BOBBY BARE TOLD SHEL SILVERSTEIN HE COULD NOT FIND ANYONE WILLING TO WRITE THE CONCEPT ALBUM HE WANTED. TWO DAYS LATER, SHEL CALLED BACK: “I’VE GOT YOU AN ALBUM.”
By early 1973, Bobby Bare had already lived through more than a decade of country music’s strange turns.
He had hits, near-misses, label changes, and enough experience to know that a recording career could not be carried forever by simply cutting another batch of unrelated songs. Bare wanted something different. He had heard Joe South’s Introspect and become fascinated with the idea of a country album that felt like one complete world.
Not just singles.
Not just filler around the hits.
An album with its own characters, mood, and shape.
He asked songwriter friends to help him build it.
Nobody really wanted the job.
Bare Wanted A Whole World, Not Just A Stack Of Songs
That was the difficulty.
Nashville was built to feed artists songs, but what Bare wanted required a different kind of writing. He was not simply asking for one strong single. He wanted an entire record that could hold together — something funny, strange, human, and complete enough to feel like it had been imagined from the ground up.
That was a lot to ask.
Most writers were busy chasing cuts, not constructing an album-length universe for another artist.
Then Bare ran into Shel Silverstein at a Country Radio Seminar party on a Saturday night.
Silverstein was not an ordinary Nashville writer. He had already built a world of his own through poems, cartoons, children’s books, and songs that could sound playful one minute and quietly brutal the next. He understood odd characters. He understood jokes with shadows behind them. He understood how simple language could carry something much stranger underneath.
Bare told him the problem.
Shel listened.
On Monday, The Phone Rang
Two days later, Bare’s phone rang.
It was Silverstein.
He told Bare he had an album’s worth of material ready.
That is the kind of detail that sounds almost impossible until you remember who Shel Silverstein was. Some writers needed months to assemble a project. Shel could hear the shape of a world quickly and fill it with gamblers, children, liars, ghosts, lovers, monsters, jokes, and moral trouble before anyone else had found the doorway.
The songs became Bobby Bare Sings Lullabys, Legends and Lies.
The title fit the material perfectly.
It did not promise one kind of country record.
It promised a strange collection of bedtime stories, barroom myths, tall tales, and human wreckage.
That was exactly what Bare had been looking for.
Bare Kept The Record Loose
Bare produced the album himself.
That mattered because a project like this could have been ruined by too much polish. Silverstein’s songs needed space to breathe. They needed to sound as if somebody might be telling them across a table, in a room where people laughed too loudly, listened too closely, and waited to see where the story would turn.
Bare kept the performances loose.
The record surrounded Silverstein’s strange characters, dark jokes, children’s-story simplicity, and sudden emotional turns with an almost living-room feel. Audience reactions helped make parts of the album sound less like a conventional studio product and more like a gathering.
That looseness gave the record its life.
It let the songs feel told, not presented.
And Bare was the right singer for that job.
He did not treat the material like novelty. He let the humor stay dry, the sadness stay plain, and the weirdness stay weird.
The Gamble Became A Hit
The idea could easily have failed.
A country concept album built almost entirely around Shel Silverstein songs was not the safest bet in 1973. It did not fit neatly into the usual Nashville album formula, and some of the songs were stranger than radio normally preferred.
But the gamble worked.
“Daddy What If,” sung with Bare’s five-year-old son Bobby Jr., reached No. 2 on the country chart. The record turned a child’s questions into something tender, playful, and disarming, giving the album its softest and most accessible doorway.
Then “Marie Laveau” went to No. 1.
It became the only chart-topping single of Bobby Bare’s career.
The album itself reached the country Top 10 and became one of his biggest records.
Bare had gone looking for a more complete kind of album.
He found one that gave him both artistic freedom and commercial success.
The Weekend Started A Decades-Long Partnership
The deeper result was not only the hit album.
It was the partnership.
Bare eventually recorded well over a hundred Silverstein songs, returning to him again and again whenever he wanted material that sounded different from ordinary Nashville product. Silverstein gave him stories that could be funny, rude, tender, bizarre, heartbreaking, or all of those things in the same track.
Bare understood how to sing them without sanding down the edges.
That became the strength of their connection.
Silverstein could write outside the lines.
Bare could make those lines feel country.
Together, they built a catalog that did not sound like anyone else’s — songs full of strange people, crooked humor, children’s voices, hard luck, and endings that did not always land where listeners expected.
What That Monday Phone Call Really Leaves Behind
The deepest part of this story is not only that Shel Silverstein wrote Bobby Bare an album in a weekend.
It is that Bare recognized he needed a writer who could think bigger than a single.
A restless artist.
A concept he could not get others to understand.
A Saturday night party.
A complaint to Shel Silverstein.
Then a Monday phone call, Lullabys, Legends and Lies, “Daddy What If,” “Marie Laveau,” and a creative partnership that kept feeding Bare’s career for decades.
Bobby Bare went searching for one record that felt like a whole world.
Shel Silverstein gave him that world almost overnight.
And once Bare stepped inside it, he found more than an album.
He found the writer he would keep calling whenever Nashville’s ordinary songs were not strange enough, funny enough, dark enough, or alive enough for what he wanted to say.
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