s - no one seems to quite remember, and official records are incomplete. Zabaleta died in June 1976 at age 62, Joe Limi in September 1994 at age 83. Today, 3601 Chester Ave. is still a good-time place, in a ‘90s sort of way: It’s home to Domino’s Pizza, American Indoor Shooting Range and, the newest of the three, Spectators Sports Pub, a bar that - no small irony here - specializes in boxing memorabilia. But in the minds of many older Bakersfield guitar-players and bar-hoppers, 3601 Chester will always be the home of the Blackboard. No one - not the musicians, staff employees or patrons - can seem to forget the place. It clearly was not just about honky-tonk country music, but a special time, place and sound - forever lost, forever savored. “Those were the days, man,” Hambaroff said. “Darn it, I wish they could bring those days back.”
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