Bobby Bare singer

Bobby Bare was born in Ohio, in 1935 as Robert Joseph Bare.    His father was a farmer, and as a young man he joined the army.  Just before he joined up, he wrote a song called All American boy, and had been trying to make a living as a musician.   
But his songs didn’t sell. 
After his hitch in the Army, he moved to Nashville, and was signed by Chet Atkins.  His first single was a “cheating song” called Shame on Me, which gave him a start.. but his next song was a big hit.  It was “Detroit City” by Mel Tillis, also known as “I wanna go Home”. A song about southern men who moved up North to Detroit after the war, to get jobs in the automobile industry but pined for their home.
Unlike many country singers, who write a lot of their own material, Bobby's own songs didn't ever seem to do very well. 
But he has a beautiful voice and a charming stage presence.  He has  an ability, like Johnny Cash, to make the songs sound as if they came from inside him even the ones he did not write.  He has worked very hard and had dozens of hits.  
In the 70's, he abandoned some of the sweeter, Nashville sound, and went a bit "outlaw country".. . He roughened his voice, wore jeans and  cowboy shirts. However, he was never one of the singers who made headlines because of outrageous behavior.
His hits included the folk song, "Four Strong Winds”,  by Ian Tyson...Tom T Hall’s cheating song “Margie’s at the Lincoln Park Inn”, and another poignant song called “ the Homecoming”, by Tom T Hall, and many more.  Another of his great songs was by Harlan Howard and Tompall Glaser “Streets of Baltimore”- another song about a man who leaves his southern home to work in a city…

Like the rock band, Dr Hook, he was close friends with Shel Silverstein and performed many of his songs, including the comic or outrageous songs.   These include Tequila Sheila,  Marie Laveau, “The Winner”, “Hippie and Redneck Romance” "Going back to Texas" and many more.   He also recorded a version of Dr Hook’s great hit, Sylvia’s Mother…

 In later life, he and 3 other singers, Waylon Jennings, Mel Tillis and Jerry Reed, combined as “the Old Dogs” to do an album of Shel’s songs about the funny side of getting older.  They included “Cut the Mustard”, “Lord Ain’t It hard when it Ain’t”, "Couch Potato " and other racy songs.

He has been married since 1963,  to Jeannie, who joined his band as a singer.  They have children, including a son, Bobby Bare Junior, who is also a singer and song writer.

Bobby still sings and records, and in recent years he has produced some excellent work, including an Album called Darker than Light, which includes covers of Woody Guthrie’s works and a song by U2.  His voice seems as good as ever.  

Gabriel Rossetti and Lizzie Siddal

Gabriel was one of the 4 children of Gabriele and Frances Rossetti… who were a remarkable family of Italians living in London.  All four children were highly intelligent and talented.  Christina was a poet; Gabriel a poet and member of the Pre Raphaelite group of painters and William supported the family by doing a civil service job, but also wrote. 

Maria was the most religious and conservative minded of the family, but was very intelligent.  She found her vocation in later life, as a member of an Anglican sisterhood.

Gabriel, born in a shabby street  in London in 1828, was rebellious and wilful, though talented.  His love life was also erratic, and he was often very selfish in his relationships with women.

For several years, he was engaged to Elizabeth Siddal, a girl from a poor background who acted as an artist’s model -but who also wanted to write or be an artist herself. Lizzie had some talent and worked at her painting but she was not as gifted as her fiancé and she had frequent health problems which made her life difficult.  She was painted by Millais as Ophelia and caught a chill from being immersed in cold water.

Gabriel painted her on many occasions; he was obsessed with her off key beauty.  However, he delayed marrying her, and took up with other less respectable women, at times when Lizzie was away from him. It has never been very clear what her health problems were.   Some thought it was TB, which was a frequent illness among Victorians and one for which there was no real cure.

She was often away seeking a cure for her health difficulties.  But like some other Victorian invalids, she made her health worse by the use of laudanum.  She was in short an addict.  The drug was easily available and not recognised as dangerous… 

When she and Gabriel finally married, she became pregnant, but continued as other Victorian women often did, to take laudanum.  She gave birth to a still born daughter and became very depressed, taking even more laudanum. One evening in 1862,  Gabriel came home to find her dead, it may have been suicide or an accidental overdose. He was devastated.  He couldn’t believe she was dead and then blamed himself for neglecting her.  So as a romantic gesture, he placed the poems he had been working on, in her coffin with her. 

More on Christina Rossetti

Christina Rossetti was a prolific poet and was encouraged in her artistic work by her family.  Her brother William, a civil servant, supported her and their mother, out of a modest salary... so that they could stay home and not have to work.  He himself postponed marriage for some time, because he had the responsibility of supporting his female relatives.  He also was good hearted enough to help their brother Dante Gabriel, who was an impecunious artist who frequently needed financial support.

 Christina did hope for marriage.  All the same, her devotion to her art was such that married life was not the only career that she felt was possible, as a middle class girl.  She always had her poetry.  Unlike her older sister Maria, she was not “learned”.  However, she was a reader, self-educated and interested in the arts… though not to the same extent as William and Gabriel. 

She was a complex character, shy and often prudish, but also in some ways very dogmatic.

Her brother William was an agnostic and when he married, in middle age, his new wife, Lucy was more strongly “anti-religious” than himself. 

This caused tension between him and Lucy, and the very devout female Rossettis, particularly Christina.  He wanted his sisters and mother to share a house with him and his bride, but it didn’t work out very well.  Christina tried to be tolerant and not to criticise her sister in law for her different beliefs, but in practice she didn’t find it easy to get on with someone so much opposed to herself in outlook.   Although she wrote children’s poetry, and loved her brother’s children, she at times found “real life” children hard to tolerate, especially as her health declined.

One of her best known and most complex poems is “Goblin Market.” It tells of two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, and seems to be about “forbidden fruit”.  It is not easy to decipher what it really “means”.  Is the forbidden fruit sexual knowledge for women?  Or just sensual gratification of food?  Or is it about education and knowledge which was denied to women, on the grounds that it would make them unfeminine or unfit for their womanly duties.

  Laura buys fruit from some ugly “goblin men” who seem bestial and evil.   She eats it and is happy for a time but then sickens and becomes ill.  She longs for the fruit but she can no longer hear the goblins.   Her sister Lizzie has tried to discourage her from dealing with the goblin men, reminding her that another girl, Jeanie, ate goblin fruit and died.

However, when Laura becomes ill and depressed, Lizzie is determined to rescue her sister.  She goes to the goblin men and tries to buy fruit from them.  They refuse to sell to her, unless she will eat some, but although they try to force her, she refuses to eat the fruit. She stands up to their violence and eventually comes back to her sister with the fruit all over her skin.  She begs Laura to taste the fruit, by eating it from her body, in hope of a cure. 

Laura obeys and the fruit now works as an antidote, curing her illness and ending her longing to eat it again.   This of course can be seen as a female taking on a heroic role of rescuing a damsel in distress, or even as Lizzy being a Christ figure who offers her body to Laura to help her.  Many feminist critics have seen it as such.

Christina was in many ways conservative.  Her High Church religious views and Victorian strictness made her accept that a woman should be modest, retiring, humble and obedient, and so she was not a strong supporter of women’s rights, in terms of issues like women’s suffrage.

 However she did have liberal views on some subjects... She was against slavery and also horrified by vivisection and did try to work against it.

 Some of her biographers believed that her essentially passionate, very emotional nature warred with her sense of propriety and her Victorian upbringing, creating a lot of strain for her. 

 Her brother William felt that her religiosity did not make her especially happy.  He thought that it only made her feel guilty and over-particular about propriety.  He was distressed that when she was very ill, and on her deathbed, she was tormented by guilt about small faults and mistakes in her distant past.   She told him that she was unhappy that many years ago; she had gone against William’s wishes, and had met with Cayley, her admirer, and had lunch with him... but that she had been “so very fond of him.”

William could not help but feel that her life was narrow and rather sad and that her strict conformity to “Victorian propriety” for women and to her religious beliefs added to the restrictions of her life.