Search - The Cyrus Clarke Expedition :: The Road to California

California Americana Americana music in California is a force which blew out of the Great Valley on a wave of twang, glitter, hard knocks, lonesome songs, and sorrowful steel guitars. The first incarnation was a honky-tonk scene in Bakersfield, hard scrabble oiltown and unofficial capital of the San Joaquin Valley, that gave birth to the twangy telecaster driven music of singers like Merle Haggard and Buck Owens. This tough yet plaintive sound took the Grapevine south to Los Angeles and influenced Rose Maddox, Bob Wills, Merle Travis, Don Rich, Roy Nichols, Fuzzy Owen, Ken Nelson, James Burton, and Joe Maphis; all postwar purveyors of hony-tonk dreams on the edge of the world. In the sixties just out of the reach of glittering lights of Hollywood, a new, hard edged take on those traditional sounds morphed into country music LA style. It grew quickly through Merle and Buck to Chris Hillman, Cllarence White, Jimmy Messina, Gram Parsons, Roger McGuinn, Ry Cooder, Linda Ronstadt, Emmy Lou Harris, Neil Young and a host of others. Thanks to the expanding LA music industry it soon spread out over the world. Along with the Bakersfield sound, rhythm and blues and rock were driving forces throughout California, particularly in the rapidly growing urban areas. In East Los Angeles, a fertile, thriving Latino culture produced hybrids like Richie Valens, beautifully suited to the strong character of the land and the people. Meanwhile up in San Francisco a new style of music was evolving with rock as its catalyst. Americana's rock influence is fully realized in the music of Los Lobos, the Grateful Dead, David Lindley, the Byrds, the Blasters, Santana, Buffalo Springfield, and many other great bands. San Francisco's coffee houses also produced a heady, iconoclastic acoustic music scene. It may have started in the hills south of the city where fledgling folkies Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter, and David Nelson were playing trad songs as the Hart Valley Drifters. Maybe it settled in later when the Dead, Commander Cody's Lost Planet Airmen and the New Riders of the Purple Sage rode their trad imbued electric sound in out of the western sunset. Farther north back up in the redwood trees traditional music found its voice in the plaintive, yearning simplicity of Jim Ringer and Mary MacCaslin. And in the rolling grassy hills of Marin County, David Grisman's mando cohort, the Quintet, with its lucky plucking bounciness and minor swing 'newgrass' changed the rules on how to play music with traditional instruments.