Hobart, Indiana

Everything Hobart is known for

1 song mention this city 1 artist from here

Music in Hobart

Songs About Hobart

billie jean
michael jackson
45%

Artists From Hobart

O
Omar Apollo
r-n-b Pop: 71

Rivers & Roads in Song near Hobart

Songs written about the waterways and highways that run near Hobart.

Interstate 65 22 songs U.S. Route 66 17 songs

Musical Heritage

The Gary Record Shop That Beat Capitol to the Beatles RoadyGoat

1953

One of the great untold stories in American music starts in a Gary record shop. Vivian Carter was a Gary radio personality who, with her husband James Bracken, ran Vivian's Record Shop. In 1953 they launched their own label and named it from their initials, V and J: Vee-Jay Records. Founded here in Gary and soon based up in Chicago, Vee-Jay grew into the most successful Black-owned record company in America before Motown. Its roster was staggering: the bluesmen Jimmy Reed and John Lee Hooker, the gospel of the Staple Singers, a young Curtis Mayfield with the Impressions, even the pop hitmakers the Four Seasons. And then came the moment almost nobody remembers. When the giant Capitol Records passed on an unknown British band, little Vee-Jay said yes. In 1963 it became the first American company to release the Beatles, and it put out their first U.S. album, called Introducing the Beatles. So before the British Invasion swept the country, the Beatles first reached America through a label born in a Gary record store. (Sources: Encyclopedia of Chicago; Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.)

6.1 mi away

Five Brothers, Four Number Ones, One Mural RoadyGoat

1970

Over in Gary's Miller neighborhood, on South Lake Street, a big mural celebrates the brothers who turned this steel town into a music legend: the Jackson 5. The full family that came out of one small Gary house is almost unbelievable, Michael, Janet, Jermaine, Jackie, Tito, Marlon, and more. But here is a record that still stuns. When the five brothers signed with Motown, their first four national singles, I Want You Back, ABC, The Love You Save, and I'll Be There, every single one of them shot to number one on the pop chart. No group had ever launched its career with four straight chart-toppers like that. The little two-bedroom house where they rehearsed is the quiet shrine a few blocks away; this bright mural is the loud, public thank-you, the city's way of putting its proudest sound up on a wall for everyone to see. (Source: city of Gary.)

9.0 mi away

History of Hobart

A Trucker's Cure for Truck-Stop Food RoadyGoat

For one of the most unexpected meals in Gary, you don't go downtown, you go out by the interstate, to a little spot called the Balkan Grill Company, run out of a truck-stop location. It was opened by a Serbian immigrant named Momcilo Bogdanovic, a former truck driver himself, who got sick of the sad, reheated food that truckers were stuck eating on the road. So he decided to cook them the real thing instead. The menu is straight from the Balkans: cevapi, those little grilled minced-meat sausages, hearty stews, and the showstopper, the gurmanska pljeskavica, a big seasoned meat patty stuffed with cheese and ham and tucked into warm Balkan flatbread. It is the kind of honest, made-to-order food a hungry driver dreams about, hiding in plain sight at a Gary truck stop. (Source: Balkan Grill Company.)

5.1 mi away

Flight in the Dunes, Seven Years Before Kitty Hawk RoadyGoat

1896

Long before the Wright brothers flew, men were already gliding off the sand dunes here on Gary's lakefront. In June 1896, a brilliant railroad engineer named Octave Chanute brought a crew by train out to Miller, a lakefront community later folded into Gary, hauled experimental gliders into the dunes, and pitched camp. The steady wind off Lake Michigan and the soft sand made it a near-perfect flying laboratory: you could launch from a slope and crash without getting killed. Chanute's real genius was structural. He borrowed the Pratt truss, the same crisscross of struts and wires that braced strong railroad bridges, and used it to make a biplane wing that was both light and rigid, solving a problem that had stumped earlier would-be aviators. That trussed biplane structure, worked out in these dunes, fed directly into the designs the Wright brothers would later build on, and Chanute became a trusted advisor to them. Seven years before the famous first flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903, the science of flight was already taking shape in the sand at Gary. (Sources: National Park Service; Smithsonian.)

5.9 mi away

The Squatter Queen Who Fought U.S. Steel for the Dunes RoadyGoat

1872

Some of the prettiest land in Gary, the dunes and lagoons of Marquette Park and Miller Woods, was once held by a woman the papers called the Squatter Queen. Drusilla arrived on the lonely Miller lakefront in 1872, back when those dunes were dismissed as worthless sand nobody would want. She married a fisherman named Robert Carr in 1874, and together they homesteaded more than two hundred acres along the shore, living off the lake by squatters' rights, simply by being there and working it. Then the world changed around her. U.S. Steel arrived, the city of Gary boomed, and that worthless sand suddenly became some of the most valuable lakefront in the region. Powerful interests, including the steel industry, wanted the Carr land, and Drusilla spent decades in court and on her own porch refusing to be pushed off. She held on for the rest of her life. It's a stubborn, very American story: a woman who claimed an empty dune nobody valued, then had to fight a steel giant to keep it. (Source: Indiana Historical Bureau.)

5.9 mi away

Jackson 5 Family Home

1950

The small Gary, Indiana house at 2300 Jackson Street where Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5 grew up and rehearsed.

6.3 mi away

Indiana Dunes National Park

1899

Fifteen miles of Lake Michigan shoreline with towering sand dunes, the birthplace of modern ecology in America.

13.4 mi away

Everything Near Hobart

35 stories, landmarks & places within ~20 miles — the same local lore RoadyGoat plays as you drive through.

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