458 PART 4 | SINCE WORLD WAR II
propelled hundreds of thousands of people from the Plains states, particu-
larly Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas, to the fertile farms and productive oil
fi elds of the San Joaquin. As described in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of
Wrath, these “Okies,” as they were called, retained many aspects of their rural
southern folkways, despite their contact with the California-born Chicanos
and immigrant populations from Mexico and Europe that already made up
a large part of the valley’s denizens. A generation later, the children of those
Dust Bowl migrants were still replicating the cultural milieu of their parents’
home states. Part of that milieu was honky-tonk, the Texas-based music of the
beer hall.
The burgeoning music scene that arose in Bakersfi eld after World War II thus
took honky-tonk as its starting point. As early as 1951 the Bakersfi eld scene was
lively enough to attract studio players from outside the San Joaquin Valley. One
of them, Buck Owens, moved to Bakersfi eld from Arizona in that year; in the
decades to come Owens and his band, the Buckaroos, came to defi ne the Bakers-
fi eld sound. Without turning his back on the traditional honky-tonk sounds of
fi ddle, pedal steel guitar, and high-pitched vocal harmonies, Owens updated the
sound with drums, electric bass, and a twang y Fender Telecaster electric gui-
tar, a solid-body instrument then associated more with rock than with coun-
try music, which favored mellower hollow-body guitars. The result was a sound
that appealed to country traditionalists who found the Nashville sound too slick,
while attracting a younger audience accustomed to the stronger beat of rock
and roll. One sign of the crossover appeal of Owens’s fi rst big hit, “Act Naturally”
(1963), was the appearance two years later of a cover version on the B side of the
Beatles’ “Yesterday” single.
The most infl uential proponent of the Bakersfi eld sound has been a musi-
cian born in 1937 in nearby Oildale, California, to Okie parents. Merle Haggard’s
early years were inauspicious, and a series of petty crimes showed him what life
could be like in a juvenile detention home. An attempted robbery in Bakersfi eld
at age twenty earned him three years in the state prison at San Quentin, where a
close look at death row inspired Haggard to go straight and earn his high school
equivalency diploma. W hile in his teens his singing had already attracted the
attention of established honky-tonk performers such as Lefty Frizzell, and after
his release from prison Haggard began to build a career in the Bakersfi eld music
scene. In 1966 he scored the fi rst of a twenty-year string of number 1 country
hits with “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive,” by the California-based husband-and-wife
songwriting team of Liz and Casey Anderson.
“Mama Tried” (1968; LG 18.4), Haggard’s own composition, is a semi-
autobiographical song describing his turn to a life of crime after the death of his
father, when Haggard was nine years old. Building on the updated honky-tonk
sound of Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, Haggard and his band, the Strangers,
add two seemingly contradictory sounds: background singers in the chorus,
redolent of the polished Nashville sound, and a fi ngerpicked acoustic guitar
throughout, perhaps an indication of the infl uence of the urban folk revival
and its association of acoustic instruments with authenticity. (Fingerpicking
is a technique of playing with the individual fi ngers of the right hand, rather
than with a fl at pick or by strumming.) “Mama Tried” demonstrates how 1960s
country music could embrace stylistic and technological change, expanding the
music’s expressive range without losing its rural roots.K The unpretentious
manner of country singer
Merle Haggard (b. 1937)
was welcomed by working-
class listeners.LG 18.4Buck Owens172028_18_440-467_r3_sd.indd 458 23/01/13 11:02 AM