On June 16, 1995, Merle Haggard and Buck Owens staged a joint concert at the Kern County Fairgrounds. It was the first time the twin pillars of the Bakersfield music scene had shared a stage in nearly three decades, and the event attracted national media attention. The Nashville Network sent a correspondent to interview the two country legends on Merle’s bus before the show. When asked for a definition of the “Bakersfield Sound,” Buck responded, “It’s what Merle and I do.” Merle nodded, adding, “Good answer.” Neither man elaborated.
It was likely as good an answer as any. No doubt Buck and Merle had been asked to define the Bakersfield Sound thousands of times by thousands of interviewers over the years. They were probably sick of it. It’s likely, however, that the only reason anyone ever felt the need to come up with the term to begin with was simply an attempt to make sense of the fact that the biggest country star of the 1960s and the biggest country star of the 1970s both happened to emerge from the seemingly random (to outsiders, anyway) city of Bakersfield, more than 2,000 miles from the country music mecca of Nashville.