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

Most folks who live south of the Grapevine know Bakersfield, if at all, as the home of tule fog, oil wells and those endless cotton fields 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!” premiering tonight at 9.

Produced by Paula Mazur for KCET’s Arts and Culture Unit, this new 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. Owens points out how working and living alongside black and Latino migrant workers added new flavors to the music they had brought from back home.

They also talk about the differences between Nashville country and Bakersfield country--sometimes with humor, sometimes with bitterness.

In a segment filmed at Santa Ana’s Crazy Horse Steak House this year, Owens recalls how every time he got a hit in the 1960s, he felt he was thumbing his nose at those who “claimed that if you weren’t from Nashville, you were nothing, a nobody.”

His comments about how poverty affected him so deeply--”I remember as a little kid thinking, ‘Boy, when I get big I ain’t never gonna be poor again’ “--help shed some light on his decisions to host “Hee Haw” for all those years and to become a minor media baron by purchasing a string of country radio stations.

Haggard is particularly eloquent in talking about how growing up just outside of Bakersfield shaped his vision as one of country’s most prolific and trenchant songwriters.

“I had to have some way in music to tell the people who were listening to me who I was,” he says. “My problem was I thought I grew up too fast. Music seemed to be the only way out of the rut I was born into.”

Rather than taking sole credit for giving credibility to California country music, Haggard rightly acknowledges the contributions of his precursors, including Wynn Stewart, Ferlin Huskey, Bill Woods and Tommy Collins.

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.”

And they might have shown how the Bakersfield tradition is very much alive today in the music of the Desert Rose Band, Emmylou Harris, Dwight Yoakam (who coaxed Owens out his self-imposed retirement a few years back), Rodney Crowell and countless others.

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.

“Bakersfield Country!” airs tonight at 9 on KCET Channel 28.