Bakersfield sound
In
country music, the
Bakersfield sound was a genre invented in the mid- to late
1950s in
Bakersfield, California. Bakersfield country was a reaction against the slick, string-laden
Nashville sound, which was popular at the time. Artists like Wynn Stewart used electric instrumentation and added a
backbeat, as well as other stylistic elements borrowed from
rock and roll. In the early
1960s,
Merle Haggard and
Buck Owens, among others, brought the Bakersfield sound to mainstream audiences, and it soon became the most popular kind of country music.