Growing up in Nashville, Scott Bomar thought he hated country music for many years of his childhood.
After initially liking the local tunes as a youngster, he gravitated to rock and roll in middle school and eschewed anything with a twang. But in college, when he began writing his own songs, he found himself listening closely to the chords and licks of rockers like Bruce Springsteen and Steve Earle, whose country-infused riffs became his teachers.
“The portal to country music for me was mainly becoming interested in how songs were put together,” he recalled.
As Bomar deepened his song-writing skills, the writer, researcher, and music historian found himself drawn deeper into the world of country music, and, eventually, to Bakersfield. There, he developed a passion for the particular sound of California’s lesser known cousin to the country music of his youth.
Since then Bomar has curated three retrospectives showcasing the “Bakersfield sound,” including one which won him a Grammy nomination. A fourth, packaged as a 10-CD case and 224-page book of history was released on Bear Family Records in July.
“I’ve always had an interest in what runs counter to the prevailing narrative,” Bomar said. “The prevailing narrative is that Nashville is the ground zero and central hub of country music, but there are other significant regional country music stories like Bakersfield’s.”
Lori Wear is the curator of collections of the Kern County Museum in Bakersfield and is an expert on the cultural and social relevance of the historical identity of the town. Bakersfield’s music scene has had an impact far beyond the ears of those who first heard its sounds.
“Bakersfield's country music history is important because it rose from the Dust Bowl migration and gave a voice to the working class who experienced the hardship of that time,” Wear said.
The Bakersfield sound has been characterized by many in the decades since its days of fame died. Buck Owens called it “unpolished, give-em-hell, straight-ahead, no-BS-about-it music” and Henry Shropshire, a drummer who helped define the sound, described it as “good western twang where you can get that dance feel.”
Bomar set out to discover it for himself, meeting with people who had been around since the glory days of the Bakersfield sound.
Talking with the Bakersfield sound originators so interested Bomar in the history of the area that he reached out to Bear Family Records, an independent record label focused in reissuing archival music based in Germany.
“Bear Family had done all these great compilations of people like Jean Shepard, Tommy Collins, Wynn Stewart, Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, all these west coast country artists, but they had not ever done a box set on Red Simpson,” Bomar said.
So, Bomar tracked down the owner of the company and asked a simple question: "Why not?"
Simpson, a modestly successful Bakersfield musician, was best known for his trucker-themed songs, but was reluctant to allow Bear Family Records to release a complete collection of his discography.
Determined to preserve musical history, Bomar set out to convince Simpson that his music should be rereleased and not lost to the dustbin of history with the rest of the discarded LP’s and 45’s of decades earlier.
Eventually, Simpson relented and he spent the next two years compiling information on all of Simpson’s recordings throughout his career. The release was so successful that Bomar began working on more projects with the company.
In 2015, Bomar followed up with two additional Bakersfield-focused volumes entitled “The Other Side of Bakersfield: 1950s and 60s Boppers and Rockers” for which he was nominated for a Grammy Award.
“For whatever reason Bakersfield went kind of rockabilly crazy for a few years,” Bomar said. “I see those releases as companion pieces to this release.”
Bomar hopes that the latest release will help to better fuel the interest in the history of Bakersfield music for centures to come.
“I wanted to show that those guys really came from a community that had a lot of depth and breadth to it,” Bomar said. “I’ve always viewed this not as a commercial enterprise, but it’s really a preservationist instinct for me.”
The preservationist instinct is something that has occurred to a handful of dedicated supporters in the decades since the days of the honky-tonks.
Wear has worked at the Kern County Museum for the last 21 years and was awarded an Individual Award of Merit in 2017 by the Conference of California Historical Societies for her wide-ranging preservationist contributions to the community.
Wear recently gave a lecture called “Bakersfield’s Notorious Honky Tonks,” at the Kern County Museum. The lecture took the opportunity to give people interested in the past an opportunity to take a virtual tour through the community of the past and recognize what used to exist on the “Streets of Bakersfield.”
“Bakersfield's country music history is important because it rose from the Dust Bowl migration and gave a voice to the working class who experienced the hardship of that time,” Wear said.
In the years since the inception of the Bakersfield music movement, the music has been amplified far beyond what anyone could have imagined in the early days.
“You have two international stars [Merle Haggard and Buck Owens] who started playing in the honky-tonks around Bakersfield and achieved tremendous fame,” Wear said. “Their music has influenced so many future generations of musicians.”
Bakersfield’s contribution to the country music scene has been acknowledged throughout the country. Ernie Renn is the site manager of a website dedicated to Buddy Emmons, a legendary steel guitarist whose work intersected with the time of the Bakersfield sound, but whose main career existed in Nashville.
Renn credits Bakersfield with producing the “twang” sound so commonly attributed to country music today, specifically pointing to performers like Buck Owens, Wynn Stewart and Red Simpson.
“In my opinion, [Bakersfield sound] brought electric lead instruments like steel guitar to the foreground, where it had been slowly shuffled to the background by Nashville,” Renn said.
While a small group has worked to save the history of the movement, Wear notes that Bakersfield’s efforts have failed in some respects. None of the honky-tonks that brought the first spotlights to the stars of the future are still in operation.
“We don’t pay attention to any of that which astounds me,” Wear said. “It’s interesting that our community isn’t doing more to bring in tourism dollars for this or just to preserve history,”
While Wear laments the loss of the physical buildings, she is hopeful that her efforts and the efforts of other preservationists like Scott Bomar will help to reach future generations of musicians, music fans and others just interested in what the city was like in 1950.
“Bakersfield just kind of poo-poos preservation efforts a lot of the time, but people are really interested in it,” Wear said.
Five photographs from Wear’s collection were featured in the Kern Burns “Country Music” documentary series that was released this year.
Bakersfield Time Machine
Though most of the buildings are no longer standing, take a tour of the locations of the most famous Bakersfield music hotspots.
Hitting Close to Home
Though Bomar’s collection is surely the most exhaustive release of Bakersfield music and Wear's work at the museum has saved countless artifacts of history, they aren't the first people to work to preserve the history of the area.
In fact, the story hits close to home with this journalist. Two of the artists featured on Bomar’s releases are Henry Sharpe, my great-grandfather, and Cathy Sharpe, his daughter and my grandmother. Though they both performed under the surname “Sharpe,” their real last name was Shropshire.
In 1995, Shropshire and a friend named Ken McKnight recorded a number of interviews with Bakersfield musicians (including Henry Shropshire himself). McKnight intended to write a book about the music scene and its history, but the passage of time had another idea in mind.
Shropshire passed away after a battle with lung cancer in 1998. After Shropshire died, McKnight lost enthusiasm for the project, but stored the recorded tapes in a box.
Twenty two years after McKnight stowed away the interviews, he received an email from me.
After talking with my parents about family history, the topic of the tapes came up so I decided to see if Ken still had the tapes. Our families had not spoken in more than two decades.
"I know this is probably a long shot given how long it's been since you interviewed him, but would you happen to still have a copy of that interview?” My email said.
A month later, the answer came back from Ken: “I found Henry's tape!!”
The quotes from Henry Shropshire and Bill Woods throughout the following piece come from these interviews.
The Heyday of the Bakersfield Sound
To those only passing through the Central Valley of California, the sight of farmland and oil fields might not mean much. The occasional appearance of empty and abandoned buildings probably means even less. To the people who know the history of the area, however, these sights are an important remnant of country western music’s history.
The former country music capital of the west looks a bit different today than it did during the era of the raucous honky-tonks in the mid-twentieth century, but the markers of history tell the story of this town’s past, present and future.
A quick perusal through the town’s record shops will spell out names like Merle Haggard, Buck Owens and a litany of other names that many won’t recognize.
The Bakersfield sound has been characterized by many in the decades since its days of fame died. Buck Owens called it “unpolished, give e’m hell, straight ahead, no BS about it music” and Henry Shropshire described it as “good western twang where you can get that dance feel.”
Three of the featured musicians shared some of their memories of that time and place. They represent a small sample of the thousands of people who flocked to the San Joaquin Valley for work in the decades after the Dust Bowl hit the middle United States in the 1930s.
Bill Woods came from Texas while Henry Shropshire came from Oklahoma.
The majority of the people who came to work in Bakersfield found themselves picking fruits or vegetables or working with heavy machinery on an oil drill. For the lucky few who were able to make a living from music, however, the rest of the so-called “Okies” comprised the target audience.
“The biggest part of your clientele was people that worked in fields like potatoes, flappers, grapes, swappers, agriculture and then oil fields,” Woods said.
Woods was drawn to music by the sounds he heard while living in a tent camp in Texas as a young teenager.
A family of Mexican migrant workers in the tent next to Woods’s family was playing songs like "Rancho Grande" and "La Cucaracha."
“I asked them, ‘Could I come over and sit in with them?’ because I couldn't play,” Woods said. ‘So, I started going over there and learning a bunch of them Mexican songs.”
Woods began working as the band leader at the Blackboard in 1950 where he would work for the next 13 years. As the band leader, Woods coordinated which guest stars would perform at the Blackboard.
A year later, Woods started a live television show with “Cousin” Herb Henson and a number of other musicians in the area called “Trading Post Show."
The routine for the guests at the Blackboard was simple, but arduous.
"In their contract they had to come by and appear on the Trading Post Show and announce that they would be at the Blackboard that night,” Woods said.
The television shows and reputation of a number of clubs in the area drew the attention of the entire town. Throughout the years, the Blackboard was increased in size to hold as many as 600 people, according to Woods.
In 1958, Woods met Shropshire who was looking for a job and, in Shropshire’s words, “trying to be a musician.” The two’s meeting at the Blackboard followed a momentous time for Shropshire who had just recently left Oklahoma with a wife and a seven-year-old daughter in tow.
Shropshire had been trying to make a living as a musician in clubs in the midwest since 1950. He’d had some success, but also struggled with the long hours, little pay and extensive travel.
When a friend offered to give Shropshire a drive to a land of new opportunities, he jumped at it.
Shropshire’s bargain worked out for him and his family as he got a job at the Blackboard only a few short months after the move to Bakersfield. Shropshire’s instrument of choice was the drums, but the job would require the use of his singing voice as well.
Working at the Blackboard, Shropshire earned $16.50 a night and worked seven nights a week. Six nights a week, the hours went from 9 pm to 2 am, but on Sunday the group worked a “double” which meant starting at 1 pm and playing until 2 in the morning.
“My first check, after taxes, was $102.02 and I thought, man, I can buy this town with this kind of money,” Shropshire said, with a laugh.
Shropshire adopted the stage surname of “Sharpe” and worked at the Blackboard for a total of five years and nine months. Nearly sixty years after his last show at the Blackboard, he is still most remembered for his work at the club.
After leaving the Blackboard, Shropshire eventually formed a band entitled "Henry Sharpe and the Sharpshooters” which performed regularly for eight years at the Rodeway Inn in Bakersfield.
Later in life, Shropshire became president of the Bakersfield Country Music Museum.
The majority of the people involved in the museum were aging stars of the past and their family members. The group’s work was eventually folded into an exhibit at the Kern County Museum which sits today on the same ground where the Blackboard used to stand.
