Back in 2012, the Country Music Hall of Fame opened a fabulous special museum exhibition, The Bakersfield Sound, and hired me to lead a band for a concert at the Hall of Fame featuring many of the surviving legends who created the Bakersfield Sound back in the glory days of the 1940s through the 1970s. I put together a fabulous band featuring Kenny Vaughan and Eugene Moles on guitars, Dave “D.B.” Berzansky on pedal steel guitar, and Chris “Sugarballs” Sprague on drums.
The concert featured an incredible array of talent assembled for the night: Red Simpson (a writer of many hit songs and a Capitol Recording artist in his own right, where he became the king of truck drivin’ music), Rose Lee Maphis (wife and singing partner of Joe Maphis, and a recording and TV star going back to the early 1950s, when she and Joe had a huge hit with “Dim Lights, Thick Smoke (and Loud, Loud Music)”), Buddy Mize (brother of Billy Mize and a prolific singer and songwriter on his own), Dennis Payne (a hotshot young guitarist in Bakersfield in the 1960s who played with many of the legends and recorded the instrumental album Bakersfield’s Big Guitars in 1967), Don Maddox of the Maddox Brothers and Rose (the last surviving member of the highly influential family group that were the biggest country music stars on the West Coast from the 1940s through the mid-1950s), and Dallas Frazier (one of the most successful country music songwriters of all time, who got his start as a child singer in Bakersfield in the early 1950s).
For a very long time, the Country Music Hall of Fame had the complete 2012 concert on YouTube, but it was inexplicably taken down several years ago. That’s why I was delighted when my friend Zane Adamo of The SodaCrackers band sent me these videos shot by Henry Barrios from the audience that night. Thanks, Henry and Zane, for sharing these with me!
I should also point out how sobering it is to realize that every single one of these Bakersfield legends that we backed up that evening has passed on in the thirteen years since. It was a truly amazing experience to be able to play with all of them. Thanks go out to the folks at the Country Music Hall of Fame who trusted me with this job—Michael Gray, Ali Tonn, Abi Tapia, and others who made this wonderful exhibit and opening night concert a huge success.
I’m posting these videos from an old file format that I got on a thumb drive—they may show up in the post as black boxes, but click on the videos and you’ll be whisked back to an amazing night when real country music ruled, for a brief, shining moment!
Access the videos at Deke’s Facebook post or at the Country Music Hall of Fame website!
