Behind the Bakersfield Sound: Take Buck Owens Boulevard and Merle Haggard Drive straight to the ...

BAKERSFIELD – The streets here are called Owens and Haggard, named after men with ache in their voices and enough talent to help shape a city's legacy. Buck Owens Boulevard and Merle Haggard Drive honor Bakersfield's most famous singers and, by extension, the city's most fertile time for music: the 1950s and '60s, when musicians could find work on stages of several honky-tonks or the soundstage of a local television variety show. Close harmonies and bright Telecaster licks cut through the noise of nightclubs populated by farm hands and oil field workers whose families had migrated from Oklahoma and Arkansas during and after the Dust Bowl. The music that emerged was dubbed the...