Since the 1950s, Nashville has held the monopoly on the country music business. But the West Coast has long been a country music hotbed, thanks in part to the Okie immigrants who poured into California during the '30s and '40s, looking for work in its factories and fields. Country music was popular throughout Southern California, thanks to western swing bandleaders like Spade Cooley and hopped-up Hillbilly groups like the Maddox Brothers and Rose. Bakersfield was a centerpoint of the Southern California oil and agricultural industries, and by the '50s it had become a hotbed of Honky-Tonk music, its bars thick with loud guitars and working-class rowdies looking for some serious weekend relief. Artists like Buck Owens, Wynn Stewart, and Tommy Collins developed a sharp electric guitar style that became a trademark of the Bakersfield Sound. Soon, '60s hits by Owens, like "Together Again" and "Tiger By the Tail" and Merle Haggard's "Swinging Doors" abd "Okie from Muskogee" put Bakersfield on the map as a hotbed of strong, sturdy country music. Bakersfield veterans like Owens and Haggard still tour -- Owens plays every weekend at his Crystal Palace nightclub in Bakersfield -- and the sound continues to filter through the work of artists like Dale Watson and Dwight Yoakam.
