Bakersfield
— — a country sound that came out of the oil light.
Not only on a wall.
“The southern anchor of California's San Joaquin Valley, where the flat orchards run up against the Tehachapi range. In the sixties Buck Owens and Merle Haggard built a sound here that pushed back against Nashville — twangier, sharper, made for honky-tonks on the edge of town. The Kern River comes down out of the Sierra to its east. A working agricultural city with a museum-grade musical past. — from the studio
Bakersfield, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Bakersfield is the seat of Kern County and the largest city at the southern end of California's San Joaquin Valley, with a population of about 410,000. It sits roughly 110 miles north of Los Angeles over the Tehachapi Mountains and the Grapevine, and about 290 miles south of San Francisco. Kern County leads the state in oil production and ranks among its top agricultural counties — almonds, grapes, citrus, carrots. The Kern River drops out of the southern Sierra Nevada east of town and was historically the city's defining geographic feature.
The Bakersfield Sound is the city's lasting cultural export. Through the 1960s, Buck Owens and the Buckaroos and Merle Haggard built a stripped-down, Telecaster-driven country style that ran against the orchestrated Nashville recordings of the same era. Owens's Crystal Palace, opened on Buck Owens Boulevard in 1996, still operates as a venue and museum. Haggard, born in a converted boxcar in Oildale just north of town, is buried at Greenlawn Cemetery. The Kern County Museum holds an extensive Bakersfield Sound collection in its central exhibit.
The Kern River runs 165 miles from the southern Sierra Nevada down to the valley floor east of the city, with two forks that drain Mount Whitney's western slope and the southernmost glaciated terrain in the range. Above town it is one of the most heavily run whitewater rivers in California; below town, in heavy-snow years, it can fill its bed across the western farmland. The river ends at Buena Vista Lake on the valley floor, a wetland that almost vanished to irrigation diversion before partial restoration in recent decades.