Buck Owens Crystal Palace — Bakersfield, California

Buck Owens built the Crystal Palace restaurant and music venue at 2800 Buck Owens Boulevard in Bakersfield, California, as a monument to the Bakersfield Sound — the raw, twangy, electric guitar-driven country music that Owens, Merle Haggard, and the Buckaroos had developed in deliberate opposition to Nashville's polished countrypolitan style. The Crystal Palace contains a museum of Owens's career and memorabilia, a restaurant, and a performance space where he played regularly until his death in 2006. The building, with its Buck Owens-branded exterior, is Bakersfield's most significant music landmark.

Owens had moved to Bakersfield from Texas in the 1950s, part of the Dust Bowl migration wave that brought thousands of working-class Southerners and Oklahomans to the San Joaquin Valley. The community they formed — transient agricultural workers who had built a new life in California without losing their Southern musical roots — became the audience for the Bakersfield Sound. Owens and Haggard's recordings of the early 1960s were harder and more electric than anything Nashville was producing, and their influence on country rock and alternative country has been profound. The Beatles covered 'Act Naturally.'

The Crystal Palace is on Buck Owens Boulevard in north Bakersfield — a street named in his honour. It still operates as a restaurant and entertainment venue and contains the most comprehensive collection of Buck Owens memorabilia in existence. Bakersfield is in the southern San Joaquin Valley, three hours north of Los Angeles on Highway 99.