were regulars on ‘The Old Dominion Barn Dance.’
“We were not used to people dancing
when you were performing
,” she recalled.
“We worked in theaters, or parks, or school
auditoriums where people sat and listened
.”
Long before Hillbilly Barton hit town, Woods, Owen, Talley, and others were already
perfecting an amplified small-combo hybrid of Western swing and honky-tonk that, precisely
because
it was dance music, later included early strains of rock and roll. More specifically,
rockabilly. Today, that term tends to emphasize the ‘rock’ over the ‘billy,’ but the Bakersfield
brand of 1950s rock was usually a hopped up version of the twangy hillbilly boogie and
honky-tonk bop that kept the dance floor full.
Don Markham - who played in Bill Woods’ band at the ‘Blackboard,’ and later became a
mainstay in Merle Haggard’s group - credited rock and roll with super-charging the local
music scene.
“Every once in a while Buck Owens and I would go down to this record store
that was kind of a black record store on California Avenue,” he recalled. “We’d listen to
stuff and buy some records there and learn them. Buck learned a couple of Elvis Presley
things. . . . Really, the main influence in the Bakersfield Sound was bringing black music
and rock and roll and rockabilly into the country music we were playing at the club
.” Buck
himself described their live sound as
“a mix of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys and Little
Richard
.”
Even after a handful of Bakersfield artists began having country hits, echoes of the
scrappy experimentation that helped build Bakersfield’s music scene remained. Local labels
appeared and disappeared, and long-forgotten artists came and went. In their quest to
find success, however, the Bakersfield players embraced a sonic palette that both contributed
to, and extended beyond, the crying pedal steel and twisting Telecaster twang that is
popularly associated with the Bakersfield Sound. From revved-up rockabilly to crooning
teen boppers; from red-hot boogie to cool bluesy beats; from rough-around-the-edges
garage rockers to the place where hillbilly and R&B collide, this is the story of the other
side of Bakersfield.
- 10 -
