If you have any appreciation at all for country music, you owe it to yourself to do whatever you can to get to Nashville to check out the Country Music Hall Of Fame's extraordinary new exhibit. Fortunately, you have a pretty spacious window in which to do so. The exhibit, which just opened and runs through December 2013, does a fantastic job of documenting the fabled "Bakersfield Sound," generally characterized by the sharp and piercing sounds of Fender Telecaster guitars, accompanied by fiddles, steel guitars and a honky-tonk ethos that was becoming less prominent in Nashville at the time.
The Hall is literally jam-packed with an amazing collection of guitars, fiddles, amps, stage costumes, photos, hand-written lyrics and miscellaneous ephemera documenting the country sounds emanating from not only Bakersfield, but Los Angeles and the West Coast in general.
After the jump, a few semi-blurry snapshots....
Above: The boots of Don Rich, lead guitar player for Buck Owens' Buckaroos.
Above: Buck Owens' mongrammed pipe stand and a few of his personal pipes.
Above: Merle Travis' Bigsby guitar.
Above: one of Merle Travis' shirts. Photo courtesy of Dave Chamberlain.
Above: a jacket on loan from Red Simpson, promoting his 1971 single Hello, I'm A Truck.
Above: Check it out....a Farfisa organ on a Buck Owens record!
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