Bob Price
Robert Price is deeply ingrained in the Bakersfield community. Currently he is a reporter for KGET-TV 17. Since coming to KGET in 2020, he has won three Pacific Southwest Emmy awards and two Edward R. Murrow Awards.
He previously served as the Executive Editor of The Bakersfield Californian, where he had also served as a reporter, columnist, and award-winning editor. He holds a degree in journalism from CSU Sacramento. Bob has written and spoken extensively about the Bakersfield Sound since 1997. His writings have included scroes of newspaper artiles, liner notes for a Merle Haggard box set, and a chapter for the Country Music Hall of Fame's official "Bakersfield Sound" exhibit guide.
Bob Price discussing Westward Migration and the Bakersfield Sound on C-SPAN. Click Here.
Bakersfield was established in 1863 in the western shadow of the Sierra Nevada at the intersection of two of the country's defining events: the California Gold Rush and the Civil War. Bakersfield's first generation of pioneers--gold-seekers, Southern sympathizers, and European immigrants--tamed the region's confluence of swamps and built a frontier town.
The Bakersfield Sound: How a Generation of Displaced Okies Revolutionized American Music (Paperback)
In California's Central Valley, two thousand miles away from country music's hit machine, the hard edge of the Bakersfield Sound transformed American music in the latter half of the twentieth century.
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The stripped-down country sounds that Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, and their California cohorts crafted in the 1950s and ’60s still reverberate in the twenty-first century. The edgy music created in the oil town of Bakersfield, and the great musicians identified with it, have long been a distinctive part of the fabric of country music.
Written by Bakersfield country experts Scott B.