500 Miles Away From Home

By the time he released 1963’s 500 Miles Away From Home, Bobby Bare had been kicking around for nearly a decade without a win. Led by the title track (his first hit on both the pop and country charts), the album solidified Bare as a strong voice in the new Nashville sound: poised and crossover-friendly, with no aversion to violins. A lot of these songs—“500 Miles Away From Home,” “Worried Man,” “Gotta Travel On”—had their roots not in Nashville but in folk revival bands like The Weavers and The Kingston Trio, signaling a willingness on Bare’s part to stray, however gently, from what might be expected from country, a trait that came to characterize his career.