Workin' Man Blues: Country Music in California

by Gerald W. Haslam, Alexandra Haslam Russell (Contributor), Richard Chon (Contributor)

California has been fertile ground for country music since the 1920s, nurturing a multitude of talents from Gene Autry to Glen Campbell, Rose Maddox to Barbara Mandrell, Buck Owens to Merle Haggard.

In this affectionate homage to California's place in country music's history, Gerald Haslam surveys the Golden State's contributions to what is today the most popular music in America. At the same time he illuminates the lives of the white, working-class men and women who migrated to California from the Dust Bowl, the Hoovervilles, and all the other locales where they had been turned out, shut down, or otherwise told to move on.

Haslam's roots go back to Oildale, in California's central valley, where he first discovered the passion for country music that infuses Workin' Man Blues. As he traces the Hollywood singing cowboys, Bakersfield honky-tonks, western-swing dance halls, "hillbilly" radio shows, and crossover styles from blues and folk music that also have California roots, he shows how country music offered a kind of cultural comfort to its listeners, whether they were oil field roustabouts or hash slingers. Haslam analyzes the effects on country music of population shifts, wartime prosperity, the changes in gender roles, music industry economics, and television.

He also challenges the assumption that Nashville has always been country music's hometown and Grand Ole Opry its principal venue. The soul of traditional country remains romantically rural, southern, and white, he says, but it is also the anthem of the underdog, which may explain why California plays so vital a part in its heritage: California is where people reinvent themselves, just as country music has reinvented itself since the first Dust Bowl migrants arrived, bringing their songs and heartaches with them.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction

392 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Ron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nashville has not always been the home of country music. Following migrations westward from the South and Dust Bowl states during the 1930s and 1940s, country music flourished in California, where it thrived in Hollywood, throughout the agricultural interior valleys and around the war-related industries in Los Angeles. And it continued in the post-war years, peaking in creative output one final time in the 1960s.

Author Gerald Haslam's history of country music in California tells a story full of rich appreciation for its many musical styles, from hillbilly (the Crockett Family, seen on the cover), to the singing cowboys (Gene Autry), to the heyday of western swing (Bob Wills and Spade Cooley), to Tennessee Ernie Ford, and the Bakersfield music scene, centered around Buck Owens in the 1960s. Haslam then tracks its story since those golden years in the careers of Californians who made it big in the Nashville years, such as Merle Haggard.

Haslam's sympathies are clearly with performers who have bucked the homogenizing trends of Nashville and the dominance of a music today that calls itself country but has largely lost contact with its roots. He praises the musical mavericks and outlaws who keep traditional and "hard" country alive in California, giving special attention to Dwight Yoakum, who stubbornly and fiercely chose Los Angeles as a base to launch a career that got national attention in the 1980s.

You may or may not love the author's blue-collar bias. He notes the frequent theme of discontent in traditional country music, characterizing it as the music of the hard-working men and women who labor not always successfully in pursuit of an American dream. Their yearning for simpler times and rural values is a sensibility mostly absent from today's country play lists, with only rare exceptions like Alan Jackson. It's a sentiment that finds its parallel in the traditionalist's dislike for the urban market-driven output of Nashville's lucrative music industry.

This is a highly readable book, with over 50 photographs of performers, and it's also a reference based on a good deal of scholarship. There's a 22-page bibliography and both a song title index and a subject index covering another 24 pages. Readers interested in western swing will especially appreciate the author's extensive study of this subject. As a companion volume, I'd also recommend "The Rough Guide to Country Music."

[Everyone Poops · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book focuses on what Country music meant to the history of the state by tracing the development of several prominent bands (Maddox Bros. and Rose, Buck Owens, etc.)--some homegrown, some not--into national acts. But WMB is a huge bore for those wanting a cultural and socio-political bent on how the music cam via the "Okies" who migrated here through the first half of the 20th C. Haslam is much too fond of trumping bands for their resistance to Nashville, and he does so frequently while indelicately ignoring many interesting things that have nothing to do with the music industry. Another book could be written on the subject of Bakersfield vs. Nashville, but aside from the occasional deferral to Capitol Records, I personally care very little about it.

In fact, being an East Bayer all my life, I felt somewhat slighted. For one thing, seeing how Richmond, Vallejo and Oakland are within less than 50 miles of each other, all war towns in the 40's and 50's, supplying thousands of jobs to recent arrivals from the South and Midwest, you'd think a great deal more of the book would devote itself to this area.

But no. Haslam devotes about three quarters of his book to Bakersfield and Southern California, and the rest is pretty much devoted to bands' staunch refusal to move to Nashville. The occasional passing comments on Oakland are total revelations, which are of course gold to the people who write these books. I was fucking stunned to learn that Bob Wills recorded his Tiffany Transcriptions somewhere on Telegraph Avenue. Come to Oakland today and you won't see a trace of Hank or Buck or anyone else. It is these exhumations of history that writing on subjects that are commonly ignored is all about.

Decent read, well written, but I was disappointed with Haslam's approach.

[Joanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

So much info, a must if you like the old-timey California country music.

[Lyn Jensen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eighty years of country in California, alternating between the decades and artist bios. My only critique is that I would've liked to have seen a few more paragraphs on Glen Campbell.