The Bakersfield sound was a genre of country music developed in the mid to late 1950s in and around Bakersfield, California. The town, known mainly for agriculture and oil production, was the destination for many Dust Bowl migrants and others from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and other parts of the South. Bakersfield country was a reaction against the slickly produced, string orchestra-laden Nashville sound, which was becoming popular in the late 1950s. Buck Owens and the Buckaroos and Merle Haggard and the Strangers are the most successful artists of the original Bakersfield sound era.
The Bakersfield sound was developed at honky-tonk bars such as The Blackboard and on local television stations in Bakersfield and throughout California in the 1950s and 1960s. Artists like Wynn Stewart used electric instruments and added a backbeat, as well as other stylistic elements borrowed from rock and roll. Buck Owens and the Buckaroos developed it further, incorporating different styles of music. The music style features a raw set of twin Fender Telecasters with a picking style (as opposed to strumming), a big drum beat, and fiddle, with an occasional "in your face" pedal steel guitar. The Fender Telecaster was originally developed for country musicians to fit in with the Texas/Western Swing style of music that was popular in the Western US following World War II. The music, like Owens, was rebellious for its time and is dependent on a musician's individual talents and spirit, as opposed to the elaborate orchestral production common with Nashville style country music. Bakersfield Sound musicians perform in the studio as they do on stage, with the same instruments and style they use every day, and do not depend on elaborate studio production techniques when recording their music. .
