Bakersfield Sound

You're asking about a sound, but it started as a labour market. Oil and cotton pulled Oklahoma and Texas families into the southern San Joaquin Valley in the 1930s, and the beer joints they filled needed music loud enough to cut through a Friday crowd.

The answer was electric: Fender Telecaster, pedal steel, snare on top, two voices tight in harmony, recorded dry so the band sounds like the band.

Bakersfield, California, roughly 1951 to 1972. Bill Woods ran the house band at the Blackboard Café; Trout's and the Lucky Spot in Oildale kept the same players working six nights a week.

Cousin Herb Henson's Trading Post on KERO-TV, from 1953, put those players on screen daily and fed Capitol Records a talent pipeline. Capitol A&R man Ken Nelson produced nearly all of it in Hollywood — Jean Shepard, Tommy Collins, Buck Owens, Wynn Stewart, Merle Haggard — and crucially let the artists use their own road bands instead of session men.

Fuzzy Owen and Lewis Talley's tiny Tally label cut Haggard's first sides before Capitol bought his contract in 1965. By 1969 Owens was on network TV with <em>Hee Haw</em>, and the sound became a template: Gram Parsons, the Byrds, later Dwight Yoakam.

Who: Buck Owens and Don Rich (the harmony and the Telecaster), Merle Haggard with Roy Nichols and Ralph Mooney, Wynn Stewart, Jean Shepard, Tommy Collins, Bonnie Owens, Red Simpson.

Places: the Blackboard, Trout's, the Beardsley Ballroom, Capitol Studio A in Hollywood. What: two electric guitars, pedal steel, upright or electric bass, drums kept forward, vocals doubled in high tenor harmony.

No string sections, no vocal choruses, minimal reverb. How it works: it has to sound like a working band playing in a room, and the song has to survive being sung over a bar argument.