Origin of Country - NYTimes.com Saturday night. We're cruising up North Chester on our way to a Basque feast at Noriega's, when something catches our eye across the median. Bryce hangs a U-ie so we can get to the source: a makeshift church in an empty warehouse. "Sinners Welcome" reads the gothic script banner hung on a rolled up metal grate, and a young man with a shaved head and vacant eyes asks if we know the Lord. Bryce and I nod reflexively. Inside, past rows of folding chairs, another man is at the lectern, trying to strangle salvation out of an electric guitar. It's not pretty, though maybe it isn't supposed to be. A few yards away, on the sidewalk, three teenage girls furiously suck on cigarettes, like there are nutrients or redemption in them. A heavyset woman on a scooter motors toward us. Nashville of the West, they used to call Bakersfield. Surely this is not what they meant. I'd arrived a day earlier in this central California city in search of that old time music. Buck Owens settled here; Merle Haggard was born and raised in Oildale, the unincorporated area north of the city proper, and built a mansion on the Kern River, which snakes through what is now a national forest with sheer canyons that empty into the rushing water; and countless musicians, from Gram Parsons to Dwight Yoakam, have made pilgrimages. (Yoakam's 1988 "Streets of Bakersfield," a duet he recorded with Owens, was No. 1 on the Billboard country singles chart.) There's even a specific strain of music named for the place: the Bakersfield sound, highlighted last year in a Volkswagen ad set to the 1962 Wynn Stewart song "Another Day, Another Dollar." The Bakersfield sound grew out of a reaction to the polished and lifeless tunes coming out of Nashville. Thus the country music born here in the "50s and "60s, wafting from the honky-tonks and recording studios, was more stripped down, a little louder, abetted by the punch of electric guitars, the sway and lurch of rockabilly. What you heard on a record didn't sound so far off from what you would hear Friday night at the bar, when men in cowboy hats would sing sweetheart duets with their dolled-up wives, the two of them feisty, contrite and wise, resplendent in Nudie suits. While it's not hard to find, say, authentic indie rock - throw a dart at a map of Brooklyn or Portland or Austin - country music, of the not-built-for-stadiums, non-Keith Urban variety, is more elusive these days. You could get lucky and stumble upon a throwback with a pedal steel and a library of Waylon Jennings covers - or you could fly to LAX and drive two and a half hours north to Bakersfield, where there is still great, moving country music to be heard, in the unflatteringly lit basement of Trout's (the last of the original honky-tonks); at the Crystal Palace, a shrine to all things Buck Owens; and at Ethel's Old Corral Cafe, a dive set halfway between Panorama Drive and the oil fields that gave Oildale its name. A defiantly un-P.C. statue of a giant Indian giving the "How" sign stands out front of the corral along with six American flags, and inside is a mix of bikers, cowboys and locals who fall somewhere in between. A band plays every Sunday, and the afternoon I was there it was Nightlife, fronted by Justin and Wendy McWilliams. Justin was born in Salt Lake City, where his parents played in their own band, and "everything they did was Bakersfield." "I was raised with this stuff," he said during a break between sets. Wendy, his wife, has one of those voices you don't quite believe is real - part Lucinda Williams, part June Carter - especially when you come upon it in as unheralded a place as this. She serenades couples who giddily take to the dance floor, three minutes to show off their rhinestone-studded jeans and escape the workaday blandness of their other lives. Later, Marc Madewell, who also plays at Trout's, joined the band for a song. Madewell is Bakersfield through and through - born and raised here, with a Haggardesque scowl. It's a resemblance not lost on others; "He could be the next Merle," one knowledgeable promoter told me. Haggard is a country outlaw, part of a group of musical greats like Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash who thumbed their noses at the Nashville establishment. Mel Tillis, on the other hand, is about as well behaved as you can get and still be a country musician. His set at the Crystal Palace was as much banter as it was music, and in between songs, Tillis, who wrote classics like "I Ain't Never," cracked wise about his wife's hearing, told stories about his stutter (while stuttering) and recounted tales of the actor Tim Conway. Tillis was hawking a DVD, "Huntin" Buddies," in which he starred alongside Conway. At certain moments, gazing at the courteous audience, I wished I were back at Ethel's, before realizing that there aren't all that many Mel Tillises left in the world, and to see him borders on something like musical, if not patriotic, obligation. This is the mix that pervades Bakersfield today - the glossy music hall that civic boosters plaster on their brochures and the dives where country purists take shelter. Over lunch at the Arizona Cafe, I asked Robert Price, the editorial page editor of The Bakersfield Californian, about his sense of the city. He said the distinct flavor came from a few things: the "stew" that includes Dust Bowl migrants from the 1930s and "40s, Basque sheep men whose herds thrived on the verdant acreage, and the roughnecks who drilled the wells and made sure they kept pumping. Bakersfield's isolation, he added ("two hours to the coast, two hours to L.A. and two days if you go anywhere east"), only fermented this mix. Price asked where I was staying, and I told him the Padre, the city's oldest hotel, which was recently refurbished into something approaching boutique flavor. It's now all shined up - welcome news for folks like Price, who root for downtown's revival - but as with a lot of places in Bakersfield, you don't have to dig deep to find a more rebellious past: annoyed at city officials for enforcing fire safety codes, the hotel's former owner once installed a missile on its roof. Munitions aside, that tattered spirit is best found in the town's bars, with their criminally cheap happy hours and men and women eager to get lost in them. In those scuffed rooms, emptier than is just, heartbreak finds music, or maybe it is the other way around. One night at Trout's, I saw Lloyd Reading, a 92-year-old sideman who has been performing up and down the Central Valley for more than 70 years. He has stories about Buck Owens - "He came into the Pine Burr one night. "Buck, Buck, do some songs," I said. I don't have time. I have to get a beer" " - and a daughter, Anna, bent on ensuring no one forgets who he is. He is also finishing up a new album, "Aw" Take "Em Back Boys," which Anna insisted I listen to in a minivan parked in the rain-slicked lot out back. There was something a little disconcerting about the evening: a legendary but little-known country musician amid a sea of 20-somethings amped on karaoke and who knows what else. The front room of Trout's pulls in the youth vote, while the back room, festooned with guitars and murals of country greats, pays homage to the evergreens. Certainly Bakersfield is not the only town in the world where you can find juxtapositions that seem almost post-apocalyptic. Any city hollowed out by boom and bust bears the scars: abundant "for lease" signs, pawn shops, tattoo parlors, teenagers with bad posture and too much time on their hands. But in Bakersfield it's all framed by music and history. About a half hour southeast, in Arvin, is the Weedpatch Camp, the federal government installation that was the setting for "The Grapes of Wrath," and just a few miles north of downtown is the China Grade Loop, which winds through one of the 10 most productive oil fields in the United States. At the golden hour that closes each day, the sun lends the industrial machinery something near beauty. That's when it's easy to picture the young Haggard, perched on the hillsides writing some of his most famous songs while staring out over the wells. If you are lucky, you will hear some of them covered on a late afternoon at Ethel's, by a band that will be back at their day jobs come Monday morning. Delivery men, HVAC specialists, secretaries. But here, in their Sunday finery, they sing different, and just as essential, psalms. Tip them well. ESSENTIALS • Bakersfield, Calif. HOTEL The Padre Hotel 1702 18th Street; (888) 443.3387; thepadrehotel.com; doubles from $149. As boutique as Western gets, or as Western as boutique gets. RESTAURANTS Los Tacos de Huicho 123 East 18th Street; (661) 328-9490; tacos from 99 cents. Bare-bones and frighteningly good. Noriega's 525 Sumner Street; (661) 322-8419; noriegahotel.com; dinner, $20. Set aside at least a couple of hours, and an empty stomach, for this authentic multicourse Basque feast. Arizona Café 809 Baker Street; (661) 324-3866 A delicious Mexican fixture in the Old Town Kern section of the city. SIGHTS Weedpatch Camp 8305 Sunset Boulevard, Arvin The migrant camp that was the setting for "The Grapes of Wrath." A few of the original buildings remain, and field workers still stay on the grounds during the harvest months. Kern County Museum 3801 Chester Avenue; (661) 868-8400; kcmuseum.org Modest but quirky interactive exhibits on the Bakersfield Sound and the history of oil drilling in the area ("Black Gold"). BARS AND CONCERT HALLS Trout's 805 North Chester Avenue; (661) 399-6700; troutsblackboard.com The last of the original honky-tonks now hosts everything from line dancing to karaoke to veterans of the Central Valley country music circuit. Ethel's Old Corral Cafe 4310 Alfred Harrell Highway, (661) 873-7613 On its Yelp page: "Wi-Fi: No" Thank God. Live music every Sunday afternoon, with cowboys hitching up their rides (horses) outside. Crystal Palace 2800 Buck Owens Boulevard; (661) 328-7560; buckowens.com/index2.html A concert hall and shrine to all things Buck Owens, one of the progenitors of the Bakersfield Sound. Also a stop for the occasional rock band with an appreciation of the past, like X.