New York-based country singer Tennessee Walt will present a lecture and concert in Westbury about Bakersfield artists and their music.
The Bakersfield Sound was one of the dominant elements of country music from the 1960s through the 1980s, lifting stars like Merle Haggard, Buck Owens and Jean Shepard to international fame.
Tennessee Walt’s From Bakersfield with Love will be presented on Oct. 18 at 6 p.m. at the Westbury Public Library. Admission is free.
The show will include classic Bakersfield songs such as Owens’ “Act Naturally,” Haggard’s “Today I Started Loving You Again” and Shepard’s “A Satisfied Mind.” It will also feature songs by lesser-known Bakerfield artists such as Tommy Collins, Rose Maddox, Billy Mize and Red Simpson. Walt will talk about the stories behind the songs and the man who wrote them.
“People think of country music as based in Nashville, and indeed the 1950s through the 1970s was the era of the so-called Nashville Sound, a pop-influenced school of country,” Gayden Wren, Queens resident who performs on voice and piano as Tennessee Walt, said in a press release. “But Bakersfield, California, is a long way from Nashville, and the artists who rose out of Bakersfield’s rich musical culture had a country style all their own, far grittier and more akin to traditional country than what was coming out of Nashville in those years.
“The artists of the Bakersfield Sound were primarily refugees from the 1930s dust bowl, born in Arkansas, Texas and especially Oklahoma, or the sons and daughters of refugees,” Wren continued. “The experience of migrating west, usually with nothing they couldn’t carry in a single car, left them alienated from the glossy country of the Nashville Sound and hungry for music that related more to real people and the lives they lived.
“In a sense, they’re the real heirs of Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family, Ernest Tubb and Hank Williams, the people who made country what it was at its best.” Wren concluded. “When you listen to Haggard or Owens, you’re hearing a purer form of country than you could get from Nashville, then or since.”
From Bakersfield with Love is the eighth show from Tennessee Walt, following on the heels of The Other Great American Songbook, Bristol & Beyond: The Birth of Country Music, Hanks a Lot!, Riding with the Outlaws, An Afternoon in the Country, Three Chords and the Truth: Country’s Greatest Songwriters and The Hank Williams Century.
For more information on the upcoming event, call (516) 333-0176 or visit WestburyLibrary.org.
