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.