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.