The Greatest Oldies Music

Country

A successful guest appearance on Hee Haw had television producers ready to sign young Bobby Jr. to a long-term deal. In a Nashville production office, amid cheap coffee and chilly air-conditioning, they leaned over the contract and pressed their case. It was the 1970s, and the boy’s easy charm looked like a profitable continuation of the family act audiences knew from Singin’ in the Kitchen. Most people in the business would have seen an opportunity too good to refuse. Behind dark sunglasses, Bobby Bare listened without revealing much. He knew how quickly the demands placed on child performers could consume the innocence that first drew audiences to them. His own childhood had ended early. After losing his mother at five, he had been passed among distant relatives and spent his youth working on farms and in factories. He understood what it meant to miss out on being a child, and he wouldn’t let television ratings become the reason his son did too. Bare stood and told the producers there would be no contract. The room fell silent, far removed from the applause the family had heard while performing together that summer. His refusal effectively brought that run to an end. He accepted the loss of a possible fortune so his son could have an ordinary life beyond the cameras. Walking out to the parking lot, he was satisfied with being a father instead of a manager. He left the promise of packaged fame behind, choosing a quieter dignity his son would only fully understand decades later.

BOBBY BARE GAVE HIS CHILDREN ONE SUMMER IN SHOW BUSINESS

The microphone was low enough for a five-year-old.

Bobby Bare stood nearby while his son worked through “Daddy What If,” Shel Silverstein’s chain of questions about a world in which familiar things suddenly stopped behaving as they should. Bobby Jr. did not sing like a trained child entertainer. He sounded like a boy talking to his father.

That was the record’s center. The famous voice supplied reassurance; the smaller voice made reassurance necessary.

When the song became a hit, Nashville saw a new act it could sell. Bare saw something with a shorter life.

The Age of Five

Bobby Bare understood five-year-old uncertainty from the other side.

His mother died in 1941, when he was five. His father, unable to care for all three children, separated the household. Bobby’s younger sister was adopted by a family down the road. His older sister moved among grandparents and relatives. Bobby himself was passed between homes.

The disruption did not provide a tidy origin story. It established that family arrangements could change without asking a child whether he was ready.

Bare later worked on a farm and in factories. He built a crude guitar from a coffee can, a stick and strands of screen wire, then imagined a different life long before he possessed an instrument capable of producing it.

By the time his own children arrived, he had crossed nearly every distance country music could offer: factory work to radio, unsuccessful records to “Detroit City,” rented rooms to a stable Nashville household.

The son beside him at the microphone had not been required to make that journey.

A Song Built Like a Conversation

Bare had become one of Nashville’s most alert song finders. He recognized material from writers who did not fit neatly into the industry and gave their work room to retain its strangeness.

Shel Silverstein fit naturally into that world. His songs could move from tenderness to mischief without warning, and Bare resisted the urge to make them respectable.

Their 1973 double album, Lullabys, Legends and Lies, gathered ghost stories, tall tales, children’s questions and adult trouble. Bare produced the project himself at a time when Nashville singers were rarely given that authority.

“Daddy What If” needed neither an orchestra nor a theatrical child vocalist. Bobby Jr.’s presence turned it from a clever composition into a family exchange accidentally captured on tape.

The single climbed to No. 2. Bare’s only chart-topping  country record, “Marie Laveau,” came from the same Silverstein collection. His creative freedom and family life had entered the same successful album.

Everybody in the Kitchen

The next project widened the doorway.

Singin’ in the Kitchen brought Jeannie Bare and the children—Cari, Shannon and Bobby Jr.—into an album made largely from Silverstein material. The arrangements preserved conversation, jokes and the loose timing of people who knew one another better than they knew the studio.

Jeannie was not merely a star’s wife coaxed toward a microphone. She had sung professionally and possessed a strong country voice of her own. The album gave her several featured moments while allowing the children to remain children rather than miniature adult performers.

Its informality was carefully protected. Interviews and bits of family talk appeared between songs. The cover placed the Bares around a kitchen table, locating the project in the room where most families already made noise together.

They took the record on the road for a summer. Bobby Jr. remembered wanting to be onstage because that was where his father stood. For a child, imitation could look exactly like vocation.Bare did not assume they were the same thing.

 

 

The Offer From Hee Haw

The children appeared on Hee Haw, contributing the witch’s scream used in “Marie Laveau.” The program wanted to hire Bobby Jr.Bare declined.

A continuing television job could have made his son independently famous. It might also have changed the structure of the household: schedules, rehearsals, adult praise, ratings and income would begin gathering around a seven-year-old.

Bare later explained that he wanted the children to remain children. Bobby Jr. recalled his parents’ concern that early entertainment success could leave a person receiving unnatural attention and feeling finished before adolescence was over.

After the family tour, the act stopped. There was no long campaign to produce another hit duet, no sequence of matching outfits and no attempt to turn the Bare surname into a permanent television property.

The hit remained available. The child did not.

A House Full of Songwriters

Keeping Bobby Jr. out of professional child stardom did not mean keeping him away from  music.

The Bare household attracted writers. Silverstein became close enough to function as an unruly extended-family member. Other songwriters passed through as friends, collaborators and guests. Later, when Bare hosted Bobby Bare and Friends, the conversations revolved around the person who had made the song as much as the performer who could sell it.

Bobby Jr. absorbed that hierarchy. He later said that in his family there was no occupation held higher than songwriting.

What his parents withheld was not music but the machinery that could make a child confuse applause with identity. He heard songs argued over, rewritten and passed from hand to hand. He also went back to school when the family’s brief touring experiment ended.

As an adult, he chose rock clubs, loud guitars and original material that did not resemble a careful continuation of his father’s career. The distance confirmed that the choice belonged to him.

The Record Made in Return

In 2005, the direction of work reversed.

Bobby Bare had been largely absent from recording for years when his son produced The Moon Was Blue. The younger Bare did not try to manufacture an updated version of “Detroit City.” He placed his father inside a spacious, late-night collection of songs suited to an older voice.

The child once guided through a duet was now listening from the control room, making decisions about arrangements, performances and what should be left untouched.

Their relationship had survived the dangerous usefulness of “Daddy What If.” The early hit had not consumed the son’s childhood or obliged him to reenact it in middle age.

They could work together because they had also been allowed to live separately.

What Bobby Bare’s Family Record Really Leaves Behind

Singin’ in the Kitchen never became the foundation of a dynasty act. Its value lies partly in that refusal.

It preserved Jeannie’s voice, the children at particular ages and a household relaxed enough to sound untidy. Then Bobby Bare closed the professional door before the record business could decide that the children owed it a sequel.

Bobby Jr. still became a  musician. His father did not prevent the choice; he postponed the industry’s power to make it for him.

Years later, father and son could meet in a studio without recreating the small boy and protective father from 1973. One sat behind the microphone. The other listened from the control room.

This time, nobody needed to lower the microphone.

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