From Dust Bowl labor camp to Bakersfield Sound honky-tonk

By ROBERT PRICE

Among followers of the lively, blues-steeped music that emanated out of California honky-tonks and recording studios during the 1950s and ‘60s, it is considered an irrefutable fact: The Dust Bowl migration of two decades prior was almost wholly responsible for the advent of a style of country music that has come to be called the “Bakersfield Sound.” The creative and commercial phenomenon that opened doors for the likes of Merle Haggard and Buck Owens had its genesis in a single economic cataclysm, or so the thinking goes.

The two events exist in the public consciousness today almost in a cause-and-effect progression. Popular magazines fondly retell the story with little attention to what came before or after. “(T)he Bakersfield Sound ... (is) a music steeped in the rural legacy of the Dust Bowl migration, shucked clean of cliché and excess sentimentality,” Richard Chon wrote in Westways.

"Bakersfield is the capital of the Golden State’s Dust Bowl , … (a) title especially fitting for a town founded by Okies, those down-on-their luck Midwesterners who traveled out west in search of better lives,” writes Matt Kettmann, apparently inventing portions of the story for American Cowboy magazine as he goes along. “... I've always figured that a hardscrabble history must lend itself to a hearty regional pride ... (and) such pride surfaces most readily when it comes to the ‘Bakersfield sound.’”

Historians generally give the Dust Bowl migration a more realistic appraisal, placing it alongside the other cultural changes that made the Bakersfield Sound possible. That westward, Depression-era population shift is highly significant and memorably symbolic, but not the whole story in the development of Bakersfield honky-tonk music and perhaps not even the most important story.

It is indisputable that tens of thousands of economic refugees from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and elsewhere descended on the West Coast, particularly Los Angeles and the California Central Valley, between 1935 and roughly 1942, and that they brought their culture with them. These Southwesterners, primarily rural but also city folk, brought conservative social values, an individualistic spirit, pugilistic notions about honor, dichotomous feelings about Saturday-night and Sunday-morning conduct, and a taste for blues-inspired folk music, recognizable today as country music. Their music celebrated those attitudes and tendencies in realistic stories set to accessible and simply structured musical arrangements.

The Depression-era migration of these “Okies” was only marginally connected to the devastating 1935-38 dust storms of the southern Plains that gave the great westward exodus its name. They were, in fact, driven West by factors more economic and social than meteorological; the regions of the country affected by over-grazing and the resulting dust storms minimally overlapped the states of origin of the “Dust Bowl” migrants.

Whatever their motives for coming West, these Okie migrants were indeed largely responsible for developing and sustaining the Bakersfield Sound. But the evolution of that music traces a succession of migrations over many years fueled by poverty, perceived opportunity and war – including, most notably, the great war that came after the Dust Bowl migration. Population movements throughout American history have “moved” the music, its performers and its audiences to new places on the map. World War II was the single greatest force in the cultural mixing that that brought country music to the West coast, and a major vehicle for the population shift that provided the West with its country-music audience. The Dust Bowl migration was such another of these culture shifts, albeit a major one. The link between labor camps (and squatters’ camps) of that era and Bakersfield honky-tonks isn’t as solid as the legend’s soundtrack might have us believe, but it is significant nonetheless.

The attitudes demonstrated in those labor camps, such as the Sunset Federal Labor Camp near Arvin, were apt mid-century reflections of attitudes about life and leisure among the people of Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Missouri. Those Southwestern attitudes informed the development of West Coast country music’s popularity and certain themes within the overall genre, many of which -- such as the urban vs. rural dynamic -- are still with us today.

To summarize, the Bakersfield Sound was influenced greatly but not exclusively by the Dust Bowl migration and its most historically illuminated facet, the federal labor camp. Other cultural changes, both before and after the Dust Bowl migration, played equally significant and generally underappreciated roles in the development and distinctiveness of Bakersfield-area music culture.

The migration

The migration to California of working-class people from the Southwest, Midwest and western Deep South during the late 1930s and early 1940s has been estimated by various sources, and based on differing criteria, as between 150,000 and 400,000, with the upper number more frequently cited. Few of these newcomers were directly affected by the devastating wind storms of the south-central Plains that gave the great migration its iconic name.

Popular legend has these late-1930s migrants piling into the family jalopy, Tom Joad- (and “Beverly Hillbillies”-) style, and heading west on a wing and prayer, their fates uncertain. While some of that has basis in fact, the greater truth is that many Okie migrants, as the whole of them came to be generally known, had family members waiting for them in California. Those more established family members, Californians by virtue of similar, economically driven migrations of previous decades, often greeted them not only with job leads of varying reliability but with many of the comforts of Southwestern culture: familiar foods, familiar religious practices and familiar music.

According to James N. Gregory, the Dust Bowl-era exodus “wasn’t the start of a migration; it was a phase of an ongoing, long-time relationship between Texas and Oklahoma and Missouri and Arkansas, and California. People had been coming since the Gold Rush to California, and especially in the teens and 1920s. … A quarter of a million people had come from those very states in the 1920s. So most of the people who headed west in the 1930s had relatives who told them about conditions and could offer some assistance.”

They came because there were jobs – not just Central Valley farm-labor jobs, but blue- and white-collar employment in Los Angeles too. The farming jobs were especially plentiful, however. California agriculture had lost much of its workforce during the first years of the Depression, when markets dried up, but there was a moderate resurgence in the mid-1930s and a worker shortage that the newcomers were glad to fill.

During the second half of the decade, the population of seven California agricultural counties – Yuba, Monterey, Madera, Tulare, Kings, Kern and San Diego -- grew by an average of almost 43 percent, led by Kern, with a staggering 63 percent increase. The San Francisco Bay area and especially Los Angeles also saw significant population increases, and this was before World War II brought Southwesterners to the state’s population centers by the hundreds of thousands to work in the shipyards and aircraft factories.

California abided these migrants and their musical tastes throughout the mid-1930s. The relative abundance of available work in the orchards and cotton fields of the valley contributed to their acceptance.

But California’s relatively benign view of the Okies began to erode in 1938, when devastating floods throughout the Central Valley again made life difficult for the farm-labor migrants. Newspaper accounts and the work of photographers like Dorothea Lange brought the Okies’ plight to the nation, but some Californians failed to muster much sympathy in the face of economic reality: The Agricultural Adjustment Administration cut the state’s cotton acreage by more than a third that year, and suddenly worker supply greatly exceeded employer demand. The welfare rolls skyrocketed, and local conservatives who had wallowed happily in the glut of cheap labor suddenly began to squeal, even circulating a petition demanding that no more relief be extended to migrants. “The idle thousands,” the petition demanded, should be compelled to return to their home states. The effort was fruitless.

Even after economic circumstances restored the balance of workers and workload, locals criticized the Southwestern migrants. Or, more to the point, the federal farm labor camps became the focus of increasingly shrill anti-Okie rhetoric, largely because they limited growers’ ability to exploit the migrant labor. “Okie,” “Arkie” and even “Texie” became derogatory terms that carried some of the stigmas that whites most often associate with race.

According to James Gregory:

The way those terms worked was to almost ethnicize, almost create a notion that an Okie was a different nationality, a different ethnic group, certainly a different social class and an unwelcome person. … (B)ecause of the difficult economic circumstances … a group of native-born, Protestant, for the most part Anglo Americans of Scots-Irish heritage, about as white and solid American as you can get, … became depicted as an ethnic other.

The ostracized Central Valley Okies, much more so that the quickly assimilated Los Angeles Okies, seized what they believed was their own and clung to it – the food, the religion, the social (but not necessarily economic) conservatism, even the speech patterns -- and of course the music. The rest of California was generally willing to let them have the latter, and as a result the transplanted Southwesterners became the primary agents of its dissemination, both as consumers and performers.

The music

Okie migrants of the late 1930s did not bring country music to California, as is often suggested. Okies came west to a place where country music was already well established. Singing cowboys such as Ken Maynard, Roy Rogers, Tex Ritter and Gene Autry — entertainers who came to Hollywood from Texas (Ritter and Autry) and the Midwest (Maynard and Rogers) not as economic refugees but as young men in quest of stardom — had already brought country music’s crooning precursor, “Western” music, to the masses. Hobo troubadours like Goebel Reeves and Haywire Mac McClintock had already established a sort of “bindlestiff” folk sensibility that translated well to radio from coast to coast.

Stuart Hamblen’s “Covered Wagon Jubilee,” with West Coast stars like Patsy Montana, dominated the Los Angeles radio market from 1934 until the early 1950s. On a somewhat smaller scale, a family of transplanted Appalachians, the Crocketts of Fowler, Calif., were well established “radio favorites” up and down the valley as early as the mid-1920s.

But the attitudes and underlying culture that came west with John Steinbeck’s Joads had deeper roots. The folk music of the British Isles crossed the Atlantic with American colonists starting in the 17th century and continued to move deeper into the newly settled land of the North American continent for decades, evolving as it went. But by the end of the 18th century the Northern states were receiving newer material and newer styles -- and facing stronger economic and cultural pressure to conform to emerging urban “popular” styles. The more isolated South, conversely, tended to preserve and develop the older styles and create its own material.

As a result, Northern folk music eventually withered away or stayed in vertical, family traditions, and the performance styles edged toward urban norms. Meanwhile, the South, and specifically Appalachia, had developed a degree of isolation that, in conjunction with its more “frontier,” agricultural setting, led to a uniformity of culture that was reflected in the music. More so than others in America, the Southern culture — born of transplanted Scots-Irish folkways — valued independence, self-sufficiency, honor, and loyalty, particularly to kin, and that too became a part of the music.

It was a contradictory culture. The Southern frontier mentality embraced drink, violence and rebellion but also an evangelical religious tradition dominated by the Old Testament and a stiff, patriarchal morality. As D.W. Wilgus notes, it was a society of extremes: “sobriety and drunkenness, piety and hell-raising, daily stoicism and orgiastic religious revivals.”

The Civil War, as was the case with other American wars to follow, brought rural men into urban environments and people of different cultural regions into close proximity. After the war, patterns of population movement began to take shape. Northern entrepreneurs (or, in the Southern vernacular, “carpetbaggers”) moved into old Dixie, and many displaced Southerners moved West to pursue opportunities in mining, ranching, logging, and the railroads. The Spanish-American War and World War I had similar effects on population movement – and on social interaction. Young men from different corners of the country were thrust together into close quarters and predictable cultural exchanges took place. Soldiers and sailors were exposed to the attitudes, mannerisms, habits, and tastes of their comrades in arms, and to varying degrees they retained some of what they saw and heard — including the music.

By the mid-1920s, discernable markets for “hillbilly” music – a pejorative nickname thrust upon the “old time” music of the South in 1925 -- had established themselves in the North and the upper Midwest as well as the South. The first successful radio barn dance program (admittedly tame by Kentucky standards) was established on WLS in Chicago in 1924; as Wilgus notes, “all of those listeners couldn’t have been transplanted” hillbillies. The juke box became popular between 1910 and 1920 and almost from the beginning, hillbilly records were included on the play lists – even in the North, where urban opinions of the genre were generally contemptuous.

The Southern music of that time corresponded to the polarization of the region’s culture: wild, fun-loving tunes and low-down blues vs. tragic ballads with mournful lyrics and straight-spined sacred songs. Up-tempo songs were especially common. From the day it was first documented, hillbilly/country music incorporated a strong blues influence, as demonstrated by the popularity of the first national star of the genre, the “Singing Brakeman,” Jimmie Rodgers. He popularized the style so extensively that by the 1930s “white blues” had no regional limitation, although it flourished most significantly in Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma.

In the Southeast, separate and distinct styles of hillbilly music co-existed: the wild and silly pieces, the blues, and the sentimental, traditional songs. But in the Southwest – probably fueled by oil boom-related population movements to Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana -- those musical styles coalesced and were further stylistically regionalized by blues-jazz influences from New Orleans and Shreveport.

Barn dances and honky-tonks became musical melting pots, with older styles of country music coming face-to-face (and fiddle-to-accordion) with Cajun, blues, jazz, and even Mexican styles. Early American folk traditions had long been undermined by a longstanding ethnic sameness within the population that claimed that music, but in the Southwest, more so than anywhere, that wasn’t the case.

In the Southeast, white culture tended to retrench when confronted with change. In the North, displaced Southern whites repeatedly reached back to their heritage for reassurance and revitalization. But in the Southwest, people were exposed to so many regional influences and ethnic tastes, both in the workplace and in social settings, they had almost no choice except to become the genre’s leading edge. By the time the Dust

Bowl migration reached its apex in the late 1930s, hillbilly and jazz traditions had mingled, newer blues flavors had developed, Western Swing had emerged as the next big thing and the Southwest was creating the freshest, liveliest music in America.

That is the music that came to California with the Okies in 1938.

The Okies

As previously noted, many Dust Bowl migrants had family or other connections already in California when they set out for the West Coast in the 1930s. But for many of the others, radios and jukeboxes supplied plenty of vivid imagery to help soothe their doubts. Music portraying California as an El Dorado has always been common in American popular song, from early Gold Rush-era songs like “Come All Ye Poor Men of the North” (“the gold dust lies glittering like dewdrops after rain”) to Sophie B. Hawkins’ “California, Here I Come” (1924) (“How come some people got it all / Some people got none / I been banging my head against the writing on the wall \ But now I just wanna have fun / California here I come”) and Jimmie Rodgers’ “California Blues” (1928) (“I’m goin’ to California, where they sleep out every night”).

The first wave of Dust Bowl migrants found none of that when they arrived in California (except for sleeping out every night, not generally the choice they might have taken). Many were forced to settle in squatters’ camps where conditions were squalid at best and toxic at worst – so bad in fact that their plight eventually attracted the attention of the federal government.

A three year study of 3,543 informal and makeshift migrant camps completed in
1934 by the California Division of Immigration and Housing had concluded that sanitation, water supply and overall camp cleanliness were concerns that needed to be addressed. Those issues, along with fears of possible disease epidemics, crime, and labor unrest, led state and county officials to start looking for an alternative. That alternative came from Washington, D.C.
Early in 1935 officials from the Rural Rehabilitation Division of the Federal Relief Administration toured California, observing, interviewing and photographing migrant workers.

Photographer Dorothea Lange was among the observers. Her colleague, Nelson Lowry, was so taken with what he saw, he cabled national director Lawrence Westbrook, requesting $20,000 to build two “demonstration camps” for migrants, “demonstration” being code for not part of a wholesale program if things don’t work out. Westbrook approved the request the next day, and construction of the Arvin camp began in August 1935 on 40 acres of land leased from Kern County. It opened four months later with ninety-six tent spaces divided by roads into three blocks and set in a muddy field. A few wood-frame buildings were also constructed: utility buildings, a warehouse, a first aid center which doubled as a playroom and nursery, and a dwelling for the camp manager, Thomas Collins, who was a federal employee. By 1940, the Arvin/Sunset camp was one of 18 FSA camps in California and 56 nationwide.

The Arvin camp was slow to fill – some migrant workers wanted nothing to do with anything involving the government – but by June 1936 eighty-eight families had established the place as home. The federal camp represented the first home in California for more than a third of the migrant tenants, nearly two-thirds of whom hailed from Oklahoma.

Residents were forced to abide by a set of rules, habitual cleanliness and attention of hygiene and health chief among them. Another was the strictly enforced ban on alcohol and narcotics.

But few complained, given three of the major attractions: a camp nurse, indoor plumbing and access to hot water. Collins reported that “children had the time of their lives the first day at camp” taking hot showers. Some adults were so taken by the amenities, Collins wrote, they demonstrated “‘reverence’ for the modern facilities.” But a few found things to complain about anyway. Collins made note of one particular newcomer who, no doubt like many others, had never seen a flush toilet before moving to the Arvin labor camp:

“There was our new neighbor from Arkansas -- sitting on the concrete floor, legs stretched on both sides of the toilet bowl,” Collins wrote. “Beside her was a pile of ‘freshly laundered’ clothing. In the bowl was more clothing.”

"The fella who dun built this air wash tubs must a thot all wimin be plenty short,” Collins quotes her as saying. “Why this air tub ain't big 'nuf ter hold my man's pans fer me to wash.” The “neighbors,” Collins writes, seized the “educational opportunity” with great enthusiasm “and they had heaps of fun so doing.”

Among the organized camp activities, in addition to baseball games, were weekly “sings” and dances, which prior to the construction of a community hall in 1939, took place either on an open-air platform with a covered stage and piano pit or in a warehouse, where a radio played the national and regional stars of the day.

When they were first organized in Arvin in 1936, these community “sings” were so popular there was no room for visitors. The songs included both old favorites and tunes written by camp residents. The dances were even more popular, attended every weekend by as many as 500 camp residents and guests. Typically a fiddle player, guitarist and “bones” player performed the “hill-billy” music for square dancing, interspersed with less countrified dance numbers, introduced at the behest of the management, to “urbanize the people.” There might be six or eight squares dancing groups going at once, each with its own “hog caller.” At some point a hat would be passed around and those who could afford it would toss in a nickel or dime for the musicians.

Between February and October of 1936, Collins compiled a list of more than 30 songs that labor camp residents sang or performed, from “The Lilly of Hill Billy Valley” to “I've Got No Use for the Women.”

Wrote Collins about one particularly lively gathering:

The community sing this week was a magnificent demonstration of community effort and cooperation. The whole population was out ... There were musical numbers, solos, duets, quartets, dialogues, singing en masse, jigs and etc. The population warmed up to the occasion and as a result some old folk songs heretofore unheard in this section of the country, come to the fore. The song that brought the old folks to their toes was – ‘Eleven Cent Cotton And Forty Cent Meat.’

Not everyone was enthused by the dances. Some frowned upon the community events as immoral, and divisions arose between the Full Gospel believers and the Free Methodists, who were prone to quoting the prophet Isaiah in justifying dancing as a moral and honorable expression of joy. Interdenominational differences caused so many problems that some refused into move to the camp and face the possibility of living near followers of the rival church group. Life in a tent city made it difficult for people to ignore their neighbors’ attitudes towards religion, much less their moral standards, which were often enough in full view. As a result of these competing microscopes, one intense, the other only slightly less so, some residents complained that life in Arvin “was pretty dull.”

For many migrants, made to feel like inferior ethnic “others” by established white Californians and increasingly in competition with other migrant laborers for work that, depending on season and circumstance, could be scarce and therefore lower paying, this was not the California dream. But there was rarely much they could do about it.

The Oklahoma-bred folksinger Woody Guthrie, who’d come to California in 1940 and witnessed things for himself, tried to warn them away with a musical indictment of the conditions. Stay at home and work for better conditions in your own state, he said, attempting to refute the false impressions of Jimmie Rodgers’ “California Blues.”

Guthrie’s own ballad, “Do Re Mi,” explained it like this:

“Cause I look through the want ads every day
And the headlines in the papers always say, oh
If you ain’t got the do re mi, boys
Well you better go back to beautiful Texas, Oklahoma,
Georgia, Kansas, Tennessee.”

They kept coming anyway.

Workday’s end

Music was the balm of many migrant laborers’ days. That was particularly the case at the federal labor camps, where dances and talent shows, after-supper sing-alongs and other gatherings, formal and (mostly) informal, were common.

Guthrie once talked of watching workers gather from miles around at a particular squatters’ camp one evening to hear two girls perform. “It cleared your head up, that’s what it done, caused you to fall back and let your draggy bones rest and your muscles go limber and relax,” he declared.

Central Valley businesses noticed. The California radio stations that gave air time to hillbilly and folk performers were often deluged with appreciative mail, and those that didn’t were sometimes subjected to lobbying efforts by Okie listeners. Guthrie, not yet a star, started a hillbilly music show in KFVD in Los Angeles and by 1938 was receiving more than a thousand fan-letters a month.

Not everyone was thrilled with the new programming. Many Californians found the hillbilly music of the migrants banal and amateurish. Country music – most notably the nasal drone of the folk-oriented Carter family and the blues-tinged Singing Brakeman, Jimmie Rodgers -- had accounted for less than 10 percent of nationwide record sales in the 1920s and 1930s. Country music’s strongest attraction was in the South and Midwest; West Coast audiences of the day seem to have preferred jazz and swing. But California radio, especially in the Central Valley and Los Angeles, saw potential, and foisted hillbilly music upon the entire state.

By 1940, California Okies had plenty of Southwestern celebrities to model themselves after. There was Gene Autry, the greatest of the singing-cowboy movie stars. His cowboy costume was adapted by country singers who might otherwise have emulated the hillbilly garb of people like Carter family patriarch A.P. Carter – simple overalls. Autry was handsome, confident – and he always got the girl. “What Frank Sinatra was for Italians, and Paul Robeson for blacks,” wrote James Gregory, “nationally recognized country-music stars like Gene Autry became for Okies.”
The stars of Western Swing took their cue from Autry and other western-music heroes. Bob Wills, leader of the Texas Playboys, was as duded-up as they came. He, like few others, spoke to the Okies and Arkies of California – quite literally.

He sprinkled his performances with references like “all of us Okies” and played songs that mentioned specific southwestern locales like Tulsa and San Antonio. Spade Cooley, a favorite among the Southern California defense workers, did the same. Cooley nicknamed his three vocalists “Okie” (Deuce Spriggens), “Arkie” (Smokey Rogers) and “Tex” (Tex Williams) and claimed that each hailed from the corresponding state. He fudged a little. According to Gregory, “They became public champions of the migrant group.”

Visually, these stars represented America’s Cowboy cult. Together, we had “won the West,” and Autry and company helped remind the Okies of that perceived fact, bringing confidence to a people that sorely needed it. Musically, they were a little bit of home. Unlike some other musical genres, past and present, family and place were among their central themes. The songs had nostalgia, longing and a shared uncertainty about the forces of modernization and social change.

The songs reflected comfort, genuine friendship and a belief in the democracy of rural life — that hard work brought rewards both spiritual and monetary. Everyone could appreciate that, but Okies took those metaphors quite literally. For many non-Okies, there was real merit in those values: For some it was a lure; for others at least a path to grudging acceptance.

The Farm Security Administration, which ran the labor camps, recognized the interest (and perhaps the population-soothing merits) of that music among the camp populations. When the Porterville federal labor camp opened in 1940, it was FSA officials who threw the first concert, albeit with only a batch of 78-rpm records. Faith Petric, ,still an active folk-singer at age 90 who worked in FSA relief offices for three years starting in 1940, remembers the party:

When the new Porterville camp opened there was a big, all-day celebration. So rather than having music made by the people who were coming into the camp, we played records, some folk records. It was an official thing … I remembered the records that were played on that day because I provided them. They were folk (records), probably Burl Ives or something like that.

The FSA had been sponsoring music-centered events, including Saturday-night dances, almost from the beginning. Okies from miles around joined labor-camp residents at many of these dances, and attendance often hit 500 or more. Gradually, longer-tenured rural Californians took an interest.

Charles L. Todd, a young amateur folklorist who was then teaching in the Department of Public Speaking at the City College of New York, undertook a project documenting the music of the camps during the summers of 1940 and 1941, tape-recording labor-camp performers with the help of fellow folklorist (and public-speaking teacher) Robert Sonkin. In 1941 Todd wrote an article for The New York Times reporting on Labor Day festivities, attended by “several thousand,” at that same Porterville camp. Wrote Todd, “… (T)his was more than Labor Day: it was ‘hog killin’ time’ in Arkansas, ‘Go-to-Meetin’ Day’ in the Ozarks, and ‘Okie Day’ in California.”

After the sack races and melon-eating marathons, Mrs. Myra Pipkin, who at 45 claimed to be America’s youngest great-grandmother, sang “Happy Was the Miller Boy,” “Old Joe Clark” and “Skip to My Lou.” And so it went into the evening, one singer after another, concluding with a trio from Shafter performing the migrant anthem “Goin’ Down the Road Feelin’ Bad.” Then began one long, continuous round of square dancing, “the strenuous kind,” Todd wrote, “that only people who work all day in the cotton fields can keep up with.” The overall energy of the occasion impressed the few natives in attendance. “Say,” one unnamed local rancher told Todd, “I’m beginning to think these folks have something here.”

Todd and Sonkin spent two summers at the valley’s FSA camps, tape-recording the local talent. There was plenty, most notably the King family of Arvin. But everyone seemed to have aspirations of becoming the next Gene Autry or Patsy Montana – and they were invariably convinced they were “goin’ on the air soon.” A few had already developed stage names. “I’m Homer Pierce, the singin’ cowboy from way down in Missouri,” said one young man by way of introduction. “And I’d like to do a couple of my own tunes for you.” Another had all the moves and affectations of a film cowboy but had not yet learned to play the guitar. That was a minor detail, the singer assured the folklorists. Another Dust Bowler, years later describing her marriage at age 17, said of her young husband’s ambitions, “Like most Okies, he was a musician.”

Petric, who has been holding folk-music jam sessions in her San Francisco home for 40 years and still “harvests” folk music, acknowledges that the Central Valley was one of her earliest repositories. “(Among the) songs that particularly impressed me (was) one that was given to me by a camp manager … written on the back of an old grocery bag,” said Petric, who got only brief glimpses of the migrants at play. “It was a version of one of the great murder ballads called ‘The Waco Girl’ in the version I got.” Among other names, essentially the same song was known as “The Knoxville Girl,” suggesting the Appalachia-to-Southwest path that folk music in general had taken in the previous century – and had now taken to the West.

Despite the widespread poverty, many labor-camp households had a musical instrument or were able to eventually come up with one. “Everybody wanted to play and sing,” said Jimmy Phillips, who moved into the Arvin camp with his family in 1945 and lived there until 1953. “Every household had some kind of an instrument. And they would play. A guitar, a harmonica, a mandolin or a fiddle -- something.”

People would sit on their porches, such as they were, and strum or fiddle into the evening, he said. Phillips, whose stepfather was a farm-labor contractor and could afford a little more than most, bought the boy a drum set when he was 8. Phillips, whose grandmother was full-blooded Oklahoma Chickasaw, always credited those bloodlines for the drumming ability that eventually took him into the Hollywood recording studios of Capitol Records. But his instrument of choice didn’t make him popular back at the labor camp. “They let me practice until 11 o’clock at night,” Phillips said. “(The next morning) everybody around us, the neighbors, they’d say, ‘You like to drove us nuts.’”

Most weekend days during the early post-war years, younger residents of the Sunset labor camp, as the Arvin labor camp was also known, would walk a mile east to mingle with migrant workers from the squatters’ camps around the town of Weedpatch, which was not much more than a single rural intersection in the middle of acres of table-grape vineyards. They would meet, hundreds of them, at a business called the Collins Auction.

“This is how it began,” Phillips said. “You have all these people that’s migrated here from Oklahoma and they’re squatted there (in tents on private land all around Weedpatch) … A lot of them people would go up and they’d listen to Billy Mize and Bill Woods … come out and play. Man, I’m tellin’ you, it would be like a dream for me and many of the others, just to go up and listen to ‘em. And you would think, man, one of these days, this is gonna work, we’re gonna get to get in and do this (ourselves).”

Some of them did.

The war

Widely overlooked in the interlocking lore of the Dust Bowl migration and Bakersfield honky-tonk music is the central role of World War II, a force for population movement and interregional cultural exchange of a magnitude the country had never seen before. Typical was the story of Bill Woods, a singer and bandleader who came to Kern County the way many Southwesterners did in the mid-to late-1940s: By way of the war-era Pacific Coast shipyards. Raised in the West Texas oil fields, the son of a Pentecostal minister, he learned to play the guitar by listening to and playing alongside the Mexican family that lived in the tent next door.

His family moved to Arvin in the 1930s, and when the war broke out Woods headed north to Richmond and got a job as a boilermaker, first for Kaiser Steel and then for U.S. Steel. After work and on weekends he performed with a Western Swing band. By 1944 he had his own group.
As great an impact as the Dust Bowl migrations had on the redistribution of America’s population, World War II’s was far greater. Between 1940 and 1947, some 25 million people, or 21 percent of the total population, migrated to another state or county looking for new opportunities in either the military or the civilian sector. By comparison, only 13 percent moved during 1935-40 and even less in the half-decade before that.

During the early war years (1940-43) rural areas of the U.S. lost more than 5 million residents. All regions of the country lost population except the West, where – owing to the burgeoning opportunities in wartime shipyards and aircraft factories -- the population grew by 14 percent between 1940 and 1947. The San Diego area grew fastest (by 110 percent) but the San Francisco Bay area, and especially the East Bay cities of Oakland, Alameda and once-tiny Richmond, was second among West Coast metropolitan areas with an increase of nearly 40 percent. As was the case during the Dust Bowl migrations, a huge portion of the new wartime labor force, 29 percent, came from four states: Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana. And as was demonstrated during that earlier migration, the newcomers brought their culture with them, specifically their country music.

The Bay Area was not particularly a hotbed for country music in 1942 but that changed soon enough. Radio announcer Cactus Jack was hugely popular, as were Bob Nolan and the Sons of the Pioneers, who were regulars in East Bay ballrooms. Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, who permanently moved their base from Texas to California in 1943, but saw no need to change their name, played in Oakland four times in 1944, appearing before sellout crowds of 19,000 that topped the likes of Harry James, Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman.

On one hand, the music reinforced the fundamental values of all American society. On the other, it sometimes dealt with booze, broads, broken romances and the stress of urbanization in general. In any case, it had mass appeal.

Many second-tier Bay area performers had, or would soon have, significant southern San Joaquin Valley connections. Dave Stogner served a tour of duty in Europe, then went home to east Texas only to find that virtually his entire family had come west to work in the shipyards. He followed them to California but found his calling on the country-swing stages of the East Bay. His Richmond-based Arkansawyers were among the most popular bands of the time and place, and years later he hosted country-music television shows in Fresno and Bakersfield.

Woods, who moved to the East Bay at about the same time, landed a job in Richmond with fiddler Elwin Cross, leading to an opportunity heading his own Texas Stars. “Richmond was really hot then,” Woods once said. “There and Santa Monica was the hottest places goin’.”

Within a few years Woods was in the southern San Joaquin Valley, recruiting performers like Ferlin Husky and Cousin Herb Henson to the barn-dance halls and honky-tonks of Bakersfield. By 1952, Woods – later immortalized in the Merle Haggard song “Bill Woods From Bakersfield” – was fronting a rockabilly band at Bakersfield’s notorious Blackboard featuring Texas-by-way-of-Arizona migrant Buck Owens.

Southern black culture also gained a major foothold in the East Bay during the war years, with a Southern brand of blues distinctly different from the more indigenous variations gradually gaining prominence there. But in the decade following the war, whites left the East Bay in greater numbers than blacks. Between 1957 and 1959, only 46 percent of white war-housing residents remained in Richmond, compared with 56 percent of blacks. Whites moved to the suburbs or back home to the Midwest and South – or they moved into the Central Valley, where similar cultures were already well entrenched.

Once again, the war had brought young men from different parts of the country into close proximity. Population shifts, industrial and economic expansion, and the emotional temperament of the war years were factors as well. Military training camps were particularly efficient incubators. A soldier could stroll past a long row of taverns along a street in Biloxi, Mississippi, and follow Ernest Tubbs’ “Try Me One More Time” verse by verse through the open doors.

Helping bridge the gap back in Bakersfield during the war years was Leon Payne, “the Blind Troubadour” from Alba, Texas, who had a program on KERN-AM. By the late ‘40s every radio station in town had at least one country-and-western program, and KAFY, which became home to Woods, was all country. The Western Swing of Cooley and Wills helped attract non-Okies to the country genre – people who might otherwise have listened to Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman. By the time Buck Owens got his first job at the Blackboard in 1951 alongside Woods, Okie music had transmogrified into California country.

World War II had helped diffuse tastes in country music. GIs and defense workers redistributed it far and wide, not only throughout the United States but to Europe and even Japan. By the 1960s, it had become not the music of a region but of a class – largely lower-middle-class, almost entirely white, blue collar, and over 30. Back in the 1940s, these Okies had been overwhelmingly populist in their economic outlook, having benefited from the programs of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Dealers, but by the 1960s, threatened by the civil rights agenda of liberal Democrats, they had become increasingly conservative.

A war and nearly a decade intervened between the labor camps of the Central Valley and the honky-tonks of Kern County. And in that decade a new crop of West Coast stars emerged – Merle Travis, Dude Martin, Hank Penny, Joe Maphis, Bob Wills, Spade Cooley and many others – stars that California Okies of the early 1950s would come to emulate and appreciate along with the Southwestern traditions they (or their parents) had brought West.

The honky-tonks

The forerunners of the Bakersfield honky-tonk included places like the Pioneer Club, a dingy bar near the end of Arvin’s commercial strip. These saloons catered mostly to men, most of them farm workers, but on Saturday night there might be a band and dancing couples – an encouraging sight for married couples and women who might otherwise be reluctant participants.

Evangelical churches in the valley’s agricultural areas made their Okie associations clear in subtle ways and, as James Gregory writes, many saloons did likewise, with “rude décor” and often a name that suggested Southwestern heritage – the Texhoma Club, for example. These clubs were often rough, in keeping with the Celtic cultural tradition that accompanied the bloodlines of many Okies. Fights were common in Dust Bowl-era Central California saloons from the start.

And of course there was the music. Saloons catering to the white farm workers of the valley invariably featured jukeboxes packed with music, which, until Billboard began charting the genre in 1941 (first calling it “western,” then “folk,” then, finally in 1949, “country and western”), had always been called “hillbilly.”

Historically honky-tonks were associated with East Texas oil fields. Before long oil towns in California hosted beer joints that could have been plucked from those environs. Agricultural communities got the hang of the concept quickly, and in Bakersfield, which had an abundance of both industries, it was a natural.

The honky-tonks in Bakersfield tended to serve the non-agricultural working classes. There was the Blackboard, the Lucky Spot and the Clover Club, to name only the most famous, but many others dotted the south end of Union Avenue, toward Arvin. These, like the Rhythm Rancho, the Beardsley Ballroom, the open-air Rhythm Roundup and the all-ages Rainbow Garden, tended to serve white farm laborers and blue-collar workers. Most were safe, but a few of them, especially where oilfield workers were the chief patrons, could be violent places. As singer-songwriter Tommy Collins, an Oklahoma-to-Bakersfield transplant, once said, “The night spots in Bakersfield might well be called the ‘redneck, scared-to-death, honky-tonk, skull orchard, barely-making-a-living places of Okie entertainment.”

No honky-tonk better epitomized the scene than the Blackboard, a saloon that not only brought big-name acts to Bakersfield but gave the increasingly distinct local sound its first doses electric guitar and other rock ‘n’ roll influences. One of its owners, Joe Limi, was a short, stocky Italian who had come to the United States as a 9-year-old. He met his partner-to-be, Frank Zabaleta, before the war while driving a truck for his family’s liquor distributorship. Zabaleta, a tall, good-natured California-born Basque, had worked at a liquor store on Limi’s route. They bought the Blackboard together in 1949 and by 1951 it was the hottest country-music club in Bakersfield.

When the musical landscape changed in 1954, with the advent of Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Little Richard, the Blackboard changed with it – another cultural adaptation that generally did not, and perhaps could not have taken place elsewhere. In fact, Nashville – by now the industry’s headquarters thanks to people like Fred Rose and Hank Williams, was quite worried about these new developments. Bakersfield, in the best traditions of Southwestern country music and Okie stubbornness, embraced them.

Before1954, blues and Negro music -- long shaping forces in country music -- had limited their contributions to older country blues, jazz and ragtime. Now the newer rhythm and blues styles, handed along from black culture, exerted their influence. Rock ‘n’ roll represented “the fusion of country with rhythm and blues,” D.K. Wilgus writes, and, though it eventually grew away from country, the new music left the older style irrevocably changed.

Clubs like the Blackboard adopted rock ‘n’ roll and its rockabilly cousin without so much as a figurative blink. Phillips, the drummer raised at the Arvin federal labor camp, is a good example of the open-mindedness of the day among performers. During his career as an active musician Phillips -- who now runs a barber shop in Tehachapi – played in an all-black Bakersfield blues band, the Jivin’ Kingsmen, in the mid-‘50s; was a member of Jolly Jody and the Go-Daddies, the most popular Bakersfield rock ‘n’ roll band of the late 1950s and early 1960s; and appeared regularly on the five-afternoons-per-week Bakersfield television show hosted Western Swing fiddler Jimmy Thomason in the late 1960s. In between, he recorded with country artists like Dick Curless, Ronnie Sessions, Tommy Collins, Red Simpson, Barbara Mandrell and Merle Haggard.

Dust Bowl circumstances didn’t merely have profound affects on country musicians; they influenced rockers as well. Roy Buchanan, who was born in Arkansas in 1939 and whose family moved permanently to California’s Central Valley in 1945, predated Stevie Ray Vaughan by a full decade as America’s premier high-voltage blues-rock guitarist. His family lived in the Porterville labor camp and later in Pixley, a microscopic farm town 40 miles up Highway 99 from Bakersfield. Buchanan visualized his guitar chops while lying next to the living room radio, idolizing some of the same musicians Merle Haggard did.

“In the little house out in the field at Pixley’s edge, an inexpensive radio set brought all this music (of 1940s country and Western Swing stars) into the Buchanans’ home, as in millions of homes across the West,” biographer Phil Carson writes. “In the Buchanans’ humble household one’s appreciation for music was sharpened by the lack of other diversions. … Forty years later Roy Buchanan would specifically recall staying up late and hearing ‘Step It Up and Go’ … Leroy probably heard the Maddox Brothers and Rose version in 1947, which featured a young buck on guitar named Roy Nichols,” who would later settle in Bakersfield and record extensively with Haggard.

Nostalgia and vilification

The honky-tonk music of the post-war era held fast to the same nostalgic images of home, mother and farm that poor Southwesterners had brought to California half a generation before. But the honky-tonkers turned the equation upside down and, in effect, vilified city life. To a greater extent than ever before, the typical scene in the country ballad became the urban bar or honky-tonk where one went to escape the hubbub and complexities of urban life – such as an oilfield, even if it were only a 10-minute drive out of town. The honky-tonk scene, with its jukebox and neon lights, must have been reassuring to many of the thousands of Southwestern migrants who found adjustment to city life challenging.

Songs like “The Wild Side of Life” by Hank Thompson, “Bright Lights and Country Music,” by Bill Anderson and “Your Girl’s Gonna Go Bad,” by Tammy Wynette exude that sentiment, but it’s significant to observe that some of the more noteworthy country-music compositions denouncing the soullessness of city environments were composed by Bakersfield performers with Dust Bowl-era roots.

One of the first popular denunciations of city life from a rural perspective is in “Dim Lights, Thick Smoke (and Loud, Loud Music) which was written by Rose Lee and Joe Maphis. The song was inspired by the Maphises’ gigs at the Blackboard in Bakersfield. Like many such songs, it also reflects a challenged Evangelical moralism, with its references to a woman who will “never make a wife to a home lovin’ man” and who would “rather have a drink with the first guy you meet,” and whose “only home you know is the club down the street.”

Tommy Collins’s “High on a Hilltop” sees moral degradation in a city setting:

High on a hilltop overlooking the city,
I can see the bright lights as they gleam;
And somewhere you’re dancing in some dingy barroom,
And the lure of gayness takes the place of our dream


Generally, cities and towns of the American Southwest fared better in the eyes of country music songwriters during the war years, and afterward, than Northern and Eastern cities – a likely outgrowth of the nostalgia that dominated Dust Bowl-era musical themes. Northern cities were places of desolation and loneliness in the vernacular of country music, while southwestern towns and burgs — and sometimes even cities — were places of comfort and familiarity.

Bakersfield’s two greatest country music stars, Merle Haggard and Buck Owens, were as capable of taking shots at Northern cities as any of their contemporaries – Haggard in “The Sidewalks of Chicago,” about a wino living in mission, and in “Big City,” which chronicles the trap that large urban areas can be for displaced members of the rural underclass; and Owens in “I Wouldn’t Live in New York City If They Gave Me the Whole Dang Town,” and in “No Milk and Honey in Baltimore,” about the difficulties and disappointments of a factory worker. Conversely, Owens sings approvingly of the Texas city of Houston:

Houston town, oh Houston town,
How I love you Houston town;
When I get there I’m gonna kiss the ground,
That you stand on Houston town:

“The Streets of Bakersfield,” Owens’s greatest hit in the second half of his career (written by Oklahoman Homer Joy), achieves both: Disdain for the ridicule he as a Okie must endure, and a sort of bitter pride in his hardscrabble hometown and the established folk there who look down their noses. The result is a denunciation of city folk – even Bakersfield folk -- and that recurring Okie stubbornness, with decades-old roots.

You don't know me, but you don't like me
You say you care less how I feel
But how many of you that sit and judge me
Have ever walked the streets of Bakersfield

But what’s an Okie to do, when that old rural life fades irretrievably into urban reality, and nostalgia for the farm becomes less than crisp in the memory? Find a new type of hero and manufacture a new, glorious exodus from the mundane: Celebrate the rootless long-haul truck driver. The trucker, as close to the modern cowboy as country music could supply in the late 1950s and early 1960s, is deified in songs by the likes of Dick Curless and Red Simpson as tough and independent, part of a proud fraternity, holding fast to old values within a new context. Part loner, part team-player, “the eighteen-wheel cowboy” is perhaps the closest thing to Gene Autry that a grown-up Dust Bowl boy could ever hope to approximate – financially stable, ever skirting disaster, invested with potential but always bound, for better or for worse, to that long, lonesome, unpredictable highway. Dust Bowl migrants, even those a generation removed, would always understand something very basic about highways.

Conclusions

The Okie culture was essential to the rise of the Bakersfield honky-tonk because, along with evangelical religion, social conservatism and ingrained individualism, country music gave that migrant group continuity, inspiration and influence. It lent that group of American Southwesterners a sense of identity, a moral imperative and a sense of purpose. Although Okie culture existed in California to an extent prior to the mid-1930s, the so-called Dust Bowl migration brought tens of thousands of newcomers to the not-so-Golden State – and just at a time when the music they brought with them was achieving its commercial and creative apex.

As important as the Dust Bowl migration was to the development of Bakersfield
(and California) music in the 1950s and 1960s, however, factors before and after the 1930s were also highly significant. The movement of American folk music and rural sensibilities through two centuries of growth and migration brought important cultural traditions to the West, and World War II essentially finished the job, bringing hundreds of thousands of men and women to the Pacific Coast, where many chose to stay – further homogenizing California culture as they settled in.

Still, the Dust Bowl has a well deserved place in the history of California cultural development. Timing was critical to the phenomenon. As James Gregory has observed, the unique problems and passions of that decade created the Okie crisis and, perhaps, “created” Okies. “Had the hostile reception that forced many Southwesterners into the position of social outsiders been absent,” Gregory writes, “would there have been an Okie subculture? Certainly not the same one.”

Now, consider the life of the established Okie in the mid-1950s to early-1960s – hard-nosed and determined but still possessing a chip of sorts on his shoulder – in an environment that publicly celebrates all of those things. Add a strong economy, and post-War sense of triumph, patriotism, and optimism, a somewhat higher standard of living than the previous generation experienced, and the free-wheeling, honky-tonk lifestyle seems a reasonable outgrowth of a strongly defined Okie culture. Postwar America in general was ready to embrace some of the same values.

The result was one of those rare confluences of people, place and time, an amalgam of talent, opportunity and purpose that built Bakersfield – fleetingly, in retrospect – into a city transformed by music. If country music was, in the words of James Gregory, “the single most important source of group integrity, the essential language of the Okie subculture,” no city was more fluent than Bakersfield.

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This article received the Cal State Bakersfield Dean's Award for Outstanding Graduate Paper in June 2006.