TV REVIEW : A Look at Bakersfield’s Sound, Spirit

Most Angelenos know Bakersfield as the home of tule fog, oil wells and those endless cotton fields along the Golden State Freeway that supply some visual relief on the long drive to San Francisco or Sacramento.

But country music fans know it’s also the home of Merle Haggard, Buck Owens and other progenitors of “the Bakersfield sound,” a style that rocks a little harder, stings a little deeper and roars a little louder than its big brother in Nashville.

KCET Channel 28 offers an appropriately spirited look at the seat of West Coast country music in “Bakersfield Country!” at 9 tonight.

Produced by Paula Mazur for KCET’s arts and culture unit, the one-hour documentary focuses predictably on Haggard and Owens--Bakersfield’s two biggest hit-makers--as well as still-active singers Rose and Fred Maddox, siblings who started performing in the 1930s as a way to avoid picking cotton.

Mostly transplants from Depression-ravaged Dust Bowl states, these and other musicians speak without rancor about the hardships their families endured, their labors in cotton fields and fruit orchards, and how working and living alongside black and Latino migrant workers added new flavors to the music they brought from back home.

The show skips over technological developments that contributed to the sharp-edged Bakersfield sound--notably Leo Fender’s pioneering work 150 or so miles south, in Fullerton, on the electric guitars that form the heart of that sound. It also touches only glancingly on the impact rock ‘n’ roll had--or didn’t--on the likes of Owens, whose hit “Act Naturally” was recorded by the Beatles, and Haggard, who acknowledges that in the ‘50s he tried to sound like Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Bing Crosby and “anybody else who was on the radio.”

But any show that dusts off vintage TV footage of Owens in a deafeningly loud metallic green suit, singing bittersweet harmony with Buckaroos guitarist Don Rich on “Together Again” obviously has its heart--not to mention its ears and eyes--in the right place.