Neal Rubin

Remembering the heyday of 'Detroit City'

Country music tells stories, and no song told ours better than "Detroit City."

That's Bobby Bare up top, singing his hit version from 1963. It's a sad song about the good old days, when Southerners flocked north to find work in the auto plants and some of them left their souls behind.

Now the opportunities in the factories are as gone as tailfins, the jobs have relocated to Alabama, and we have a new anthem on the country stations -- John Rich's "Shuttin' Detroit Down," about Wall Street pirates and slashed pensions and bailouts.

I like "Detroit City" better, maybe because I wish we still had those gilded cages at Dodge Main and Fisher Body 21.

"Home folks think I'm big in Detroit city," Bare sings, pronouncing the name Dee-troit. "From the letters that I write they think I'm fine.

"But by day I make the cars, by night I make the bars. If only they could read between the lines."

Bare, 73, didn't create the song he's most associated with. The writers were Mel Tillis and Danny Dill. But Bare made it real, because he'd lived it.

Living the autoworker life

I reached him in suburban Nashville, where he romps around with his six grandkids and books the occasional out-of-town concert so he'll have an excuse for a fishing trip.

He was raised in southern Ohio, then left home at 17 and lied about his age to get a job at the International semi plant in Springfield, northeast of Dayton. "I was just a skinny kid," he says, "but I was working on the motor blocks, smoothing 'em off so they'd be ready to put on the trucks."

His best friend there was from Tennessee, he says, and most everyone else was a homesick Kentuckian. Bare had formed a band and it was getting steady work, so when the factory went on furlough, he left and never came back.

The first time he heard "Detroit City," he was driving down Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles in a borrowed, battered Ford. Billy Grammer had a modest hit with it in early '63, "and I stopped right there. It was the greatest song I ever heard in my life."

Bare's recording went to No. 6 on the country charts and No. 16 on the pop list, and after decades of other hits, it's still the one he's best known for. By the time it topped out, he was driving a red Ford Galaxie convertible.

Nothing like nostalgia

For Tillis and Dill, "Detroit City" was a familiar story set to music.

Tillis hailed from Pahokee, Fla., and Dill was from Dollar Hill, Tenn. "When I talked to those guys," says Michael Gray, "I always mention that it's one of my favorite songs. And they always said they wrote it because they heard guys all the time telling their true-life story."

Gray, 40, is an editor and historian at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville. He's also a native Michiganian descended from a father who spent 30 years with Cadillac and a grandfather who worked on the original Mustang.

Tillis served as a baker in the U.S. Air Force in the mid-1950s, "and he'd hear guys say, 'When I get out, my uncle's going to get me a job in one of those auto plants,'" Gray says. "Mel said, 'If I heard that once, I heard it a thousand times.' "

There's an unspoken bit of class conflict in the song, Gray points out; you didn't hear GM executives pining for anyplace but Bloomfield Hills. The workingman theme played out in another, more light-hearted car tune sung by Johnny Cash in 1976. In "One Piece at a Time," his Kentucky-bred auto worker pilfers a few parts a day from 1949-73 and pieces together a free, one-of-a-kind Cadillac.

Only a few other have recorded "One Piece at a Time," but "Detroit City" has been covered often and well.

Dean Martin did a terrific version.

Tillis' daughter, Pam, slowed it down. Hank Williams Jr. recorded his at Cobo Hall.

"Everybody relates to it," says Bare, who owned three Chevy Tahoes and now drives a Ford Expedition. "During the Vietnam war, I'd watch the evening news and guys would be sitting around singing that song."

These days, Vietnam sends us cheap shirts. It's a changing planet, Bare says, and one thing he's learned traveling it is that love doesn't make it go 'round.

"The strongest emotion in the world," he'll tell you, "is nostalgia."

nrubin@detnews.com (313) 222-1874