Frankie Bailes was a songwriter who co-wrote songs with Walter Bailes of the Bailes Brothers — the West Virginia gospel-leaning country act who helped launch the Louisiana Hayride in 1948 — and a co-author (with Walter Bailes) of the bluegrass-gospel standard “Traveling the Highway Home,” cut by the brothers in the mid-1940s and since recorded by Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper, Mac Wiseman, the Stanley Brothers, and many other acts.