The Blackboard was the biggest, loudest, roughest bar in Bakersfield for the better part of a quarter-century. Its owners could not have known, back in 1949, that it would become known as the freewheeling cradle of the Bakersfield Sound, the most legendary of the city’s half-dozen country-music incubation stations. But that's just what happened. Nashville had the slick studios and the celebrity mansions, but Bakersfield had raw-edged Telecaster guitars and the vague sense that something special was happening here - at places like the Blackboard.

THE KID:

Ferlin Husky doesn’t quite recollect what he expected from the skinny, confident boy who ambled up to the microphone that Saturday night in 1952. Most likely this boy would monotone his way through some tired, old Sunday School hymn, then slink back to his seat to a smattering of half-hearted applause, just like all the others before him. But the gangly 12-year-old knocked the socks off everybody. Big-eyed Dallas Frazier, straight off a Greenfield ranch, could sing like a whippoorwill. Twenty-four years later, by now better known for his song-writing talents than his singing, he was named 1976 Country Music Songwriter of the Year.

HELLO, TREBLE:

The movie version of Ken Nelson's life is a musical, the soundtrack a raw-edged collection of fiddles, steel guitars and Fender Telecasters. But Nelson, Capitol Records’ country & western A&R man for three decades, is as much as numbers man as a music man. And he has the sort of numbers any businessman would be proud of: At least 170 artists have passed through his studios to record literally thousands of songs, including more than 200 No. 1 hits. With a stable of top artists from the San Joaquin Valley, people liked Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Tommy Collins and Rose Maddox, Nelson truly had a tiger by the tail.

THE GUITAR MAN:

Roy Nichols’ on-stage guitar solos were, as often as not, unrehearsed, ad-libbed escapades that no one - not even Nichols himself - could have expected to hear. The longtime member of Merle Haggard’s renowned band, the Strangers, was notorious for such live musical meanderings. But as vast as his technical and creative skills might have been, Nichols’ most noteworthy role in the movement known as the Bakersfield Sound might have been that of musical Kilroy. Name most any prominent band in West Coast country music from the 1940s, ‘50s, ‘60s or ‘70s, and the ubiquitous Nichols was there.

Y'ALL COME:

Is there any doubt Bakersfield loved its own, unique brand of country music in the 1950s and '60s? No, not if one considers the amazing reign of Cousin Herb Henson, the piano-player/band leader/salesman extraordinaire whose 5-day-a-week TV show on KERO ran for 10 years, ending only with Henson’s fatal heart attack in 1963.

COUSIN HERB'S TV COUSINS:

Henson might be Bakersfield’s best-remembered TV country crooner, but he was neither the first nor the busiest. There was Jimmy Thomason, the Texan with a talent for fiddle and mandolin, who was the first to hit valley airwaves. And there was that young, handsome steel guitar player by the name of Billy Mize, whose “Chuck Wagon Gang” was to first to put young Merle Haggard on the screen.

TWO KINGS, ONE QUEEN:

She was married to the two best-known instigators of a 20-year music phenomenon. She sang in the two smokiest, twangiest honky-tonks of the era. Heck, she even served drinks to the fruit-pickers and oil-field workers who truly made the Bakersfield Sound what it was. Bonnie Owens, the former wife of both Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, had a front-row seat for a wild, influential chapter in American music history, and she’s grateful for it. But talk about coincidences.

PROFILES:

Don Rich, Joe Maphis, Jean Shepherd, Wanda Jackson