In
country music, the
Bakersfield sound was a genre invented in the mid- to late
1950s in
Bakersfield, California. Bakersfield country was a reaction against the slick, string-laden
Nashville sound, which was popular at the time. Artists like
Wynn Stewart[?] used electric instrumentation and added a
backbeat, as well as other stylistic elements borrowed from
rock and roll. In the early
1960s,
Merle Haggard and
Buck Owens[?], among others, brought the Bakersfield sound to mainstream audiences, and it soon became the most popular kind of country music.