- 7 -
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
Owens 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 second volume
is another visit to the other side of Bakersfield.
Featuring additional songs by some artists who were included on the first volume, as
well as presenting some others for the first time, we delve deeper into the not-necessarily-
strictly-country strains of artists from Bakersfield who recorded for outside labels, and
artists from elsewhere who aligned themselves with Bakersfield upstarts like Fire, Tally,
Bakersfield, Pike, or Rose. They all contributed to the story of the sometimes unexpected
influences that contributed to the Bakersfield Sound.
