Two Bakersfield Bars
by Bryce Martin

Tex’s Barrel House: On my last evening visits during the early 1980s, the unremarkable and poorly-lit pod of indifference held mostly elderly and low-income patrons content with shuffling along in a flat-footed version of the Cotton-Eyed Joe. And the usual bar drunks you find anywhere.

Tex's Barrel house: It's a perfect name for a Bakersfield honky-tonk, Bakersfield being an oil and farming town. Barrel house: a building on the refinery grounds where barrels are filled with various grades of oils for shipment

How about having a “straw in the cider barrel?” That is to have an interest in a well in a producing field; reservoir.

Country people can relate to apple cider, hard or soft. They can grow the trees that produce the apples and ferment the juice that makes the drink, all homegrown.

So, roll out the barrel and have a barrel of fun, as the song says. It'll be even more fun when the barrel, or keg, is filled with beer and you're holding your honey tight on the dance floor with a fiddle playing a slow waltz from a quartet of backing musicians on an elevated stage.

The Blackboard is another beer joint. Windowless and like a cavern, its ambiance inspired the country classic (classic title, anyway) "Dim Lights, Thick Smoke and Loud, Loud Music." The Blackboard got its name from the oil business. “Oilfield people came in, of course,” said part owner Joe Limi, years ago. “They got to writing on the walls.”

Just the word "blackboard" is part of country music's history. Who can forget Hank Thompson's sad reading from "Blackboard of my Heart" from the 1950s?

My tears have washed I Love You
From the blackboard of my heart

Limi found out that the oil workers were just leaving information about new wells starting up, the locations and the companies, and other details to help others of their sort looking for jobs.

Some info was plain enough and some was for the oil savvy only. Wells and prospective drill sites nearby were promoted and some remote ones “out where the wildcats prowl and the hoot owls mate with the chickens.”

“We put up a big blackboard for them to write on after that,” Limi said.

Limi said he didn’t understand most of the writing, but figured someone did.

Call it “creekology,” if you will, a term for early, unscientific geology. Or, in Bakersfield, maybe that's “oilology.”


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