WEEDPATCH, Calif. (KGET) – There’s not much left of the microscopic farm town of Weedpatch. Not much left except places like Collins Auction, where country music performers would come and stand on flatbed trucks and perform for the Okies.
Now the widely ignored landmark on Buena Vista Road is a tow yard, and the story of this disappearing hamlet is all but lost to the ravages of time.
Fact is, though, Weedpatch has played an indirect but meaningful role in the formation of Bakersfield’s cultural identity. In the political, religious, linguistic, musical and even culinary character of the southern San Joaquin Valley. Thanks to its association with the Sunset Labor Camp of the 1930s and ’40s, the setting of “The Grapes of Wrath” — Weedpatch commands a certain historical gravitas. More than one famous country music star has taken an emotional tour of the weathered musical mecca, which is set to become a state park.
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In the late-1940s and throughout the 1950s, the people of Weedpatch, relocated, entertainment-starved Okies, many of them residents of the nearby labor camp, gathered Sunday afternoons outside Collins Auction, a consignment store specializing in used furniture and appliances, to hear live music. This is where Billy Mize and Bill Woods, among others, played some of their first public shows, making Weedpatch one of the earliest incubators of the Bakersfield Sound. Collins Auction still stands; the tow yard folks have a photo of the building from about 1972, when it was then a half-boarded-up used furniture store that has since been substantially reconstructed…