History of the Bakersfield Sound

One of the established facts, no matter whom you talk to, is that the Bakersfield Sound was created in the honky tonks.




Buck Owens
Buck Owens with Band
The (Bakersfield) music was simple but powerful, played by simple-living people who had to leave their farms to come west. There's quite a history to the camaraderie that developed between those Dust Bowl people. They weren't apt to go for fancy music.
Tommy Collins, an Oklahoma native who wrote his first hit songs after moving to Bakersfield in 1951