The Bakersfield Sound: How a Generation of Displaced Okies Revolutionized American Music

Praise for Robert E. Price’s work and The Bakersfield Sound:

This book all but reads itself. Price’s sense of history, his command of facts, his sense of humor, his sensitivity to class and race, and a love of the music—it’s all here.—Greil Marcus

I have never seen anything equal to it. The depth to which [Robert Price] took it has not been approached to my knowledge. [Price’s] dedication to detail [and] enthusiasm to the task was apparent throughout.—Buck Owens

Price … weaves a savvy blend of personal anecdotes and broader historical narrative in this work.… The book’s greatest asset is this local flavor; the author excels when describing barkeeps, backing musicians, and the relationships between them.—Kirkus Reviews

It’s clear that [Price] has a great respect and appreciation for the material. This is some of the finest work on the Bakersfield Sound I’ve ever read. Maybe the finest work.—Ken Nelson, Country Music Hall of Fame producer for Capitol Records

This is absolutely THE defining book about Bakersfield. Until something else happens there, this is it. It’s beautiful. The preface alone was worth the price of admission.—Marty Stuart, recording artist and past president, Country Music Association

"Seldom does a truly definitive book come along on any subject, but Robert Price has bucked the odds to produce one here. The Bakersfield Sound is original, comprehensive and accurate. It is also crisply written, so it is a pleasure to read. The author provides the why as well as the who and what of Bakersfield’s unexpected musical prominence in the second half of the twentieth century, offering perspectives that reach beyond the music scene toward deeper cultural roots. Unambiguously recommended."—Gerald W. Haslam, author of Workin’ Man Blues: Country Music in California

A fascinating story well told.—Randy Poe, coauthor of Buck ’Em!: The Autobiography of Buck Owens, Grammy-nominated record producer and president of Leiber & Stoller Music Publishing

Price’s writing, though incredibly detailed and painstakingly researched, never bogs down in academic dullness; you can tell he’s a passionate fan.… If you weren’t already a fan, Price’s encyclopedic scope will have you seeking out the music of Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, Merle Haggard and the Strangers, and other Bakersfield stars. Put them on while you enjoy the book, and you’ll be transported to a time of pure American music.—Blue Ink Review

An entertaining piece of music history, essential for those of us who are fans of outlaw country and its greatest San Joaquin Valley musicians, Merle Haggard and the late Buck Owens. But the book also says something more profound—and troubling—about how places come to be hotbeds of a particular enterprise, and how they can lose that identity.—Joe Mathews, Zócalo Public Square

"This is an inside look that includes anecdotes about legends like Merle Haggard, Buck Owens, and Johnny Cash. In addition to musicians, the book honors the venues, instruments, and promoters who empowered them. But more than merely recounting facts, the book captures the vitality of the era, and shows how it shaped music in later decades.… The Bakersfield Sound, like music itself, has the power to move people in surprising ways."—Foreword Reviews

The book is not just your average ‘run of the mill’ information on the usual suspects—Buck and Merle—but digs deeply into the tangled web that is the Bakersfield Sound. [It includes] the many characters, locations, and aspects that make up that West Coast California sound that is hard to not love.—Amanda Eichstaedt, executive director of KWMR, West Marin Community Radio

"[The Bakersfield Sound] just got moved to the top of my reading list!"

—Chris Shiflett, Foo Fighters

You sure covered it pretty good.—Red Simpson

Copyright © 2015 by Robert E. Price

First Heyday edition, 2018

First published by iUniverse in 2015

All rights reserved. No portion of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from Heyday.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017958676

Cover photo courtesy of Bill Ray/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

Cover Design: Ashley Ingram

Interior Design/Typesetting: Glenn Hammett

Orders, inquiries, and correspondence should be addressed to:

Heyday

P.O. Box 9145, Berkeley, CA 94709

(510) 549-3564, Fax (510) 549-1889

www.heydaybooks.com

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CONTENTS

Foreword by Marty Stuart

Preface to the Heyday Edition

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1    The Great Convergence

Chapter 2    Toward Eden

Snapshot: Otherness

Chapter 3    Honky-Tonk Paradise

Snapshot: It’s That Kid!

Chapter 4    Vegas of the Valley

Chapter 5    What’s on TV?

Snapshot: The Mosrite

Chapter 6    Buck Owens

Chapter 7    Merle Haggard

Snapshot: The Man in Black Needs Cash

Chapter 8    The Two Defining Songs

Chapter 9    The A & R Man

Chapter 10  The Mentor, the Muse, and the Protégé

Snapshot: Millennium Eve

Chapter 11  The Next Wave

Afterword

Appendixes

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

FOREWORD

Of Dust and Twang: An Ode to Bakersfield

Marty Stuart

I formed my first band when I was nine years old. The group was founded on a three-chord song with catchy words and a simple melody. Tiger by the Tail was the song.

It was the first piece that I learned to play on my Teisco Del Rey electric guitar. My best friend Butch Hodgins and his brother Ricky were my bandmates. Their mother, Jane, was the one who showed me where to put my fingers on the fretboard in order to bring forth the song from inside of that little hollow-body Japanese guitar.

A set list of the songs played by this neighborhood band of kids is on display at Buck Owens’s Crystal Palace in Bakersfield. The Buckaroos’ Band Hall seemed a fitting home for the document. They were the band that inspired our group to get into show business, eventually leading us to become the biggest country music stars on Route 8, Kosciusko Road, in Neshoba County, Mississippi.

After a show or two, I knew that I needed a Fender guitar. I wanted to get that California sound that Roy Nichols had going with Merle Haggard and the Strangers. Luther Perkins had a similar sound that gave Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Three a unique identity. The twangy solos played by Don Rich on Buck Owens records lit me up and made me feel like doing the happy dance all the way to the Pacific Ocean and back. Those three musicians—Nichols, Perkins, and Rich—inspired me to play my guitar every day.

My heart and mind were on fire for music. My fingers seemed to always want to play, and I liked the feeling. I woke up every day hoping that the mystery gift was still there, and as each day passed I wanted more and more of its magic.

I have such fond recollections of those warm southern days of 1967. That was the summer that a musical explosion of seismic proportions occurred inside of me and rained down enough music to last a lifetime.

In reading the profiles and biographies of my country music heroes from that era, I learned that most of them shared common backgrounds as country folks: rags-to-rhinestone stories that began in cotton field after cotton field with hard work the common rite of passage to the spotlight.

That was the story at our house. Hard work was a fact of life. My dad was a factory worker and my mother worked as a bank teller. When the subject of me getting a new guitar crossed the dinner table, the answer was earn it. It took some work, but by late summer I had earned enough yard-cutting money to purchase a used Dakota Red Fender Mustang along with a Fender Prince-ton amplifier.

From the moment I brought them home, I believed myself to be a member of the club. When I put that guitar around my neck and sang Tiger by the Tail, Folsom Prison Blues, or Branded Man, I felt empowered. Special. Set apart. In my mind I was Merle, Johnny, and Buck’s representative, their ambassador way down in the backwoods of Central Mississippi.

Those were the days when the airwaves were filled with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, and scores of other bands inspired by the British invasion. Rock stars seemed to rule the world, and even in rural Mississippi, the music of my heroes was considered a lower-class form of entertainment. The music I called our music did not get the respect I thought it deserved in our community. It became my conviction that someone needed to fly the flag of that hard-hitting brand of country music, and I thought that it might as well be me.

Now, several million miles later, the sparkling country-music sound of the 1960s created by those Bakersfield greats is more precious to me than ever. I liken it to a family heirloom or touchstone to our family’s Mississippi days, a time of pure joy and musical discovery. My wife, Connie Smith, describes country music as the cry of the heart.

That is exactly what I felt as a young musician and still feel today, as a bona fide road warrior, when I listen to the recordings of Merle Haggard and the Strangers or Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, the songs of Tommy Collins, the duets of Jean Shepard and Ferlin Husky, the sound of Ralph Mooney’s steel guitar. It’s what I feel when I hear the timeless songs of Fuzzy Owen, Harlan Howard, and Dallas Frazier, the smile in Bonnie Owens’s voice, the divinity of the sound captured in Capitol Studio B, Hollywood, the masterful guitar of James Burton, Don Rich, Roy Nichols, and Gene Moles. It’s what I experience when I hear Red Simpson’s cinematic songs, Norman Hamlett’s name when Merle calls it out on his records and the solos that follow, the thunder of the Maddox Brothers and Rose, Tom Brumley’s crying steel-guitar blues on Together Again, the suspended feeling of time standing still when Merle, Bonnie, and Glen Campbell harmonize, the mysterious sound and lonesome look of Lewis Talley, the blistering power of Wynn Stewart’s 45 rpm of Playboy, and Joe and Rose Lee Maphis’s honky-tonk masterpiece, Dim Lights, Thick Smoke (and Loud, Loud Music).

Those are some of the glorious reflections I treasure from the musical revolution known around the world as the Bakersfield Sound. The Bakersfield movement was the ultimate expression of blue-collar country, yet stands as one of America’s purest cultural offerings to the world stage of the creative arts.

I’ve had the privilege of knowing so many of the people represented here in Robert Price’s book. American originals each and every one, a chosen band of people bound together by a sound, a feel, and the dust of the San Joaquin.

On one of my visits to Bakersfield, musical historian and ambassador-at-large Bob Mitchell gave me his official tour. We toured Buck Owens’s mausoleum, the site of the Rainbow Gardens dance hall, Don Rich’s grave, Buck and Merle’s old mansions, as well as the converted boxcar where the Haggard family lived when Merle was a boy. I stood on the railroad tracks at the end of the street from where that boxcar sat and I immediately felt Merle’s presence. I knew that I was standing on what must have been holy ground to him as a boy. I closed my eyes and I swear I could hear the scream of a thousand lonesome wildcat train whistles out in the distance.

I sensed that I was standing in a spirit world terminal. Jimmie Rodgers, Lefty Frizzell, Bob Wills, a parade of migrant workers, field hands, preachers, prisoners, drunks, hustlers, hobos, fugitives. I felt a procession of heaven-bound angels carrying the tears and the prayers of a million loving mothers, truck drivers, waitresses, hookers, card sharks, and a choir of common men, all waltzing across my mind, tipping their hats as they passed.

The middle of that railbed seemed to be the getting-on place leading to the soul of so many of Hag’s songs. I suspected that Merle’s keen powers of observation, much of his wisdom, and his need for motion lay rooted in the dirt and gravel underneath the tracks where I stood. That dirt served as the foundation of a life’s work that traveled the earth, on into space, reaching all the way to heaven, finally touching the hand of God—a profound body of work, lovingly wrapped and placed into the boxcar of a blue train that came calling for Merle on the morning of April 6, 2016.

Another powerful spiritual hotspot within Bakersfield’s aura is the Sunset Labor Camp. Even under the canopy of a beautiful, blue California sky, smiled upon by acres of sunshine, the labor camp looks like a lonely, tear-stained remnant of old America. The camp sits there nobly, serving out a life sentence amid endless miles of dust and sand. Looking at the labor camp I had the same feeling I get when I go home and drive through the Mississippi Delta. There seems to be nothing there, yet everything is there. The Mississippi Delta and California’s San Joaquin Valley are double-first musical cousins. One gave us the Delta blues and the other, as Woody Guthrie said, gave us hard-hitting songs—made by hard-hit people, which evolved into California’s own unique brand of country music.

The music of the San Joaquin drifted around the world, touching lives at every turn. In the latter days of the 1960s, it doubled back through the Mississippi Delta and headed south until it found its way onto the airwaves of a thousand-watt radio station that transmitted its way into our home. The music that the signal was hauling found its mark deep inside my heart. Breathing in the atmosphere of the San Joaquin, I felt its power, the cry of its heart, and so many unspoken mysteries. The land feels ancient, biblical, the kind of place where, if you listen closely, you can hear the Chuck Wagon Gang sending a transfusion of love and hope into the microphone of a Mexican border station. They’re playing Echoes from the Burning Bush for a congregation of homesick souls gathered around a phantom Philco radio, outdoor in the open air at a rogue camp at the end of a long and weary day.

Moses stood on holy ground

The fire from God descended down

Set the roadside bush on fire

Then the Lord did there explain

Through his servants should remain

All the echoes from the bush on fire

Oh the echoes from the bush

How they thrill my soul

Oh the echoes from the bush

Point me to the goal

I no more am doubting

But with joy I’m shouting

With no thought of shame to blush

This my song shall ever be

Words that are so sweet to me

Echoes from the burning bush

As Bob Mitchell and I traveled back into Bakersfield, it became apparent that the city is a booming twenty-first-century kind of place. In reality Bakersfield is a ghost town. Most all of the greats are now gone. However, when I visit, walk the same earth, breathe the same air as the people in this book who breathed, it always makes a difference in me.

I have to believe there’s more notable music to come from this dusty California town. The right song, the right star, the right moment in time. Lightning could strike again. Stranger things have happened. In the meantime, the musical legacy of Bakersfield is solid, with few equals and no challengers in sight.

Robert Price has chronicled the story, penned it down to the minute in beautiful form—an exquisite portrait. Bravo, Robert!

As for me, I’m still in a band, playing a Fender guitar. I still consider myself one of Merle, Johnny, and Buck’s representatives. And I am still of the conviction that somebody ought to fly the flag for that brand of hard-hitting country music.

It might as well be me.

Marty Stuart

Mojave Desert, California

March 2017

PREFACE TO THE HEYDAY EDITION

The last time I ever spoke to Merle Haggard was December 10, 2015.

I was leaving a book signing at the Bakersfield Music Hall of Fame, walking to my car, when my mobile phone rang. It was my friend Ray McDonald, a close confidante of Merle’s who’d grown up with two of his stepsons and, years later, drove the tour bus.

I’ve got somebody here wants to talk to you, he said, and I heard the rustle of a phone passing from hand to hand.

Robert, rasped a familiar but tired baritone, you’ve written a hell of a book. I want to tell you I really like the front cover. You picked the right guy to put on there.

He was referring to the book’s original cover boy, Billy Mize, smiling and pointing from behind a KAFY-AM microphone stand, his cowboy hat pushed back cavalierly to reveal dark, boyish curls. He is probably twenty-two but conveys a gentle innocence that suggests fourteen.

It was Billy or you, I told him. Tough choice, but I had to go with Billy. He sort of epitomized, in that photo especially, the era I wrote about—the early days.

Well, you made the right decision, Merle said. Special man, special time. What a talented artist. Thank you for doing that.

Merle had been fighting pneumonia for a month, forcing him to cancel several concert dates. He would cancel a few more over the next three months.

On April 5, at about six o’clock in the evening, I received a call from a man who introduced himself as Merle’s attorney. One does not generally want to receive unsolicited calls from attorneys, even, sometimes, one’s own, and this call did nothing to contradict that truth. This was, in fact, bad news. Rayburn Green was calling to let me know that Merle wouldn’t be rallying this time. It’s close, he told me. Very, very close.

Grown children and bandmates and old, beloved cronies had been streaming onto Merle’s modest ranch property in Shasta County, California, all day. They’d been shuttling on and off his beloved silver tour bus to sit at his bedside and whisper in his ear. The Super Chief had been his home on the road for years and it was the place he now chose for his final comfort.

A few times, in between visitors, Merle’s attorney told me, he had read stories aloud to his friend and longtime client—stories from this book. The next day, his seventy-ninth birthday, Merle died.

I don’t know which stories the attorney read to Merle, but I imagine they were not from the sections that mentioned his hit songs or his accolades. I imagine they weren’t even about Merle at all, but rather about Billy Mize and his heroic Cadillac, Red Simpson and his shoeshine kit, Fuzzy Owen and his comically tiny recording studio. Because whatever Merle Haggard might have been once, in the heady days of sold-out concerts and the fast living that went with it, the Merle Haggard I’d come to know was reflective, humble, and, above all, grateful. His last decade had been a long-running exercise in appreciation for all he’d managed to achieve against absurdly daunting obstacles, most of them of his own making, and for the people who’d helped make him, one way or another, the man he came to be.

I glimpsed some of that one night in February 2006. I was teaching a six-week class at California State University, Bakersfield, on the history of the Bakersfield Sound, and at the conclusion of the course’s first-night lecture I greeted a short line of students, each wanting to tell me about some personal connection to the people or places we’d be studying. A slender, silver-haired woman who’d been lingering at the back of the line stepped forward as the last student turned to go. Well, you got most of it right, she said. And that’s how I met Lillian Haggard, Merle’s sister, seventeen years his senior.

Her presence in the class was a mixed blessing. Every time my lecture veered from documented fact to speculation I would find myself peering in her direction, as if to ask, Isn’t that right, Lillian? She would usually smile and nod, almost imperceptibly, but also occasionally frown or roll her eyes. And so it went.

It occurred to me that she might hold some sway with her famous brother; perhaps she could convince him to visit the class. She pooh-poohed the idea without hesitation: he lived in Redding, a seven-hour drive down the long spine of California. I persisted, asking her again each week after class, but she offered no encouragement. Finally, with only a couple of class sessions left, the message changed. Maybe, she said. But have a backup plan.

On February 15, the next-to-last night of the class, I walked into Dorothy Donohoe Hall to see Lillian and a friend of hers standing just outside the classroom door chatting with Merle Haggard—an unconvinced, doing-this-for-my-sister Merle Haggard. I put him up in front of the class in a student desk turned to face everyone and sat to his right, and for the next ninety minutes he answered our questions—haltingly at first but eventually with patience and warmth. We talked about Tally Records, the Blackboard, Richard Nixon, and Okie From Muskogee. We talked about Buck Owens, Tommy Collins, Johnny Cash, and the present state of country music.

Then, when class was almost over, as Merle was shifting his weight in that desk so he could get up and go, I called his attention to a man who’d been sitting quietly against the back wall of the classroom. Merle, I said, I want to introduce you to somebody—somebody you probably haven’t seen in almost fifty years. And I pointed out Tommy Gallon, the man who, in December 1957, as a Kern County sheriff’s deputy, had arrested him—twice, within a span of thirty hours. Merle, then nineteen, had tried to break into a roadhouse café one night, was spotted and readily identified; Tommy and his partner Robert Mooney had arrested him and booked him into the Kern County Jail. Like he’d done so many times before, however, Merle escaped. The two deputies, irritated by this turn of events, tracked him down on Christmas Eve at his brother’s house. Within two months Merle was in San Quentin State Prison.

Yes, I’d been sufficiently confident that Merle would show up that I arranged for Tommy and his wife, Ann, to visit the class and wait for just the right moment.

As the class was filing out, Lillian pulled the men together, and they chatted in the parking lot for a while. They seemed to connect, no doubt sensing time’s way of softening the hearts of both petty criminals and small-town cops. When Tommy died a year and a half later, Merle called Ann with condolences.

I’m not sure the Merle Haggard of twenty or thirty years before would have cared all that much for the reunion. The Merle of forty years before might have been downright offended, having kept his past from public view for so long, only admitting to the world who he was and what he’d done the day Johnny Cash, on national TV and with Merle’s begrudging consent, introduced the story.

I didn’t know that Merle Haggard, though. I knew only the one who was reserved but gracious and appreciative of how his life had gone.

Yes, a lot has happened since this book first came out.

Less than a month after I spoke to Merle that final time, Red Simpson died. Complications from a heart attack, age of eighty-one. In its obituary, The New York Times called him an architect of the twangy, hard-driving Bakersfield sound in country music who made a career out of truck-driving songs. That description fit another life, though, three or four Red Simpsons ago.

The one I knew, that most of Bakersfield knew, was an impish, wisecracking character who knew as much about the big rigs he sang about in songs such 1971’s (Hello) I’m a Truck as he did quantum physics.

Jean Shepard, the San Joaquin Valley girl who became one of country music’s first female stars, died of Parkinson’s disease in September 2016 at the age of eighty-two. From her Bakersfield base she had cultivated her 1952 duet with Ferlin Husky, A Dear John Letter, into a spot on the roster of the Grand Ole Opry. And, finally, in November 2017, the Bakersfield Sound’s most telegenic star, movie-idol handsome Billy Mizer, passed away at eighty-eight.

The ranks of the musicians, promoters, and audiences that made the Bakersfield Sound a fleeting phenomenon thins a little more every year. Since this book first appeared, it has thinned in most significant ways.

Robert E. Price

Bakersfield, California

PREFACE

In the spring and summer of 1997, I wrote a series of newspaper articles on the twang that made Bakersfield famous. Those articles, most of them published over a four-week period in the Bakersfield Californian, clicked in ways I couldn’t have imagined. I received letters, postcards, and e-mails from the four corners of the earth— literally. Messages came from Sweden, Brazil, Australia, and Japan. When is the next installment coming out? Where can I buy the book? Do you have Susan Raye’s phone number? Do you think she’d remember me from that time I met her in that parking lot in Omaha in 1968?

I followed up that newspaper series