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Bakersfield Opening Programs: Together Again: Pioneers of the Bakersfield Sound and Under Your Spell Again: The Sounds of Bakersfield

Special Program

March 24, 2012
Several musicians with ties to California discussed the origins of the historic music scene in Bakersfield, California, during the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum's gala opening weekend for its new exhibit, The Bakersfield Sound: Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, and California Country.

Watch Panel Discussion: Together Again: Pioneers of the Bakersfield Sound from March 24, 2012

The panel, Together Again: Pioneers of the Bakersfield Sound, included two eighty-nine-year-old California country music veterans best known for performing in family acts: Don Maddox, the lone living member of Maddox Brothers and Rose, as well Rose Lee Maphis, who performed with her husband, Joe Maphis. Other panelists included songwriter-artists Dallas Frazier, Buddy Mize, and Red Simpson-all of whom came of age in the early days of the Bakersfield music scene.

After a mid-day ninety-minute discussion, panel members returned that afternoon to perform in a musical celebration, Under Your Spell Again: The Sounds of Bakersfield. The performers, joined by Bakersfield veterans Gene Breeden and Dennis Payne, represented several generations of musicians, from Maddox, who first performed in 1937, to bandleader Deke Dickerson, a contemporary country music singer based in Los Angeles.

Watch Concert: Under Your Spell Again: The Sounds of Bakersfield from March 24, 2012

The panel traced the history of country music in Southern California, reaching back to the social conditions that led to Bakersfield's rise. "The story of Bakersfield started long before anyone knew the names Buck Owens and Merle Haggard," said Scott Bomar, a Bakersfield music expert who hosted the panel. "Buck and Merle are the best-known artists to emerge from the Bakersfield music scene. The success Buck and Merle had created the need to categorize the interesting fact that these two men happened to hail from the same unassuming town in Southern California."

As Bomar explained, Owens and Haggard emerged from an environment that informed their musical development. Both came from families that migrated to Bakersfield, as many others did, from southern states during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl eras. And both cut their teeth as backing musicians in Bakersfield nightclubs before becoming singers and bandleaders.

The panelists, none of them California natives, had similar stories about how their families traveled from other states to seek a better life in the agriculture-rich San Joaquin Valley. More than 70,000 migrants arrived in Southern California in the Dust Bowl years between 1935 and 1940.

"My family were sharecroppers in Alabama who left the farm during the Great Depression-not this one, the first one," Maddox said. "They sold all their worldly possessions, and they got thirty-five dollars for it. My mother had always wanted to go to California, she heard it was the Golden State, and she wanted to find her pot of gold. My parents had five kids, and we started walking from Alabama to California."

Eventually, the Maddoxes received advice from a couple in Meridian, Mississippi, who convinced the homeless family to hop freight trains instead of trying to walk across country. The Maddoxes arrived in the San Joaquin Valley in 1933, and for four years moved up and down the state finding work as temporary field workers-until the brothers and their sister were hired by a radio station in 1937. The Maddox Brothers and Rose went on to record for the record labels Columbia and Four Star, employing such influential musicians as guitarist Roy Nichols, who later played with Haggard for decades.

Known as America's Most Colorful Hillbilly Band, because of their outrageous costumes and rambunctious stage show, the family group recorded from 1947 to 1958. Rose went on to a solo career, while Don Maddox retired to cattle farming on a ranch in Ashland, Oregon. Their energetic sound later influenced rockabilly and the brash side of the Bakersfield sound.

In performing two songs with the band-which included Dickerson on bass, Dave Berzansky on pedal steel guitar, Eugene Moles Jr. and Kenny Vaughan on electric guitars, and Chris Sprague on drums-Maddox displayed the family's knack for lively songs while cracking jokes like the old-school entertainer he is. He opened with "Paul Bunyan Love," showing off his fiddle playing at the start of the song, then played "The Death of Rock and Roll," a take-off on Ray Charles's "I Got a Woman."

Maphis had performed for decades with her husband, Joe, becoming mainstays in the cast of the Los Angeles TV program Town Hall Party, which panel host Scott Bomar described as the West Coast version of the Grand Ole Opry. As Joe and Rose Lee Maphis, the couple recorded for Columbia, Capitol, Starday, and the Mosrite label, and Joe Maphis became known for a double-necked electric guitar designed for him especially by the Bakersfield-based instrument company Mosrite. The Maphises co-wrote the honky-tonk classic "Dim Lights, Thick Smoke, (and Loud, Loud Music)," which Maphis sang on Saturday with the backing band.

Dallas Frazier, while on the panel, spoke of his first performances in Bakersfield as an adolescent, before moving to Nashville to become one of country music's most successful songwriters, penning such classics as "Beneath Still Waters," "Elvira," "Fourteen Carat Mind," "Mohair Sam," and "There Goes My Everything." "He's written about 9,000 songs," but it all began in Bakersfield," said Bomar.

Frazier's family moved from Oklahoma when he was an infant. "We were not received well," Frazier said, recounting how his parents picked fruit and cotton. "There was a lot of persecution against the Okies-and no matter who you were, you were called an Okie if you were one of the migrant families. We lived in a tent, there were outdoor bathrooms, and we lived in an old boxcar that was brought out for workers to live in. It was a rough life."

Frazier started performing musically on local TV at age twelve, and he signed a recording contract with Capitol Records at age fourteen. Ferlin Husky, already a successful Capitol recording star, helped Frazier by taking him into his home, grooming him as a performer, and opening doors for him with TV producers and with Capitol Records producer Ken Nelson, who worked on Frazier's early recordings.

After scoring a pop hit with his composition "Alley Oop," by the Hollywood Argyles, Frazier started pursuing songwriting more diligently, before long moving to Nashville, where his work has earned him induction into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. He performed two of his country hits, "Fourteen Carat Mind," a hit for Gene Watson, and "(I'm So) Afraid of Losing You Again," a hit for Charley Pride.

Buddy Mize, along with his brother Billy Mize, became a notable figure in the Bakersfield sound as a songwriter, musician, and performer. Hailing from Kansas, his family became part of the westward migration, eventually settling in the San Joaquin Valley. The Mize brothers began performing and appearing on Bakersfield TV programs, such as Cousin Herb's Trading Post on local channel KERO.

"We were all one big family in Bakersfield," Mize said. "Most of us all played in bands with each other at one point or another. We all grew up on the same music and had the same tastes and were cut from the same cloth."

Red Simpson, a successful songwriter and recording artist, performed such classics as "Close Up the Honky-Tonks," "You Don't Have Very Far to Go," "The Highway Patrol," "Sam's Place," and "I'm a Truck," some of which he wrote for others, some of which he included on the seven albums he recorded for Capitol Records. As Bomar said in his introduction, Bob Dylan has called Simpson, "The forgotten man of the Bakersfield Sound."

After writing hits for Haggard and Owens, Simpson earned a spot on the roster of Capitol Records, where he was encouraged to write and record songs linked to the trucker craze of the time. Simpson made his mark with several, including "I'm a Truck," "Roll Truck Roll," and "Diesel Smoke, Dangerous Curves," as well as "The Highway Patrol"-all of which he performed in Saturday's concert. He credited Capitol's Ken Nelson for giving all of his artists, including Haggard and Owens, the freedom to use the musicians they wanted in the studio.

"Ken Nelson was a good man," Simpson said, then quipped, "He made a lot of money for all of his artists, too-except one." Although Simpson had a Top Five hit and several Top Forty hits, he never achieved the solo fame of friends like Haggard and Owens. But Simpson did well as a songwriter, with Haggard, Owens, Junior Brown, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and others recording dozens of his songs.

Simpson's family came up from Arizona, but they were treated the same as migrants from other states. "We were awful poor," Simpson said, saying they called his neighborhood "Little Okie" as a slur against the impoverished farm workers living there. "So the music happened after work, with the group of people who you were picking fruit with. Everybody would bring out their instruments, or you'd go to someone's house, and you'd move all the furniture out in the yard so you could play music and dance in the living room."

"Y'all had a house?" Mize interrupted with a smile. Simpson replied, "I didn't say it was our house. I don't remember us having a house. It must've been someone else's. But that's what we did for fun. There weren't any movies for us. They cost six cents, and we didn't have that. It made for a hard-working music. It was a relief valve."

The music drew dancers, another way for blue-collar workers to blow off steam, which is why the most popular bands included western-swing bands such as Bob Wills & the Texas Playboys and rollicking groups such as the Maddox Brothers & Rose. Bands that moved west from eastern outposts, such as Joe and Rose Lee Maphis, saw an immediate difference in crowds out west.

"On the east coast, when we were performing, it would be in a theater or a high school or parks," Maphis said. "No drums were allowed on the stage, and people sat there and watched. Our very first performance in Bakersfield, at the Blackboard Cafe, and we had a very loud, ex-Bob Wills drummer. It was quite different. To top it off, people got up and danced-while we were singing!"     

Joe and Rose Lee Maphis, along with Max Fidler, are credited as co-writers of "Dim Lights, Thick Smoke (and Loud, Loud Music)," a song inspired by the couple's first visit to the Blackboard. "That's what Bakersfield was like," Maphis said with a smile. "It certainly told the true story."  

-Michael McCall