CR014 - Ralph Mooney: The Sound of Country Music

Cocaine & Rhinestones: The History of Country Music

Tyler Mahan Coe

History

4.8 • 8.2K Ratings

🗓️ 23 January 2018

⏱️ 88 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The legendary pedal steel guitarist, Ralph Mooney, deserves the reputation he earned on his instrument. However, he deserves a lot more than that. This episode of the podcast backtracks to Bakersfield for a deeper examination of its "sound," a closer look at some people responsible for it and the story of a man whose story isn't told nearly often enough. It would be unacceptable to end the first season of a podcast on the history of country music without dedicating an episode to Ralph Mooney. After today, you'll know why that is. This episode is recommended for fans of: honky tonk music, the Bakersfield Sound, steel guitar, Wynn Stewart, Waylon Jennings, Ray Price, The Maddox Brothers and Rose, Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Marty Robbins, Skeets McDonald and road stories.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Let's back up a bit.
0:02.6	In the 10th episode of Cocaine and Rhyne Stones, you heard some of this song because Bucco
0:07.6	and played lead guitar on it.
0:09.2	I've seen it called the first song with the Bakersfield sound on it.
0:28.8	What is the Bakersfield sound?
0:31.0	Where did it come from?
0:33.7	One guy playing on this song is named Bill Woods.
0:36.9	He's known as the father of the Bakersfield sound.
0:40.3	But that's less because of his great piano playing and more because of the patriarchal
0:44.8	role he served in Bakersfield's music community.
0:48.5	In Bakersfield's heyday, he led the most popular house band in town, the orange blossom
0:53.2	playboys.
0:54.6	The musicians he hired were simply the best.
0:57.7	Everyone knew it and many of the players who did come to define the Bakersfield sound
1:01.9	came through that band.
1:04.2	One of them was Buccoans.
1:07.0	We could argue all day long about what the Bakersfield sound even is.
1:11.4	So I would be a jackass to stand here and tell you any one person invented it.
1:16.6	When I talk about the Bakersfield sound, I'm talking about a style of music performance
1:21.5	and a style of music production that Bakersfield made famous and where it went from there.
1:27.1	Twangy Telecaster guitar parts with a high end tone that could slice right through an
1:32.1	AM radio signal, a whirlwind of whining petal steel guitars and crying fiddles coming
	...

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