Postcard from Bakersfield - “In Search of the Sound”
Between the years of 1930 and 1940, some 3.5 million Americans fled the Great Plains, with the Dust Bowl blowing roughly 440,000 out of Oklahoma alone. For many, the end destination was the promised land of California and Route 66 provided a path of exodus. Some, with cars loaded, followed the road all the way to Los Angeles, but at Barstow many more detoured north to the San Joaquin Valley. In the process, these migrants not only transformed California, but in Bakersfield created a sound that forever altered American music. Join us as we explore the roots of this most American genre as we trace the footsteps of such artists as Buck Owens and Merle Haggard with author Bob Price, and attempt to get a finger on the pulse of this city's scene today.
Bob Brice - The Bakersfield Sound
TRANSCRIPT
(As this transcript was obtained via a computerized service, please forgive any typos, spelling and grammatical errors)
Jimmy Phillips (00:22):
My granny, she was from Ada, Oklahoma, and they came right through. They came out Route 66, but most of the Okies came this way because they was looking for farm work and they was looking where they can pick some cotton. I was raised by the Okies, but, and when you're in Bakersfield, I'm gonna tell you something that's that <laugh>, that's where you're gonna find a lot of the Okies.
Evan Stern (00:48):
About midway through the Grapes of Wrath, after making it to California, Tom Joad meets a father and son who are heading back to the panhandle. "At least we can starve to death with the folks we know," the older man says to Tom, before warning, "Okie used to mean you were from Oklahoma. Now it means you're a dirty son of a bitch. Okie means you're scum. Don't mean nothing itself, it's the way they say it." And having grown up in the Arvin Federal Government Camp where the Joads eventually found some dignity, Jimmy Phillips tells me Steinbeck wasn't writing fantasy.
Jimmy Phillips (01:27):
1945. And we moved into what they called the Arvin Federated Labor Camp. That's where they got their start, and they found work. And that's what they came out from Oklahoma to do just like everybody else. We moved, when we moved in 1945 to the government camp, we lived there in a tent circle, in the tent circle. Now that's the canvas covered cabins with ply board around the bottom. And that was your house. It was a, uh, 10 to 12, and we slept in the same bed. It was a, uh, regular bed was slept sideways, and all of us slept in that bed. Five mom, dad, myself, Sue and Kendall. And, but way back when we first started out there, everybody, they said, "No, we don't want our kids affiliated with those people. They can't go to school in Bakersfield. They can't go to school here because they have lice. They're full of lice."
Evan Stern (02:28):
This wasn't true. As Jimmy says, the camp had showers, laundry, facilities, and even an electric socket where you could plug in an iron if you wanted. Now 80 with an impeccably groomed mustache befitting his barber credentials, Jimmy lives in Tehachapi in a ranch home that seems downright palatial when compared to the tent his family shared. But he insists the camp was a great place to grow up. And while Okie was long meant as a slur, it's a title he came to identify with well before Merle Haggard made it okay.
Jimmy Phillips (03:00):
I'm proud to be and have been and lived through those hard times in which it was hard. I know I still sound like an Okie when I get around to Okie, this even gets worse, you know? But, but there's certain things that we would say back then that you, you don't say dog, it's "doag." You know, where's that doag? And, uh, pliers. A pair of pliers. My dad would always say, Hey, Jim, how many them plars? How do you spell pliers? P l a r S. Yeah. You don't sp <laugh>. I mean, and, and there was so many things- far. Well, we need to build a fire. How do you spell fire? F a r I flunked spelling all the time because they said, spell it like it sounds. I did.
Evan Stern (03:48):
Considering this, it's little wonder Jimmy took refuge in and focused most of his attention on music where he so excelled at drums, he began gigging on sessions at age 16 and found himself at the center of a scene at its creative peak.
Jimmy Phillips (04:04):
For all through my, all through my years, I cut hair and go play music. And that's the way I wanted to keep it. I had offers to go with Buck and Merle and, and Charley Pride. I, I, Marty Robbins. He wanted me to move back to Nashville and, and work for him. And, but I knew I was Bakersfield Sound. I'm Bakersfield sound, and I'm gonna be Bakersfield sound till the day I die.
Bob Price (04:51):
I I say that the Bakersfield sound was not a sound so much as a time and a place, a lot of energy, uh, a lot of optimism. You know, you had Okies, uh, who had brought their music west. You had, uh, people who'd come west during World War II to work in the shipyards and the aircraft factories. You know, the comparison I make is to, uh, you know, Paris in the 1920s with Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein.
Evan Stern (05:13):
That's Bob Price. A reporter who spent 32 years covering features on the local beat, his book, The Bakersfield Sound, is a definitive tome on this city's music history. Driving me through Merle Haggard's old neighborhood of Oildale, there's no mistaking this industrial town for the left bank. But while artists like Fitzgerald and Baldwin found their voices in Paris, it's true that talents like Buck Owens, Don Rich and Ralph Mooney found theirs here. And while the lost generation revolutionized American Letters, these cats did the same for American music. And Bob tells me a little about what set them and this place apart.
Bob Price (05:54):
Uh, the difference between Nashville and, and Bakersfield on a couple levels. One, Nashville, uh, was and is a recording industry city. Bakersfield was a live music city. Uh, you had just a whole lot of clubs, uh, recording artists would come here from Los Angeles and, and, uh, Las Vegas and other places to perform, not to record. They go to Nashville to record. They come to Bakersfield to perform. And then also, you know, sort of stylistically, uh, Bakersfield music, especially early on, owed a lot to rock and roll. That was coming out at the time. Little Richard and Buddy Holly and, uh, you know, rock around the clock. Bill Haley and the Comets.
Evan Stern (06:34):
Jimmy agrees with this and puts matters in a little more simple terms.
Jimmy Phillips (06:37):
I've always said that right off the bat, that, uh, the Bakersfield sound, it was created in the bars, and Nashville was created in the church.
Evan Stern (06:47):
The bars in Bakersfield were famously loud and rowdy. And when you think about what it must have been like to gig in these spaces, you can see how much of its evolution was born out of practicality. Its hard driving rhythms kept the crowds happy with fun, danceable beats, while Buck Owens found the newly invented Fender overpowered any drunken hollers,
Bob Price (07:08):
You know, Buck may, maybe, uh, deserves all the credit for having popularized it, uh, at least in Bakersfield because he liked the way it sort of cut through the noise, cut through the din, cut through the, you know, through the drums. And, uh, just had this, you know, this, this edge to it that he liked. And it just became, uh, became popular and became popular. Obviously, another genres of music. But, uh, I think he gotta give Buck Owens some credit for, for popularizing, the Telecaster,
Evan Stern (08:00):
While Buck Owens, recording of the Red Simpson written Sam's Place captures the spirit of a night at a Bakersfield honky-tonk. It was at the Blackboard, a notorious windowless cavern of a saloon where he started as a member of the Orange Blossom Playboys.
Bob Price (08:15):
Well, I mean, the, the story that that's told most often is the night that, uh, Joe and Rosalie Maphis, uh, who were from Virginia, uh, came out to, they, they had moved to California. They'd moved to Los Angeles. They came up to visit the Blackboard in, I think, 1954, 53, something like that. And, uh, they were used to shows where people sat politely in their chairs and watched the show. And, uh, at the Blackboard, people were dancing and, you know, it was pretty wild. And, uh, so he, he penned this song, uh, Dim Light Thick Smoke, and Loud, Loud Music. Uh, but I mean that summarize it, it was a kind of a rowdy, loud place.
Jimmy Phillips (09:23):
I, I played, I played the Blackboard one night there, and the Hell's Angels came in and I thought, I'm dead <laugh>. And, and I thought, okay, now I was told, I was told, if a fight breaks out, you take that drum seat and you fold it on and take the top off of it, fold that drum seat up and stand, put your back up against the wall and stay there and just swing that drum seat, <laugh>. I thought, well, if that's what I have to do, I'll do it. I seen this one lady, I mean, well, this man hit this, hit his wife and this guy right beside him, he jumped up and, and flattened him. And I mean, blood went everywhere. And, and so this lady, she went over and hit that man that hit her husband, and she said, and she pulled off her high six inch high heel. And I watched her hit him in the head, man, blood was everywhere because she told that guy, she said, this fight between me and my husband, not you and him, or you and me, she said, it's between me and him. You stay out of it. I, I know there was, yeah, I played where chicken wire was up around us. I sure have
Evan Stern (11:22):
The Blackboard was just one of many honky tonks where people could drink and dance away their cares. And driving down a road paralleling an industrial railroad track, Bob tells me about the scene that once thrived here.
Bob Price (11:34):
This is, uh, Edison Highway. And, uh, there were a lot of, lot of clubs along this way. Two, of the prominent ones were The Lucky Spot and the Clover Club. There were some other ones called, uh, there was Chet's Club, but this was the people with, you know, they'd start at the Blackboard, um, party for a while, drive all the way across town to Edison Highway. And, and, uh, Merle Haggard and Cousin Herb and, um, Fuzzy Owen, all those guys, their hangout was Edison Highway <laugh>. Nothing is very recognizable. It's pretty, pretty derelict now. Um,
Evan Stern (12:11):
Derelict is the best way to describe this stretch of road as most buildings have been replaced by Scrapyards.
Bob Price (12:18):
Yeah, a lot of these landmarks have dried up and gone away. And, um, and it's an awful lot of, uh, you know, if you look to the right, you'll see an empty lot. And it used to be, and there's just a lot of those going on. Uh, so that's, uh, the sad, the true state of affairs.
Evan Stern (12:33):
But on 18th Street, Bob points out an abandoned gray cement hut that's still standing.
Bob Price (12:39):
This was the headquarters, this incredibly tiny building was the headquarters of Tally Records in 1956, 55, 56. Uh, this is where, um, buck Owens recorded a couple songs, a couple rockabilly songs, Hot Dog, and a couple others
Evan Stern (12:59):
At the same time. If you go to Memphis, and I mean, obviously Sun Records was, I mean, bit more famous than Tally Records, but you can tour Sun Records in in Memphis.
Bob Price (13:09):
Why can't you tour this?
Evan Stern (13:11):
This site frustrates me and am pained to learn.The Blackboard itself was torn down to clear space for the County's History Museum complex.
Bob Price (13:18):
You know, museum people will say, well, it was just this sort of strip mall looking building that wasn't very remarkable. Um, um, it had been used as a shooting range at one time, and there was supposedly, you know, lead embedded in the walls. That's the excuse we were given. But it was, it was torn down by people who are in the business of education. And, uh, it's on museum grounds and it's in itself, you know, the, the old Blackboard was, you could argue a museum piece, and, uh, nevertheless, they knocked it down and you would, you know, if they're gonna put up something that's, uh, you know, honors Kern County history in some way, that would be one thing. But it's still, it's just a grassy lot now. So there's no really reason that I can see to have knocked it down. And that building, you know, ironically, the, uh, the New Bakersfield Sound Museum that they're building, the new, uh, exhibit, uh, freestanding building is only about 30 paces from where the old Blackboard was. So they could have easily hung onto it and turned it into a pretty good little museum. But it's gone.
Evan Stern (14:25):
I asked Bob where people should go hear the Bakersfield sound nowadays, and with a smiling laugh, he tells me, Austin. And Pat Evans, who owns the store and venue World Records where he's booked and promoted, acts like Los Lobos, Fiona Apple, and Collective Soul since 1982, doesn't seem to argue otherwise.
Pat Evans (14:45):
What is the Bakerfield sound right now? I had a, a, a customer of ours from, um, you moved here from New Jersey and she said, you know, back in, back in back home, I can go see live music every night. And, uh, me and my friends were, were just, we're just big music fans and, and my friends have said us, so, okay, so tell us about the Bakersfield sound. And she said, and I told them, the Bakersfield sound is just a, a patch on a hat. It, there's nothing, it's, there's nothing here that has anything to do with the Bakersfield sound. Um, it just, this just happened to be the town where this happened. I, the world really wants there to be a Bakersfield sound that they can come visit much like Branson or something like that. But there's, they want it to be these, you know, these uh, dives and say some something really authentic. I, I know some investors that have come to me and say, we wanna open a place that has the Bakersfield sound. Oh, they don't live here, has the Bakersfield sound and go every night of the week, you can go hear the Bakersfield sound on that stage. Well, I put on concerts in Bakersfield. That has, that's just something you, you have a nostalgia for. It doesn't exist, nor do the people that wanna come out and see it exist. You can't keep that thing going where no wife wanted their husband to hang out.
Evan Stern (16:09):
But while much has changed in Bakersfield over the last 50 some odd years, much remains the same. Agriculture still drives much of the Valley's economic engine, and people still migrate here to work the fields.
Bob Price (16:22):
Brown skin is really one of the very, and you know, is one of the few things that's, that's different. Uh, Okies had their own language in, in a sense. Um, they have their, uh, distinctive religion, their distinctive music, their distinctive foods. Um, you know, they really have a lot of, a lot in common. There's, there's always a class of people that needs to, to work jobs that are less desirable, you know, just the way it's, it's always been. And um, you know, Latinos are now filling that role. But, you know, a generation and a half ago it was, it was the Okies,
Evan Stern (17:01):
While the honky tonks that dotted the Edison Highway have shuttered, I noticed El Rancho Grande nightclub stands just a block away from the Clover's old address. And if a music scene here exists, it's powered today by people with names like Gutierrez. I see this that night in Stramler Park where taco trucks and Michelada tents have set up for the second annual Tejano Music Festival. As dusk falls, dates in boots, jeans and cowboy hats begin filtering in to see acts like Michael Salgado, Grupo Califas and a trio of young women called Las Caliope.
Celene Ruelas (17:40):
Um, Caliope is actually the Greek goddess of music, song dance and poetry.
Tagacy Valdez (17:46):
Yeah. And it feels good to have like a name that has a meaning behind it. Cuz a lot of groups like they just have a name cuz it sounds nice, you know, or it looks nice like, let's say like on a screen or like on paper it looks nice, but it feels nice. Like whenever like people ask, oh, like what does Caliope mean? And then like you're able to actually say what it means and it has like an important like significance behind the name
Evan Stern (18:06):
Dressed in satin gowns, purple rebozos and floral patterned felt hats, all share vocals with Founders Selena Ruelas on Violin Tagaci Valdez on guitarron and Rosana Valadez.
Celene Ruelas (18:19):
I would say our foundation and fundamentals are based on mariachi. And pretty much from that, um, we used all the knowledge and the experience that we've gotten from mariachi to just pretty much bloom out and, and, and play songs that of other genres that we want to hear. Not just the traditional mariachi, but the traditional mariachi is actually what got us here
Evan Stern (18:46):
In addition to classicos, their set features a tribute to Selena and even a cover of Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire. But mariachi is unquestionably their foundation. And when I ask how they discovered this music all cite, their parents who traced their roots to Mexico,
Celene Ruelas (19:01):
It actually comes from my grandfather, which is my dad's dad. Um, he's someone I never got to meet. Um, but played a very, very important inspiration in my life. Um, he had his own mariachi in Guadalajara and the name of his mariachi was Mariachi <foreign>. So when my parents, um, you know, growing up it was something that my mother, she wanted us to pursue, she wanted us to pursue the tradition of music for my father. So music, um, was, it came from my family, it's in my blood and it's just beautiful how growing up in our house, we had instruments everywhere. We had instruments practically in every room and we had more than probably 30 instruments. So it was, our living room was literally a music store.
Rosanna Valadez (19:53):
Oh yeah. My mom is from Zacatecas and my dad's from Jalisco. My mom came to the States when she was 14 years old and started working at that age. And my dad came to the States when he was around 17, 18 years old. They're, you know, very hard workers and at a young age, you know, they got married young and you know, bought their house, you know, got their American dream and, but yeah, that's how my parents came and they're the ones that inspired me to, to, you know, to play music because I come from a musical family as well. So
Tagacy Valdez (20:29):
I guess it's like pretty similar cuz everyone, like they come here to work and they all have that same mentality that they wanna, that they wanna like make money for their family. They wanna keep going. And people here are very hard workers. They're very, very hard workers. Like even like in terms of like farm workers, people like any type of workers and musicians too, like being a musician, a lot of people think, you know, it's easy, you know, like you just play and everything. But like sometimes like you play hours and hours every week and then, I mean, it's the same for any type of work.
Evan Stern (21:00):
You know, I've been doing a lot of exploration of what was known as the Bakersfield sound and I've had a lot of people tell me that, oh, the music scene in Bakersfield is dead. It doesn't exist. <laugh>,
Celene Ruelas (21:12):
No, <laugh>. I'm like, I would be the first to say that cuz I do check out a lot of, uh, bands. There's so many different types of bands here and I wouldn't say not one band is alike. They're all different. Um, so the music scene here, it is great and I, and we definitely support the local artists and musicians
Evan Stern (21:31):
So, yes, there is music here in Bakersfield. It just has a different groove and changes like these are to be expected. And while I lament my search for a dirty honky tonk came up dry, you can still catch an occasional show at the Family Friendly Crystal Palace, which Buck Owens built and opened himself back in 96. Also, the sound itself is doing just fine. It paved the way for Gram Parsons and ZZ Top before getting picked up by Dwight Yoakum, Danni Leigh, the Derailers and Miami based Mavericks. Also not for nothing, Brad Paisley says, he asks himself today, what would Buck do? And more than this, perhaps what happened in Bakersfield wasn't just about the sound, but the attitude- that is, a willingness to experiment and not simply follow, which happens all over. But when I ask Bob, where traces of Okie culture is found here, now his answer is telling
Bob Price (22:28):
You see it on in the obituary page of the newspaper every, you know, every single day. I mean, there's anywhere from one to 20 individuals who, uh, you know, came over as children in the 1930s and, uh, from Oklahoma some place in Oklahoma or Arkansas or Panhandle, Texas and stayed
Evan Stern (22:47):
In his book. Bob says the legacy of that time needn't die with them. But to a great extent, it has before adding. It's good to remember who you were because it says a lot about what you'll become.
Bob Price (23:00):
I think it's important for every city of any consequence to honor its past. Uh, you know, every city has something that they really need to hang onto. And the one thing Bakersfield has, or one of the few things Bakersfield has is, uh, is the Bakersfield sound. I think it's something that we just continue to celebrate.
Evan Stern (23:21):
Bob says Bakersfield's identity, once upon a time just happened to be genre shaping American music. It's residents should never forget that.
