July-August 2008

Country Music in Los Angeles: California Crackers

By Dennis Roger Reed

They made their way to Los Angeles, but for the entire dream like potential, it was still a city. Full of bustle and tall buildings, and nothing like home. So most migrated a bit more to the outskirts, to places with names like South Gate or Pomona or Buena Park. Someplace where there might even be a spot of land for a garden, or a place for a few chickens. Bell Gardens and Cudahy became known as “Billy Goat Acres.” Cotton could grow in a Santa Monica front yard. Little “dust bowl” communities sprang up in the Southern California canyons or mountains.

And they brought their music with them, fiddles and guitars and high pitched keening vocals, or soft lullaby like melodies sung almost as prayers. But the new land, the new needs, altered the music, charged it with electricity just like the cities, made it brassy, loud and sometimes grating. You could smell the honky tonk in one song, and taste the cool mountain air in another. Sometimes, the music was all you had.

For those who had lost their family or their way, music was often a salvation, more socially acceptable than drunkenness. For those that blessed their luck in finding a job or a decent place to live, music might’ve filled in for their loss of a spiritual home. Religion was different for these folk, too. The church you were baptized in was your church, so if you left home it was almost infidelity to attend a new church. Independent to a large degree in religion before they left home, the mountain folk didn’t need a sanctified Sunday minister to read scripture and live the bible life. The traveling evangelists brought a more formal tact if they needed that in their lives. And lifting one’s voice in songs of praise was always acceptable.

The flatlanders were gritty folk, but the mountain folk were the most stubborn by far. The Ozarks’ top soil and game had given out years and years ago. The Carolinas had been logged out, and the poverty in the Smokies and Adirondacks was so bitter that anything or anywhere seemed better. They’d adapted and adapted and adapted until there wasn’t anything left to adapt to, so they’d loaded their belongings on anything with wheels and headed west, indistinguishable from the Okies and Texans to the untrained eye. 

The mountain folk favored the fiddle and sentimental melodies, and the folks from the flat lands seemed to cotton more to the steel guitar, and western swing. Western swing was more popular in Los Angeles than it was in Dallas in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and you were more likely to run into a honky tonk star in Culver City than Nashville.

And it came crashing together here in Southern California. Not in Nashville, not even in Bakersfield. They created their own spin off Highway 99, but it was Southern California where it grew. Transplants, transients and a new generation of urban hillbilly fans who got hooked in WWII on that driving honky tonk beat, or that bouncy western swing were willing to spend some of their hard earned dough. You could bump into a Brooklyn-ite or an Okie on the dance floor some nights in Santa Monica. But the Okie population soared as you moved to the “outskirts” to the Harmony Park Ballroom or the Riverside Rancho. 

Southern California added more ingredients to the stew. The Tex-Mex beat drifted west and mixed with rancheros and conjunto, and as the neighborhoods in low rent areas mixed more and more, so did the music.

It was a glorious time, when it seemed like a kid with talent and enough money for a Sears and Roebuck e-lec-tric guitar could go from a western dance band playing on Fridays at the Masonic Lodge to cutting a record and being heard on the radio to hitting the road as a bonafide country music star. 

And even for those that would have stardom elude them all too easily, there was almost a living to be made picking the guitar or slapping the bass. Working man’s clubs flourished in spots like Signal Hill or East Los Angeles, anywhere people worked in large number. Bars near Lockheed, Boeing and the other aircraft factories needed to either have country on the jukebox or live on Friday night. Some of the clubs catered to this need around the clock, with swing shift or graveyard employees needing their beer and music just as much as the 9 to 5ers. Out on that sweating dance floor, it almost didn’t matter that this week’s paycheck was really already spent.

It was a new land, with new duties and new rules. It wasn’t that hard to fall into the new routine, but home is home and no matter the circumstance, memories exist. Like seeks like, and certain neighborhoods became “little Arkie” or “Tex west” and as more and more folks drifted into Southern California, it was actually easier to stick to your roots. “County” picnics flourished, and car loads of relatives and friends converged on Sunday to Los Angeles parks, stringing up banners that announced “Hamilton County Picnic Today: All Welcome!” The tables would fill with greens and potato salad, fried chicken and ham, and if there was a creek anywhere nearby, boiled crawdads. Pies and cakes filled the sweet tooth, and before long, fiddles and guitars emerged from cases. Grandpa might jump up and start clogging or do a buck and wing. Some of the men folk drifted away a bit to partake in clear liquor in a jar, moonshine or White Lightening. For a few hours, amongst the eucalyptus and oaks, you could pretend you were back home under the old ash tree and the factory or body shop or meat packing plant was just a bad dream.

No matter how adept the pickers and grinners were on Sunday afternoon, come next Friday or Saturday night, it would be down to the corner bar, or out to Harmony Park or the Riverside Rancho. You just had to dance to the beat set up by the bass and drums, so loud your could feel it in your chest. Mix this music with the sawdust, sweat, beer and perfume and you had a blend called honky tonk. And those heroes on stage were the real thing, died in the wool professionals with spangled trousers and ornate high heeled cowboy boots and rakish cowboy hats. No matter that many of the performers weren’t actually from the country, or never had roped a steer or rode a horse. Once the spotlight hit the stage and the drummer smacked the snare and brought in the band, music was the focus. Alcohol and the possibility of sex or violence may have lurked nearby, but as long as there was a two step and an occasional country waltz, all was well. Monday was a million miles away.

Dennis Roger Reed is a singer-songwriter, musician and writer based in San Clemente, CA. He’s released two solo CDs, and appeared on two CDs with the newgrassy Andy Rau Band and two CDs with the roots rockers Blue Mama. His prose has appeared in a variety of publications such as the OC Weekly and MOJO magazine. Writing about his music has appeared in an eclectic group of publications such as Bass Player, Acoustic Musician, Dirty Linen, Blue Suede News and Sing Out! His oddest folk resume entry would be the period of several months in 2002 when he danced onstage as part of both Little Richard’s and Paul Simon’s revues. He was actually asked to do the former and condoned by the latter. He apparently knows no shame.

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