By Kathleen Hokit, Published on May 15, 2026 | Feature Photo Credit: Kern Media LLC
In Bakersfield, some sounds find you before you’re old enough to look for them. That’s certainly the case for The Soda Crackers’ very own, Zane Adamo.
He was six years old when he first picked up a fiddle in Bakersfield.
“Most people think it’s a different instrument,” he says. “It’s not. It’s the same thing, just a different way to say it. Even my classical violin teacher would call herself a fiddle player. It’s a style thing.”
Adamo, a Bakersfield kid who headed to film school in Monterey, California, spent five years carving out a path in Los Angeles, and ultimately found his way back home. Now, he’s on stage 75 to 85 days a year, balancing a filmmaker’s perspective with a musician’s grit. He leans into tradition without being confined by it, writing new songs that carry the sound forward. A reminder that the Bakersfield Sound isn’t just history.
The Soda Crackers‘ love for Bakersfield’s history is the reason they exist.
The Soda Crackers at the Kern County Fairgrounds, Credit: Kern Media LLC
Western Wednesdays
Adamo followed the industry south to Los Angeles after finishing film school in Monterey, a Central Coast town shaped by its working waterfront and immortalized in the pages of John Steinbeck.
The work he found down south ran the full spectrum of what it means to freelance in a city that never stops producing content.
“When I was down in L.A., I’d be on set at a studio for yoga one day, then the next day it would be press-on nails, then after that a bike race.”
That kind of unpredictable, shape-shifting hustle is its own education. You learn to read a room, find the story in anything, show up ready for whatever the day hands you. It also leaves you hungry for something with roots. The Soda Crackers were that something, though nobody knew it yet.
“It was basically a group of friends that met at our buddy Josh’s house by Dodger Stadium, in a neighborhood called Frogtown. We would play at Josh’s house for about four hours every Wednesday night and call it Western Wednesdays.”
Music was always part of his life, something he’d carried since childhood, but it wasn’t the plan.
“The band was supposed to be just a fun little side project… an outlet for music because I’ve always played music since I was a kid.”
But something happened in that house. The sessions got tighter. The music got better. The Wednesday nights started turning into something people looked forward to. Before long, The Soda Crackers had their first show—booked at Taft’s Oildorado in 2021—and the side project was starting to look a lot more like a calling.
Then life redirected him back to home.
“I started dating my middle school sweetheart and moved back to Bakersfield.”
Zane Adamo with his middle school sweetheart, Haley with Symone of Bakersfield Country Dance Co teaching at Fairfax Grange 570
Photo credit: Kern Media LLC
Adamo came home. And the band came with him.
According to Adamo, it was much easier to get started in Kern County because of the area’s deep-rooted country music scene.
It was nearly impossible to get anything on the books in L.A. when they first started.
Back in Kern County, the filmmaking found its footing too through portrait work for the county superintendent of schools, projects in the ad industry, and more.
Bakersfield Sound
Ask Adamo about the Bakersfield Sound and he gives you a feeling.
“The Bakersfield Sound is an era—a moment in time,” he says. “There was a three-decade window where it was really at its height, and it was a group of musicians that all worked centered around Bakersfield.”
That window, roughly the late 1940s through the 1960s, was when this city was a genuine destination. Not a stop on the way somewhere else. A place artists came to.
“Bakersfield had close to a dozen honky-tonks and dance halls, and pretty much anybody who came out to the West Coast came through. Some of the biggest stars in country music would come through Bakersfield.”
The story starts with the Dust Bowl. Families from Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas came west by the thousands, drawn to the San Joaquin Valley’s cotton farms and oil fields. They brought their music with them.
By the postwar years, Bakersfield was home to a cluster of honky-tonks, one of those being the Blackboard Café, which became the payday escape for workers who wanted to drink, dance, and hear something real. Blackboard Café closed its doors around 1980, but a preserved section of its original bar still survives in a Bakersfield home as a relic of the legendary Bakersfield Sound era.
Ragtime, traditional fiddle, New Orleans jazz, blues, big band swing—Bob Wills had already fused all of it into something wildly danceable before he ever set foot in California; and by the mid-1940s he was making Bakersfield a regular stop.
When that sound collided with the honky-tonks and artists craving something different, an entirely new sound was born.
Fairfax Grange dance hall, 2026, Bakersfield California. Credit: Kern Media LLC
According to the Country Music Hall of Fame, both Buck Owens and Merle Haggard were children of Dust Bowl refugees.
Owens arrived in Bakersfield in 1951. Haggard’s family had been driven west from Oklahoma years earlier and he was born in the area in 1937, growing up in a converted railroad boxcar, currently housed at Kern County Museum, just north of the city’s best honky-tonks.
As documented in Ken Burns’ Country Music on PBS, the music they built, together and separately, carried the weight of all of that.
“If you listen to Merle Haggard versus Buck Owens, they’re very different sounds, very different writing processes, different in so many ways—but they are still the Bakersfield Sound,” Adamo says.
That breadth is exactly what makes it worth preserving. And it’s exactly what The Soda Crackers are built to carry.
Five Originals, Five Covers, One Debut
This past December, The Soda Crackers released their debut album. Ten songs—five originals written by current or former band members, five covers drawn from the era that shaped them.
“I think the spirit of the band will always have to be based in playing covers from the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s,” Adamo says. “But we are also starting to write our own music.”
Credit: Kern Media, LLC
That balance is intentional. The covers are a statement of allegiance—proof that the band knows where they come from and takes it seriously. The originals are proof that they’re carrying the Kern legacy forward.
Only Adamo and the bass player remain from the original lineup of The Soda Crackers. Lead guitar, steel, and drums have all evolved as the band has grown. What hasn’t changed is the foundation: fiddle, rhythm, and a commitment to music that moves people. Literally.
The Dance Floor Is the Point
For Adamo, music and movement have never been separate things.
“Dancing is what makes going to country music shows the most fun,” he says, “because it’s that connection with your partner—and the band who’s playing the music for you.”
Every decision The Soda Crackers make runs through that lens.
“We center all of our shows around dancing. All the songs we write, all the songs we learn, the covers—they’re all great songs to dance to.”
At many of their shows, The Soda Crackers bring in a dance instructor. Not because the music needs explaining, but because the form does.
Zane Adamo dancing at Bakersfield, California’s Fairfax Grange 570 historic dance hall, Credit: Kern Media LLC
“For a lot of people, when they think country music, they think line dancing. But before line dancing, it was all partner dancing; waltzing, two-step, swing dance.”
Playing in Texas and Oklahoma sharpened Adamo’s understanding of what Kern County needs help in preserving.
“So many people know how to dance. And I think the biggest thing is they still have places for dancing to happen. Out here—specifically Bakersfield and the West Coast—there aren’t too many places where you can dance with a real defined dance floor.”
His explanation for how to fix that is simple.
“If nobody knows how to swim, there aren’t any swimming pools. You gotta have dance floors where people can learn how to dance.”
A Night at Fairfax Grange
All of this—the philosophy, the music, the belief that dance floors change communities—came into focus on a recent April night at Fairfax Grange 570, a space where Adamo has volunteered for two years and currently serves as vice president.
Fairfax Grange, tucked off East Brundage and Fairfax situated in East Bakersfield, has a floor that carries decades of history. The walls hold something you can’t name. Walk in and the room settles around you like it’s been waiting.
The Soda Crackers perform on stage at Fairfax Grange 570, Credit: Felix Adamo
The Soda Crackers opened. The floor filled. Couples found each other. And the boots effortlessly slid around the floor.
After The Soda Crackers opened and the dance floor came alive, Dale Watson took the stage. The legendary traditional country artist has shared bills with icons like Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson, spending decades carrying forward the spirit of classic American honky-tonk music.
For Adamo, the moment carried weight that went beyond a great show.
“Getting to put on a show with Dale Watson was so much fun for us. We’ve been putting together shows out at the Grange for the last few years, and to have such a legendary name in traditional country music make a stop at our local dance hall was amazing,” he says. “I hope this show we put on with Dale helps spark more national touring artists, the folks who really understand and appreciate our town’s heritage, to make a stop in town. It really helps having a venue like the Grange here in Bakersfield to make that a reality.”
What This Town Could Be
When reflecting on Kern County’s musical heritage, Adamo says:
“This town has never fully embraced its musical heritage. If you go to Austin, Memphis, Nashville, Tulsa—all these cities are known for their music, and they really lean into it.”
Bakersfield, for all its legacy, has let some of the physical landmarks of that legacy disappear.
“We’ve lost pretty much every single place where music has happened here. Where Buck Owens got his start—those places are gone. The Crystal Palace shut down. And that’s such a shame,” he says. “[But] I’m optimistic. I think city leaders are ready for it. It just takes time.”
That optimism shines in every show The Soda Crackers play, every dance lesson they offer, every time they fill the Grange with people who’ve loved this music their whole lives—and people who didn’t know they were hungry for it until the music started.
“It Takes People Like You”
There’s a line from a famous Buck Owens live album recorded at Carnegie Hall that Adamo carries with him.
“It takes people like you to make people like me,” he quotes. “It takes a community like Kern County, a city like Bakersfield, to make bands like us. We’re very fortunate to have a lot of amazing people here in the community that help us out and have supported us from the early days as well.”
Ben Mathiews of The Soda Crackers
And when The Soda Crackers leave—when they travel to Texas, Oklahoma, wherever the road takes them—they take that with them.
Benjamin McCarthy of The Soda Crackers, Credit: Kern Media LLC
“When we travel outside of our community and tell people we’re from Bakersfield, we take it as a responsibility to represent our town and the heritage of our music well.”
James Miller of The Soda Crackers, Credit: Kern Media LLC
The sound never left. The Soda Crackers are carrying it forward, but Adamo makes it clear they’re not alone in their efforts:
“We have our buddy, Kyle Appleton. I call him the Bill Woods of our generation. Bill Woods was kind of like the intersection of the community, he met people, he got people connected with the right people. He got people recording down at Capitol Records. And so Kyle Appleton here in town plays with just about every band you can think of. He records everybody, he fixes my guitars. He has subbed for us a few times. He’s an amazing person in our community, fighting for that same change. Devon Brinsfield, a recording artist in town, is a friend of ours too. Then there’s Los Hermanos Mendoza. They’re very young and doing amazing stuff. And there’s so many other people here in town. Vince Galindo also has played country music here for decades and fighting the good fight.”
Chuy Holguin of The Soda Crackers, Credit: Kern Media LLC
*The Soda Crackers’ debut album is available on all streaming platforms. If you want to support local, which you should, you can find physical copies at Going Underground Records on 19th Street and The Emporium Western Store. Visit The Soda Crackers’ social media or visit their website for upcoming shows.*
Zane Adamo of The Soda Crackers, Credit: Kern Media LLC
Kern Magazine’s Signature Questions
What do you love about your Kern County community?
“What I like most about my hometown, Bakersfield, is that you can really make a positive change and change your community. I’ve lived in big cities like L.A. where you can feel very alone even though you’re around millions of people. And I’ve lived in smaller towns like Monterey that feel very slow. What I love most about Kern County is how much it’s changed for the better and how it’s starting to become a city where people can come here and do something that they set their mind to, and change things.”
When you eat local, where do you like to go?
“Whenever anybody comes into town, I always send them to Mexicali. My parents had their first date there. I think the ambiance at Mexicali is the best. If I don’t know where to go, that’s usually the first place I think about going.”
When you just need to get out of town, where’s your spot?
“In Kern County, I love going up to Kernville. And the foothill areas—they’re gorgeous. Outside of Kern County, I always want to go back to Austin, Texas. There’s so much great music that’s happening there and so many amazing spots.”
The Soda Crackers, Credit: Felix Adamo
