“Mel Tillis not only gave me `Detroit City,’ he showed me all the good fishing spots in Florida,” Bare recalls. And Bare is the kind of guy for whom these two events may be of equal importance – a hit song and good fishing.
– Excerpt from The Old Dogs official Web site
Bobby Bare
Home: Nashville, Tenn.
Years fishing: Since he was 7 years old
Favorite bass lures: Plastic worms and shiners
Favorite fishing hole: “Wherever the big ones are biting”
Favorite fishing buddies: Jerry Reed, Mel Tillis, David Fritts, Roland Martin, among others
Largest bass ever caught: 13 pounds
Largest fish that got away: “I’ve lost some big fish. Of course, they get bigger when you lose them.”
So Bobby Bare takes Waylon Jennings fishing one time and they’re using live spring lizards for bait. Bare’s having a grand old time casting and reeling and making conversation, but Jennings is having a little trouble.
“He couldn’t stand to bait his hook,” Bare says with a chuckle.
Jennings, a towering country music legend who sings and plays some of the down-and-dirtiest tunes in the business, was squeamish about baiting his hook. And don’t think that doesn’t get the Old Dogs rolling.
The Old Dogs are Mel Tillis, Jerry Reed, Jennings and Bare. In 1997, these four country music giants collaborated, along with the late writer Shel Silverstein, on an album entitled “The Old Dogs Volumes One and Two.” The collaboration represented not just a culmination of great music, but a gathering of great fishermen. See, one thing about these Old Dogs is that they not only “hunt,” they love to fish – especially Bare.
“A lot of music people, we just love to fish,” explains Bare. “In the entertainment business, I’ve met some real self-important people. But I’ve never met a fisherman I didn’t like.”
Never quit fishing
Bare grew up in southeastern Ohio fishing for brim and catfish in the Ohio River Valley. At 18, he moved to Los Angeles to make music. Along the way he made albums, won awards (including a Grammy for 1963’s “Detroit City”) and dabbled in television. In short, he became one of the most well-liked, well-respected country musicians in the business.
And he never quit fishing.
“I started fishing when I was 7 years old and I’ve been fishing ever since,” says Bare. “In the `60s, that’s when I started seriously bass fishing.”
For 30 years he has lived on the shores of Old Hickory Lake outside of Nashville with his wife, Jeannie Sterling. Old Hickory is known as the lake where the world-record walleye of 25 pounds was caught in 1960. For Bare, it is the perfect outpost for his fervent fishing routine. In addition to Old Hickory, he’s a regular at the nearby Tennessee bass havens of Percy Priest, Dale Hollow and Center Hill lakes.
“Oh, I get excited about fishing,” says Bare, who gets out on the water about three times a week. He admits his wife often scolds him, playfully, for fishing so much.
Every year as a treat to themselves, he and a bunch of friends chase smallmouth on Wilson Lake on the Tennessee River. Bare’s list of fishing buddies reads like a Who’s Who of country music: Little Jimmy Dickens, Jerry Reed, Mel Tillis and the late Floyd Cramer to name a few. It was Tillis who introduced Bare to Florida bass fishing in the mid-`60s. On his first trip, they hunted bass on the banks of the St. John’s River; he’s been going back ever since.
One of Bare’s more memorable excursions was a trip he made to South Florida to visit Reed while Reed was filming scenes for the Adam Sandler film, “The Waterboy.” Between filming, Bare, Reed and Henry Winkler – better known as Fonzie from television’s “Happy Days” and who is “also a heavy-duty fisherman,” according to Bare – spent hours on Lake Okeechobee. One day, Reed landed a 12-pound largemouth, one of the biggest he’d ever caught.
“Jerry Reed loves to fish, maybe more than I do,” says Bare.
The biggest largemouth Bare ever caught himself weighed around 13 pounds, he says, but he’s had a line on some that make a 13-pounder look like a minnow. “I’ve lost some big fish,” he explains. “Of course, they get bigger when you lose them. I’ve never caught the big one, but I have landed a lot of five-pounders.”
From Central America to the Arctic Circle
In search of the “big one,” he recently went to Cuba with television fishing guide Orlando Wilson exclusively to chase world-record bass.
“We didn’t catch it,” Bare says. “We found that a lot of the bass down there have stunted bodies because the fish are never harvested.”
Bare’s favorite fishing tank is “wherever the big ones are biting. Of course, I love to go to Florida and shiner fish for largemouth.” Still, he’ll always love baitcasting for feisty smallmouth on his home waters around Nashville.
For the last 12 years or so, it has been a spring tradition for Bare and Little Jimmy Dickens to head down to Clewiston, Fla., and go fishing with legendary pro Roland Martin. One of his preferred game fish when he heads to South Florida, besides bass, is tarpon. He recalls a deep-sea excursion off Sanibel Island, where he fought a massive silver king for about three hours.
“One of the biggest battles I can remember,” Bare says.
But, ever the traveler, Bare has made fishing trips all over the world. He was fishing off the coast of Belize when he saw his first tarpon, “I thought I had about an eight- or nine-pound yellowtail on the line, but it jumped out of the water and I saw it was a big tarpon. It spit that old plastic lure right out and I said, `What the heck was that?'”
Bare says one of his most exotic and favorite fishing expeditions was a guided salmon tour along the icy, clear waters of the Norwegian Arctic Circle. Though he never caught the big salmon he was after, he landed an abundance of northern pike, lake trout and grayling.
Bass connections
Through the years, Bare has made connections throughout the pro bass fishing industry. For 10 years, he was a spokesman for Red Man chewing tobacco and served as a high-profile promoter at numerous events such as the Red Man All-American tournament. He has also fished off-and-on in Red Man tournaments and done relatively well. But it was the strong and lasting contacts he made within pro bass fishing that he really appreciates.
“I got to know a lot of the fishermen doing that,” he says, “and I’m still friends with them all. When they hold pro tournaments on Old Hickory, some of the guys stay at the house. It’s great because we get to talking fishing and it’s like Christmas for me.”
He cherishes a “real good cranking reel” given to him by his friend, pro bass angler David Fritts. And he’s the proud owner of a 1981 Ranger boat. “I thought I needed to get me one of them Ranger boats,” he says. “It’s a low-profile, older Ranger I got down in Tampa.”
When he takes his Ranger out in search of big bass, Bare leans toward plastic worms and live bait – usually on four- to six-pound test line – as his bait of choice. He’s also skilled with crankbaits, but uses them less so because, as he puts it, “that works you too hard. That’s why I like the jig and pig, and spider jigs.”
But no matter what he’s using, the venerable country star plans to just keep on fishing. Starting in April, he has 10-15 shows scheduled across the West in some of the finest fishing country around – places like Montana, Idaho and Alaska. And Bobby Bare couldn’t be more thrilled.
“Oh, I get excited about fishing all right,” he explains. “I can get up and play in front of a hundred thousand people and I don’t get nervous. But if I run on a shiner and get a big bass on the line – oh, that gets me excited.”