By ROBERT PRICE

Californian staff writer

The old Blackboard nightclub is now a pizza parlor. Tex’s Barrel House is a strip joint. The Clover Club is gone completely, replaced by a newer building that rests on the same patch of dirt alongside the Southern Pacific railroad tracks.

But save the eulogies. The Bakersfield Sound never really died - it just moved to Austin, Texas.

Specifically, it moved to Austin’s Sixth Street, a hub of nightlife every bit as lively and vital as Edison Highway or Chester Avenue ever were. And more than ever, a neo-Bakersfield Sound - considerably rocked-up in some cases - mixes comfortably in Austin’s stew of country, rock, Tejano, folk and blues.

That’s certainly the case at the Continental Club, a throwback honky-tonk just across the river from Austin’s main nightclub district. It is here every August that local picker Casper Rawls hosts the Buck Owens Birthday Bash, a celebration of the “freight train” sound that first put Owens on the country-music radar screen in 1959. Owens himself took the Continental Club stage two years ago.

Elsewhere in Austin, the velvety, emotive baritones of Merle Haggard sound-alikes such as Dale Watson are cascading onto the sidewalk from assorted clubs and concert halls.

But the Bakersfield Sound in its two primary flavors (Buck and Merle) is turning up in other places, too, these days - in the likeliest of cities, such as Bakersfield and Nashville, as well as in places one might not expect. It’s even turning up in Chicago, the American blues capital, where a Buck Owens Birthday Party Tribute is held every Aug. 12 at a dance hall called Shubas.

Here are just a few of the artists popping up around the country these days - new faces with strangely familiar sounds or frames of reference.

•THE DERAILERS: Tony Villanueva and band mates had just belted out a satisfying cover of Owens’ “My Heart Skips a Beat” when someone noticed a familiar figure looking up at them, arms crossed, front and center at the edge of the Continental Club stage.

“Someone says, ‘Hey, Tony,’ and I’m checking my fly or something, and I look down ... and there he is,” said Villanueva, remembering the first time he sang for Owens. “I was stunned, awestruck and a little bit scared. But he was smiling.”

If Owens was flattered by the Derailers’ take on his No. 1 hit from 1964, he was downright teary-eyed by evening’s end. Two dozen singers marched past the mike, each one performing a different Owens tune.

None made a more lasting impression than the Derailers, a boot-stompin’, Austin-based quartet that plays with the same sort of bar-stage simplicity that made Owens a star. Its debut album, “Jackpot” (on Austin’s Watermelon Records and produced by Dave Alvin of the greaser-rock Blasters), rings with spare, righteous authenticity. The Buckesque feel is hard to miss.

Maybe there’s more of a connection there than meets the ear. “Austin, Lubbock, Dallas, San Antonio - they all seem to connect to the Bakersfield Sound,” said Villanueva, an Oregon native who moved to Austin in 1989. “So many of the Bakersfield guys were Texas immigrants, people who shared that spirit of hard-working people. Hot weather, hard work and hot licks - that was Bakersfield, and that’s Texas, too.”

The Derailers have recently returned from a tour of Europe, where they closed several shows with their own adaptation of one of Owens’ trademark songs. “We raised the roof with ‘Buck’s Polka’ in Germany,” Villanueva said.

Villanueva would like nothing more than to do the same at Owens’ Bakersfield club, the Crystal Palace, and in fact, the two parties have agreed in principle to do just that. A date is not set, but Villanueva said he hopes to be in Bakersfield sometime in late August.

•THE HOLLISTERS: All the ingredients for a credible rendition of the Buck sound are here: spare instrumentation, a ringing Telecaster and high harmony vocals. The Houston-based Hollisters (named for Rafe Hollister, the singing moonshine-distiller from the old “Andy Griffith Show”) attract comparisons to Johnny Cash because of lead singer Mike Barfield’s gravely bass voice, but their influences are many and varied. The list starts with Owens, to whom the band pays homage with a repertoire that includes two Buck covers, “Wham Bam” and “Hangin’ On to What I Got.”

“What appeals to me about the Bakersfield Sound is that it had a freshness, the energy of rock ’n’ roll,” Barfield said. “You hear that sound a lot in Texas these days. Texas and California are kind of similar with the Mexican influence in the music. California might have more of a Western Swing influence, and the honky thing. Texas has a little more of a blues sound, but there’s a similarity.”

The Hollisters’ forthcoming CD, “The Land of Rhythm and Pleasure,” is being mastered, and it should be available by summer’s end. But the Hollisters, like the Derailers and others, may not come searing through your radio speaker anytime soon. The Hollisters’ sound doesn’t square with most typical country-radio formats, so their best bets will likely be college stations or the emerging country/folk/blues genre known as Americana. That format has not yet found its way into the Bakersfield market as a commercially supported reality.

“In some respects, the Hollisters represent the missing link between the two branches of the alternative country movement,” writes Houston Chronicle music critic Rick Mitchell, a former entertainment writer with The Californian. “They can share a bill as easily with honky-tonk traditionalists Dale Watson and the Derailers as they can with punkabilly rockers like the Old 97s or the Rev. Horton Heat.”

•THE BACKSLIDERS: Maybe it was the influence of Dwight Yoakam, maybe the 1992 release of Owens’ four-CD boxed set of Capitol Records recordings, but this Raleigh, N.C.-based band learned a few years ago that the music-listening public seems to have a new appreciation for the Owens style.

That was fortuitous: These band members do too.

That’s particularly true of the Backsliders’ lead vocalist, Chip Robinson, and Steve Howell, the lead guitarist.

“Both of us were big fans of that sound, that bare-bones, stripped-down thing, with the harmonies and stuff,” Robinson said.

The two played together as a duo for three years, a period spent “pretty much ruining bluegrass music,” Robinson said. When they first decided to add a honky-tonk/freight train dimension, they hired a steel guitar player - and then fired him after six months. Then they added Brad Rice, an ex-punk rocker formerly with the True Believers. That all but cinched the inevitable: Their Buck-meets-Steve Earle debut CD, “Throwin’ Rocks at the Moon,” will never get any sort of airplay on traditional country radio. Well, probably not, anyway.

The new CD, on Mammoth Records, does manage to demonstrate that, despite a musically muttified pedigree, the Backsliders keep a country flame burning in the window. Their influences encompass Gram Parsons and the Rolling Stones, Elvis Costello and the Blasters, Owens and Yoakam. (The band’s CD is produced by Yoakam’s longtime guitarist, Pete Anderson.)

“The cool thing about this band,” Howell told one interviewer, “is that we’re just as comfortable covering a Ramones tune as we are a George Jones song.”

The Backsliders are not scheduled to visit Bakersfield on their current tour, but they’ll be playing July 19 at Jack’s Sugar Shack in Los Angeles.

•IRIS DEMENT: Iris DeMent grew up near Paragould, Ark., listening to Merle Haggard with the same sort of adulation and keen ear that Haggard himself exhibited with Lefty Frizzell. But DeMent didn’t start writing songs until she was 25 and living in Topeka, Kan. She later moved to Kansas City, and within a few years was polished enough to take a shot at Nashville. Two years later she got a record deal; now she’s back in Kansas City and has three albums out on Warner Bros.

Her alto style has the breeziness of a Joni Mitchell, the phrasing of a Jackson Browne and the sassiness of a Bonnie Raitt, but it also has the authenticity of a Haggard, both in terms of the real-people, real-places nature of the themes, and, if one listens hard enough, even something in the voice.

DeMent’s music goes way beyond workaday themes, however. Some songs are satisfyingly melancholy, some confessional, some angry. One thing is certain: DeMent, who sometimes collaborates with her husband, a burly firefighter named Elmer McCall, will never be accused of sameness.

Haggard first heard her sing on his bus. He was listening to “Tulare Dust,” a collection of songs by various young artists doing their own interpretations of Haggard’s work. Haggard listened to her version of “Big City” and decided he had to meet her. “That’s the way I wanted ‘Big City’ to sound,” he announced to his road mates.

He immediately bought copies of her first two albums and, after finding a special quality in her songwriting skills, invited her to his home in Palo Cedro.

Now her third album, “The Way I Should,” is out and Haggard has co-written one of the tracks, a joyful love song called “This Kind of Happy.” “She’s the best singer I ever heard,” he once gushed. Funny, DeMent always thought the same of Haggard.

• BILLY YATES: This native of the Ozark foothills manages to sound a little - sometimes a lot - like both Haggard and Owens, depending on the song. His self-titled 1997 debut album on the Almo Sounds label, churns up a bit of “freight train” grit along with some Merlesque crooning.

“My big idols were Buck, Merle and George Jones, and when you hear that record of mine, those influences are pretty clear,” Yates said. “I’m thrilled to death that people are picking up on the Bakersfield thing” on the album.

Yates, who left junior college in 1981 after two weeks to become a barber like his father, ran his own hair salon in Doniphan, Mo., for five years while he performed live most every night on local radio.

Then he took part in an impromptu audition at the Lake Wappapello Opry in Wappapello, Mo., and was hired on the spot.

That built up his confidence and public-performance skills, and in 1987 he moved to Nashville and started shopping his songs (while continuing to cut hair). In 1992 he landed a songwriting deal with a publishing company, quit cutting hair (selling his barber shop back home as well) and, within a couple of months, had written a dozen songs. One of them, “I Don’t Need Your Rockin’ Chair,” became a hit for Jones. Several others since then have been hits for others; now, with his new, teary ballad, “Flowers,” Yates hopes to help himself. That song may not have much in common with Bakersfield, but most anyone over the age of 40 will pick up on the throaty, Haggard-like undertone of “Mama Said” and “Broken Hearted Me,” and the Blackboardy feel of “Honky Tonk Babe” and “I Smell Smoke.”

“Two of the four songs we used on the demo (tape), when we were trying to get the record deal, were the two Buck Owens-type songs (“Honky Tonk Babe” and “I Smell Smoke”) that we ended up putting on the record,” Yates said. “I think that proves that this Bakersfield thing is a big part of me.”