Bobby Bare

Robert Joseph Bare Sr. (born April 7, 1935) is an American country music singer and songwriter, best known for the songs "Marie Laveau", "Detroit City", and "500 Miles Away from Home". He is the father of Bobby Bare Jr., also a musician.

Bare was born in Ironton, Ohio, on April 7, 1935. In the 1950s, he repeatedly tried and failed to sell his songs. He finally got a record deal, with Capitol Records, and recorded a few unsuccessful rock and roll singles. Just before he was drafted into the United States Army, he wrote a song called "The All American Boy" and did a demonstration tape (demo) for his friend, Bill Parsons, to learn how to record. Instead of using Parsons' later version, the record company, Fraternity Records, decided to go with Bare's original demo. The record reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100, but Fraternity erroneously credited Bill Parsons on the label. The same track, with the same billing error, peaked at number 22 in the UK Singles Chart in April 1959. In 1965, an album of older recorded material, Tender Years (JM-6026), was released on the Hilltop label. That same year, the material was repackaged by Sears and released under the title Bobby in Song (SPS-115).

Bare's big break in country music came when Chet Atkins signed him to RCA Victor. His debut single for the label was 1962's "Shame on Me". Follow-up "Detroit City" reached number six on the Country and number 16 on the Hot 100 charts, and in 1964 earned him a Grammy Award for Best Country & Western Recording. Then, a surge of hits followed, including "500 Miles Away from Home" (based on a traditional folk ballad written by Hedy West as "500 Miles") and Ian Tyson's "Four Strong Winds". In 1965, he received two further Grammy nominations for Best Country & Western Vocal Performance and Best Country & Western single for the latter song. In 1966, he received a yet another Grammy Nomination for Best Country & Western Male Vocal Performance for his song "Talk Me Some Sense". He also recorded two duet albums with Skeeter Davis and recorded six tracks as a trio with Norma Jean and Liz Anderson, which produced a major hit with "The Game of Triangles", a wife-husband-other woman drama that hit number five on the Billboard chart and earned the trio a Grammy nomination. In 1968, he recorded an album with a group from England called The Hillsiders. In 1969, he had a top-five hit with Tom T. Hall's "(Margie's At) The Lincoln Park Inn".

Bare moved to Mercury Records in 1970 and immediately scored a top-three hit with "How I Got to Memphis", and also had two top-10 hits with early Kris Kristofferson compositions, "Come Sundown" and "Please Don't Tell Me How the Story Ends" (both 1971). He also scored a number-12 hit in 1972 with a version of Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show's pop hit "Sylvia's Mother", written by Shel Silverstein.

Bare returned to RCA in 1973, after two years at Mercury. and scored once more with Billy Joe Shaver's "Ride Me Down Easy", which nearly made the top 10. He started to release novelty songs recorded live with selected audiences. One such song, "Marie Laveau", topped the country chart in 1974; the song was Bare's only number-one hit. It was co-written by his friends Silverstein and Baxter Taylor, who received a BMI Award for the song in 1975. In 1977, Bare released an entire album of songs by songwriter Bob McDill called Me and McDill, which contained the popular hit "Look Who I'm Cheatin' on Tonight".

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.