BILLY MIZE AND THE BAKERSFIELD SOUND
Total Run Time: 100:00
Director: William J. Saunders
Country of Origin: USA
Ratings: None
Synopsis: A uniquely talented collective of musicians emerged, quite unsuspectingly, from Bakersfield, California in the 1950s and 60s. They birthed a genre that lyrically and sonically indexed their particular life experience, challenged the established tastes of the Nashville scene, and permanently altered the landscape of Country music. They called it the Bakersfield Sound.
Artists like Merle Haggard and Buck Owens rode the movement to national fame, but Billy Mize, a singer-songwriter and original founder of the Sound who gave Buck and Merle their starts, found touring to be incompatible with the only thing he loved more than music: his family.
But the deaths of two children, divorce, and hard living tore that family apart, and when a stroke took Billy’s voice, he hit rock bottom. After relearning how to talk in an intensive brain rehabilitation, Billy’s birthday approaches, for which the city of Bakersfield has thrown a huge concert event, and at which Billy is determined to take back the mic and end his 20 years of silence.
