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Bobby Bare Jr. was five when his father placed him beside a studio microphone and let him ask a string of impossible childhood questions. Shel Silverstein had written “Daddy What If” as a conversation between a boy and his father. Bare did not polish the child out of the recording. His son’s small voice, uncertain timing and complete trust were the reason the song worked. Released on Lullabys, Legends and Lies, it reached No. 2 on the country chart in 1973. Television producers noticed. The Bare family followed with Singin’ in the Kitchen, an informal album featuring Bobby’s wife, Jeannie, and their children Cari, Shannon and Bobby Jr. For one summer, the family traveled and performed together. There was an obvious commercial future available. Bare ended it. When Hee Haw wanted to hire Bobby Jr. after the children appeared on the show, his father said no. He had enjoyed making the records with them, but he did not want his son living inside the attention given to a successful child performer. Bobby Jr. later remembered that his parents removed the children from entertainment because they did not want them becoming washed-up performers before reaching their teens. The decision carries additional weight beside Bare’s own childhood. His mother died when he was five—the same age his son was when they recorded “Daddy What If.” His father could not support three children alone, and the family was divided among relatives and neighbors. By fifteen, Bobby was working on farms and in factories. Fame had finally given him the money to keep a family together. He would not allow fame to reorganize that family around itself. Bobby Jr. eventually became a musician, but he returned as an adult and chose a harder, noisier path far outside his father’s shadow. In 2005, he produced The Moon Was Blue for the elder Bare. By then, the little boy had acquired his own voice. His father had helped preserve the years in which he was allowed to find it.

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.”

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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