A case could be made for 1948 as the birthdate of rock and roll. “Okie Boogie,” recorded that year by The Maddox Brothers and Rose, was western swing stripped to bedrock with a furiously pounding rhythm yanking the usually tragic pedal steel along for a reckless ride. Then again, a track by Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, “Seven Come Eleven,” recorded in 1945 and also included in The Bakersfield Sound, also hints at rockabilly with its fierce slapping rhythm.
The Bakersfield Sound is a magnificently authoritative 10-CD box set whose heavily illustrated hardbound book contains artist bios and track-by-track notations. Wills was included in the set for his seminal influence on the country music scene that coalesced in the environs of Bakersfield, Calif. The city was a mecca for Dust Bowl refugees with farm fields and oil wells offering work for any man willing to roll up his sleeves. Honky-tonks were their place of refuge when the workday ended.
Bakersfield is recalled as an alternative to Nashville, and during the 1960s, it challenged the Tennessee town as country music’s capital. All of the folks whose recordings are collected here had aspirations of popularity, and some made it. To generalize the difference with Nashville, the Bakersfield boys (and several gals) were proud of their authentically rural roots and had no interest in hiding them behind slickly conceived pop arrangements.
The tracks on The Bakersfield Sound are sometimes eclectic. Jazz and Latin influences can be heard. The through-line is that Bakersfield recordings sound as if made by bands, and after World War II, they tended to a tough sound based on the embrace of the Fender Telecaster electric guitar. Trebly and twangy, the Telecaster was loud enough to take center stage at the honky-tonks where the players learned their craft and solid enough to knock the tar out of any drunken roughneck who didn’t like their looks.
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As happened elsewhere in the U.S, with Memphis’ Sun Records as the most famous case, much of this music was released on indie labels. By the mid-1950s, a guitarist and songwriter called Buck Owens became prominent in Bakersfield sessions before releasing records under his own name and became instrumental in steering West Coast country music with his gritty guitar playing. He sings his first single, “Down on the Corner of Love” (1955), an outstanding song about—sex trafficking on the streets?—in an imperative, almost frenzied voice. By 1956, many of The Bakersfield Sound’s tracks are flat-out rockabilly, and the reverberations continued in the best Bakersfield music. It became part of the DNA as Owens and newcomer Merle Haggard worked out their guitar-driven sound—aware of rock, yet distinct in sensibility.
For a recording teasingly self-aware of the tension in country music between new ways and old values, check out Wanda Jackson’s “I Gotta Know” (1956). The boppety-bop music of jukeboxes and fun times shifts to lachrymose balladeering—that dour, tragic steel—when Jackson asks her guy for a wedding ring.
