GERALD HASLAM: Real folks, real music part of Bakersfield's cultural legacy
Bakersfield is sacred ground, says country music star Marty Stuart. Bakersfield is what?
Although it has produced a chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (Earl Warren), an international opera star (Lawrence Tibbett), at least one world-class writer (Robert Duncan) and many top athletes (Frank Gifford, for instance), Bakersfield has rarely been called "sacred ground." Instead, it has long been a target of jokes within the Golden State. The city's climate, its appearance and its hardscrabble reputation have provided comedians from Johnny Carson to Jay Leno with stereotypical material.
In fact, that less-than-sterling image was a principal reason it was in the 1960s credited with being California's center of "Okie music"; it wasn't intended as a compliment.
But an unexpected thing occurred on the way to the next joke. Bakersfield came to embody in the minds of fans many of the most admirable traits of traditional country music: Grit, pragmatism, loyalty, hard work, honesty ... genuineness, in general; those things can now be evoked by mere mention of the Kern County community's name.
Why? Largely because it remains so associated with the late Buck Owens & the Buckaroos, Merle Haggard & the Strangers, Red Simpson et al., as well as the Okie migration in general in the popular mind.
"When you listen to Buck and Merle," said the late Bill Woods, "you hear guys that really did pick that cotton or do that jail time, not some Nashville or Hollywood 'package.'"
It's also true that Bakersfield in the 1960s countered Nashville's and Hollywood's push into bland, pop music styles. Ken Nelson at Capitol Records allowed Owens and the Buckaroos to record on their own terms -- hard country. In the 1930s and 1940s, young musicians had streamed to California to be in country music's hot spot. By the '50s that stream had slowed. In the '60s it had virtually stopped, and that fact actually heightened the accomplishments of Nelson and Owens, so some commentators began to refer to Bakersfield as "Buckersfield"; the city didn't counter Nashville, but Buck -- with 15 consecutive No. 1 hits certainly did.
A Bakersfield-of-the-mind developed -- virtually a reversed version of the town's old stereotype -- and it still prompts a response nationally. When acts from the Kern County seat are introduced -- whether in Nashville or New York -- the crowd's inevitable response is revealing: "Welcome from Bakersfield, California" "ROAR!" The announcer must pause.
Moreover, older productions now considered classic such as "A Town South of Bakersfield" (volumes 1-3 [1985, 1987, 1992]), Owens' and Dwight Yoakam's "Streets of Bakersfield" in 1989, and the 1996 release of a fine hard-country CD "Bakersfield Bound" by the Desert Rose Band's Chris Hillman and Herb Pedersen and, more recently, the "Brokedown in Bakersfield" tour, among many other examples, illustrate how the city's name has come to connote things that don't necessarily have much to do with its reality.
What began as a snobbish dismissal of country music and its fans in this state -- associating them with Okie music and a supposed rube locale -- has actually led to an iconization of Bakersfield ... or of a version of it, anyway. So the town in which the anti-Okie campaign of the late 1930s originated has become the capital of "Okie Music." For many traditionalists across the nation, that music is the last bastion of true country roots. "Who knows," said the late Bill Rintoul, "maybe they'll have to add a Bakersfield theme section to Opryland so there'll at least be some real country music there."
At the far more important Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, that is exactly what they're doing starting March 24, 2012, when "The Bakersfield Sound: Buck Owens, Merle Haggard and California Country" opens to the public.
It's about time.
Novelist-historian Gerald Haslam, a Sonoma State professor emeritus, is a native of Oildale. His books include "Workin' Man Blues: Country Music in California" (1999) and his latest, "In Thought and Action: The Enigmatic Life of S.I. Hayakawa, " written with wife Janice Haslam.
