Chris Morris and Hillbilly Deluxe

Hillbilly Deluxe is the Los Angeles country music night associated with Chris Morris, a music journalist and critic who has spent decades covering country and Americana with the depth of attention the music deserves.

The night is part of the Los Angeles country music underground that has been building for years — a community of musicians, writers, and listeners who take seriously the claim that the Bakersfield sound and the country-rock tradition that grew out of it make Los Angeles a legitimate home for this music, not an ironic one.

What Hillbilly Deluxe does

The best music nights do a specific thing: they create a context in which the music you care about sounds right, and they find the audience that the music requires. The audience for Hillbilly Deluxe is the Los Angeles Americana community — which is real, which is substantial, and which has been underserved by the mainstream music press that tends to locate Americana primarily in Nashville and New York.

Morris brings the critical rigor of a serious journalist to the programming. The nights aren't curated by instinct alone but by someone who knows the history deeply and makes choices that reflect that knowledge.

The Los Angeles country lineage

The Los Angeles claim on country music is historical, not aspirational. The Bakersfield sound was produced in the California Central Valley and recorded in Los Angeles. Merle Haggard's early recordings were made in Bakersfield and Los Angeles. Buck Owens built his career from a California base.

The country-rock synthesis of the late 1960s and early 1970s — the Byrds, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Emmylou Harris's early work, the Eagles — happened primarily in Los Angeles. The musicians who made these records were living and working in Los Angeles and drawing on country music as one of several sources.

Hillbilly Deluxe is a present-tense version of this history. The night positions itself within a lineage rather than as a novelty.

The current scene

In early 2009, the Los Angeles country and Americana underground was at an interesting point. The Fleet Foxes breakthrough the previous year had expanded the audience for folk and folk-adjacent music. The scene was drawing younger listeners who hadn't come up through traditional country.

Hillbilly Deluxe and similar nights were the infrastructure for that audience. The people who went to these nights became the community that the music needed.

More Field Notes.