Making a Music All Their Own

There’s a school of country music called “The Bakersfield Sound.” Rooted in the common life of this San Joaquin Valley town, it is harder, purer, grittier than the sometimes sappy music of Nashville. Buck Owens and Merle Haggard are its patron saints, and Owens has described the sound this way: “Twang, twang, ripsnort, get up, get on with it and go at it.”

Of course, to sing the Bakersfield sound, it is necessary first to live the Bakersfield life, and this is what brings us to the unshaved, sunken-eyed man stretched out on a bunk in Cell No. 7 of the big Kern County Jail. On the afternoon we visit, last Thursday, Dallas Thompson is in the fourth day of a hunger strike. He is woozy and cottonmouthed, but vows to starve rather than pay “one red cent” of $20,000 in child support the county contends he owes. Thompson claims he is not that far behind in payments, but in any case he’s broke.

“My fortune’s in chasing rainbows,” he says, “but I haven’t done that well.”

Across town, an assistant district attorney produces several postcards Thompson sent his two teen-aged sons last summer from Hawaii and Fiji. “The Girls Still Go Topless!” he hoots on the back of one. That the postcards were delivered to the ex-wife’s apartment might be construed as flaunting, the prosecutor suggests. More to the point, they indicate something other than abject poverty.

We’re not here, though, to sort through who done who wrong. The woman Thompson divorced 14 years ago probably has a song of her own to sing: “My Ex Ate Pineapples While I Went on the Dole.” Or such. Rather, the point is that things like this seem to happen in Bakersfield. When Haggard sang about the “radiator man from Wasco,” he wasn’t making it up.

Shaped by oil, agriculture and the dust bowl migration, Bakersfield (pop. 175,000) is known to most Californians as a gas stop off California 99. It is notorious for hellishly hot summers and not much else. It is also as redneck a city as can be found this side of Tulsa.

The twang of its people is pronounced. Downtown, it’s easier to buy a pair of work boots than a briefcase. People with pinched Okie faces still live crowded together in trailer home neighborhoods, their everyday conversation laced with the blue collar poetry of Owens and Haggard. Walk the streets of Bakersfield and hear the songs in the making.

“How’s it going?” a raggedy looking man is asked in greeting outside one trailer court.

“Hey,” he answers sadly, not breaking stride, “I’ll be better.”

A man named Mike appears outside the district attorney’s office and pours out a sad story about how his wife died, and his company went bankrupt, and he lost his “suit-and-tie job,” and had to go on welfare, and met this girl, and got her pregnant, and now the county is hounding him for child support back to the day of conception--even though he still lives with the mother-to-be and will attend the delivery, scheduled to be induced next Friday.

Pretty sad, it is agreed. How long have you known this woman?

“Well,” he says, smiling slyly, “I met her nine months ago next Friday.”

At dinner, a waitress tells the next table about her traffic accident: “I got hit by a truck and rolled over twice, but that trucker just kept on driving.” And about her no-good man: “When my husband starts cooking, I run for the door.”

Bakersfield has not dodged the bullet of change altogether. Like so many California localities, it has been overrun by strip malls, smog and drive-thru everythings. An onslaught of Los Angeles escapees has made it one of the state’s fastest-growing cities; newer subdivisions are referred to as “North L.A.” And every day, it seems, the Bakersfield Californian prints the obituaries of two or three more dust bowl immigrants.

Some of the dilution is probably good. Rednecks and racists can be parallel strains. I noticed that even the back wall of Buck Owens’ studio has been defaced with spray-painted KKK signs and swastikas. And the ACLU recently closed its Bakersfield chapter, citing a general lack of enthusiasm for civil liberties.

So Bakersfield is far from perfect. But there is something to be said for a place where they still live a little differently, still make a music all their own. The song I’d write is this: We need Bakersfield like we need Berkeley, and a whole lot more than we need one more L.A.

Twang twang. Ripsnort.