Buck Owens and the Crystal Palace: Country Music's Working-Class Rebellion

Nashville in the nineteen fifties was producing country music with string sections. Professional arrangers smoothed the edges off the guitar work, slowed the tempos to something the middle of the country could absorb, and delivered a sound that communicated a version of rural America that was palatable to suburban radio programmers. In Bakersfield, nobody cared what Nashville was producing.

Buck Owens and his band the Buckaroos built the Bakersfield Sound on Fender Telecasters and a drum kit that was actually audible over the crowd noise in the bars along Edison Highway. The bars along Edison Highway were not polite places. They were honky-tonks full of the children and grandchildren of Dust Bowl migrants who had come to Kern County from Oklahoma and Arkansas and Texas in the nineteen thirties and stayed, and who had opinions about what country music was supposed to sound like that had nothing to do with Nashville's arrangements. Owens, who had come to Bakersfield via Texas himself, understood his audience because he was his audience.

Merle Haggard, born in an Oildale boxcar a few miles north of where you are, came to the same sound from a slightly different angle, but the core of it was the same: amplified, direct, the sound of people who had actually been through the experience the lyrics described.

Buck Owens opened the Crystal Palace in Bakersfield in nineteen ninety-six as a museum and honky-tonk. The nineteen ninety-six date is reported in the scholarship but has not been confirmed against two independent primary sources, so this production offers it with that caveat. Owens performed there until his death in two thousand six. The Crystal Palace has since closed, after about twenty eight years in business, according to an announcement from the Owens family.

What is not in question is the influence. The Bakersfield Sound reached the Beatles, influenced the Rolling Stones, and altered the trajectory of American country music in a direction that Nashville, thirty years later, would come to describe as traditional. The people who made it described it as what they knew.