The camera pans across the gray-blue haze of San Francisco Bay, sails above the bleak topography of San Quentin, and settles on Merle Haggard and his band as they trudge through one of the prison’s entry gates, its thick iron bars flung open for them.
“This is South Block, boys,” Haggard says in the 1971 video footage. “I spent 18 months in that son of a bitch.”
Over a decade prior, Haggard was in the audience when Johnny Cash played a New Year’s show at San Quentin. At that time, Inmate A-45200 had been serving an indefinite sentence for a relatively minor crime: an attempted burglary of a Bakersfield café.
This article appears in Issue 34 of Alta Journal.
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In prison, Haggard gained a reputation for his country singing and guitar work. Following the Man in Black’s performance, Haggard suddenly found himself the go-to instructor for his fellow convicts, all eager to learn how to play licks like Luther Perkins, Cash’s lead guitarist.
The day of his release in 1960, Haggard ate breakfast at the mess hall with a few prisoners he’d become close to. During the meal, his friends told him they’d miss his ugly face. He said not to worry, joking that one day he’d come back and put on a show for them like Johnny Cash.
Now, Haggard was performing as one of the top-selling country music artists in the world, as well as one of the most famous rehabilitation success stories in the history of the California Department of Corrections. Merv Griffin Enterprises had sent a film crew to capture what producers must have predicted would be Haggard’s triumphal return. He came back not as a polished product of Nashville but as the most gifted singer-songwriter to emerge from the musical melting pot of California’s southern San Joaquin Valley—the champion of a leaner, sharper-elbowed, more urgent form of country music known as the Bakersfield sound.
Several of Haggard’s No. 1 singles—“Branded Man,” “Sing Me Back Home,” “Mama Tried”—couldn’t have been clearer about the consequences suffered by a wayward boy who’d turned criminal. But the singer hadn’t come to pick from his usual set list. Instead, he’d be recording tracks for a live album of spirituals to be named The Land of Many Churches. In the tradition of the Bakersfield sound, Haggard would break with tradition.
Haggard and his band, the Strangers, took the stage. The prison chaplain delivered a prayer. Haggard started strumming “Amazing Grace” with closed eyes, his baritone breaking and building and breaking again. The response he got from the inmates in the audience was hushed, worlds away from the howling and raucous laughter that Cash elicited during his San Quentin concerts. Little here of the rowdiness that made such great television. “I was blind,” Haggard sang, “but now I see.”
FIRST NOTES
Merle Haggard and Buck Owens—the two great pillars of the Bakersfield sound—were children of Dust Bowl refugees. In January 1935, a barn fire on Jim Haggard’s leased farm in Oklahoma killed the livestock and destroyed the seeds for the next season’s crops. By the time Merle was born two years later, the family were living in a converted refrigerated freight car in Oildale, California, a little over three miles north of some of Bakersfield’s best honky-tonks.
Merle idolized his father, and after losing him at age 9, he was reluctant to submit to any other authority. He began hopping freight trains, and by middle school, he was dodging truant officers and stealing cars. He spent a good chunk of his teenage years in reform schools and several months in jails. He was exceedingly difficult to contain. By his own reckoning, he escaped custody 17 times. All the while, he was honing his abilities as a singer and guitarist.
Alvis Edgar “Buck” Owens Jr. was born in a Texas farm town in August 1929, two months before the great crash on Wall Street. His sharecropper father packed up the household for California when Owens was eight, but the family’s homemade trailer broke down in Arizona, so they ended up settling in Mesa. As a teenager, Owens landed his first radio show and joined a professional band—Mac and the Skillet Lickers—playing lap steel guitar at Mesa’s bars.
In May 1951, Owens relocated to Bakersfield after his estranged wife, Bonnie, moved there with their two kids. (Bonnie, a gifted country singer, would become another of the city’s major stars—both as a solo artist and as a collaborator with Haggard, who would become her second husband.) Finding the city fertile ground for his kind of music, Owens began singing, playing, and elbowing his way toward the apex of the city’s burgeoning music scene. On the stages of Bakersfield’s honky-tonks as on the dance floors below them, the specter of the Dust Bowl’s agonies wrestled with the muscular optimism of the postwar economic boom.
NEW MUSIC CITY
By the late 1950s, thanks to its Grand Ole Opry and the establishment of recording studios like RCA and Decca, Nashville, Tennessee, had become the country music capital of the world. The city’s “countrypolitan” aesthetic was all about bringing an easy-listening respectability to a rough rural genre through chaste background vocals, syrupy strings, and a surfeit of velvety reverb. By contrast, there was a crispness and immediacy to the tracks that Owens and Haggard laid down at Capitol Records’ Hollywood studios—elements they shaped into signature features of the Bakersfield sound.
The two spent the entirety of the ’60s transmitting the music in their heads onto vinyl. They recorded with their own backing bands—Buck with his Buckaroos, Merle with his Strangers—and proceeded largely free from heavy-handed corporate intervention. They would rule the top of the Billboard country charts in the ’60s. Owens finished the decade with 18 No. 1 hits. Haggard took second place with 8, although he would rack up an additional 30 chart-toppers over the following two decades.
The Bakersfield sound would pour the foundation for California country rock—from the Flying Burrito Brothers and Gram Parsons’s solo work to Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles to the cowpunk sensibility of Dwight Yoakam. Following Owens’s and Haggard’s examples, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings wrested control of their careers from Nashville, with new contracts allowing them to choose their own material and backing bands. Their outlaw country movement would owe a large thematic debt to Haggard’s back catalog, heavy on hardened criminals and lonesome fugitives. Nelson’s longtime lead guitarist Jody Payne and Jennings himself embraced the sacrosanct electric axe of Buck and Merle: the Fender Telecaster.
A flat slab of ash bolted onto a maple neck, the Telecaster possesses a jangly treble capable of cutting through the racket of booming bass drums and the chatter of hard-drinking dancers. For the most part, Nashville studio players kept to the warmer palette of hollow-body electrics. Owens bought his first Telecaster when it debuted in 1951. Over a decade later, Haggard would adopt the Tele, too—it appears on his earliest professional recordings.
In the studio, Owens and his lead guitarist Don Rich brought out some of the sunniest tones the Telecaster had to offer. Playing live, they harmonized and grinned at each other as their guitars galloped through numbers like “My Heart Skips a Beat” and “I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail.”
On Haggard’s recordings, the Telecaster sounds like an entirely different animal. His work drew from past wounds. “Mama Tried” is an ode to Haggard’s long-suffering mother, Flossie, who had stood by her son as his rap sheet grew longer. The song was released in July 1968, about a decade after Haggard entered San Quentin. The chorus goes:
I turned 21 in prison doin’ life without parole
No one could steer me right but Mama tried, Mama tried
Mama tried to raise me better
But her pleadings I denied
That leaves only me to blame ’cause Mama tried
“Everything was against me,” Haggard once said. “And everything went for me.”
FOUNDING FATHERS
In September, Buck Owens’ Crystal Palace hosted its final concert: a performance by a Tucson, Arizona–based guitar duo called Ryanhood.
Owens erected his Palace in 1996 just east of where Highway 99 plows through Bakersfield. Architecturally, it resembles a honky-tonk McMansion, with a colonnaded façade. The exterior color is salmon with green trim. During the height of its popularity, the venue attracted crowds with its collection of Owens memorabilia and the musician’s custom Pontiac convertible with genuine steer horns, mounted behind the bar. The kitchen served barbecue, Cryin’ Time Onion Rings, and Buck’s Texas Chili.
For country music historian Scott B. Bomar, the demise of the Bakersfield sound came well before the Palace’s closure or Owens’s final concert in March 2006—and even before the venue opened its doors a decade earlier.
Bomar marks the beginning of the end as July 17, 1974. That day, Don Rich took off from Owens’s studio and crashed his motorcycle against the center divider on Highway 1 in Morro Bay. Rich was not only Owens’s guitarist and bandleader but his best friend.
“Don and Buck were really close—they were like a ‘creative yin and yang,’ ” Bomar observes. “Buck had positioned himself as the gatekeeper of the country music business in Bakersfield, and after Don’s death, he kind of lost that fire. Lost that passion.”
In 1976, Haggard left Bakersfield and relocated north to a ranch near Lake Shasta, where for several decades he fished for bass and tooled around on his houseboat.
The city had not produced a country star remotely approaching the stature of Owens and Haggard before they made their marks, nor has it since. Ferlin Husky, who moved to Bakersfield after World War II, worked for a while as a DJ, began performing around town, and peaked relatively early as a recording artist: “Wings of a Dove,” his highest-selling single, reached the top spot on the Billboard country chart in 1960. Wynn Stewart, another influencer of the Bakersfield sound, who served as a mentor to Owens and Haggard, scored his only No. 1 hit in 1967.
For all its drawbacks, Nashville still runs an efficient assembly line—attracting talent, investing in it, and making country stars of a few of the hopefuls who have gravitated there.
But Bakersfield has never had that kind of pull. Bomar contends that if not for its two superstars, the Bakersfield sound might be regarded now as a mere footnote in country music history. “Without Buck and Merle,” he says, “Bakersfield would have just been an interesting local music scene that people knew about if they lived in the region.”
But while the wellspring in Bakersfield may have run dry, the Bakersfield sound continues to exert an undeniable impact on country music—and popular American music more generally.
Today’s bestselling country music remains blindingly glossy and overly slick. Bygone stars like George Jones and Loretta Lynn sang from traumatic personal experience about poverty and want in a way that no Nashville producer could ever completely squelch. But today’s country stars appear to be singing about lives lived almost entirely within the confines of an old Coors Light commercial—overflowing with fine-lookin’ ladies, bros, and trucks.
The handful of country artists who’ve stayed true to their roots—Jamey Johnson and Chris Stapleton prominent among them—are often thought of as the modern outlaws, latter-day incarnations of Waylon and Willie. But Johnson, for one, has been vocal about where his inspirations truly lie. “I recognized that if Merle…hadn’t written songs the way he did, I’d have no reason for being there,” Johnson has said. “Merle was just as big an influence in my life as anybody. That’s the thing about influences. It doesn’t take but one song.”•
Ed Leibowitz wrote about how performance venues were surviving during the pandemic for Alta Journal 15.
