Burl Ives
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Burl Ives | |
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| Born | 14 June 1909 Jasper County, Illinois, USA |
| Died | 14 April 1995 Anacortes, Washington, USA |
Burl Icle Ivanhoe Ives (14 June 1909 – 14 April 1995) was an acclaimed American folk music singer, author, and actor.
Born near Hunt City in Jasper County, Illinois, Ives is probably best remembered for his music. He dropped out of college to travel about as an itinerant singer during the early 1930s, earning his way by doing odd jobs and playing his banjo. He was jailed in Mona, Utah, for singing “Foggy Foggy Dew”, which the authorities decided was a bawdy song.
Ives from 1927 to 1929 attended Eastern Illinois State Teachers College in Charleston (now Eastern Illinois University), where he played football. During college he was a member of the Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity. He dropped out of college because of poor grades and in 1930 landed on WBOW radio in Terre Haute, Indiana.
In 1940 Ives began his own radio show, titled The Wayfaring Stranger after one of his popular ballads. The show was very popular, and in 1946 Ives was cast as a singing cowboy in the film Smoky. His first book, The Wayfaring Stranger, was published in 1948.
Other movie credits include East of Eden (1955); Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958); The Big Country (1958), for which he won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor; and Our Man in Havana (1959), based on the Graham Greene novel; and many others. He also had an extensive career as a television actor.
Ives had an extensive Broadway career, including appearances in The Boys From Syracuse (1938-39), Heavenly Express (1940), This Is the Army (1942), Sing Out Sweet Land (1944), Paint Your Wagon (1951-52), and Dr. Cook's Garden (1967); his most notable Broadway performance was as Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955-56), a role written specifically for Ives by Tennessee Williams.
In the 1940s Ives popularized several traditional folk songs, such as “Lavender Blue” (his first hit, a folk song from the 17th century), “Foggy Foggy Dew” (an English/Irish folk song), “Blue Tail Fly” (an old Civil War tune) and “Big Rock Candy Mountain” (an old hobo ditty).
In 1952, Ives starred as Ben Rumson in the national tour of the popular musical Paint Your Wagon, co-starring Nola Fairbanks as his daughter, Jennifer Rumson.
Ives cooperated with the House Unamerican Activities Committee, and named fellow folk singer Pete Seeger and others as possible Communists. His cooperation with the HUAC ended his blacklisting, allowing him to continue with his movie acting. [citation needed]
In the 1960s Ives began singing country music. In 1962 he released three major hits, “A Little Bitty Tear”, “Call Me Mr In-Between”, and “Funny Way of Laughing”, all three of which crossed over and topped the pop charts as well.
Possibly his most remembered role today is as narrator Sam the Snowman in the Rankin-Bass animated television special, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964). Ives performed in other television productions, most notably Pinocchio (1968) and Roots (1977).
Ives's "A Holly Jolly Christmas” is a very popular tune during the Christmas season, as it's frequently played on the radio and was featured in the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer special. Frank Black of the Pixies is a contemporary fan of Ives according to Apple's iTunes Music Store. In a contribution to “Celebrity Playlists”, Black includes no fewer than 15 of Ives' hits in his playlist. Madison, Wisconsin, punk rock band Killdozer released the EP Burl in 1986, which they dedicated “in loving memory of” Ives, who was still alive (and evidently still remembered) at the time.
The Ren and Stimpy Show's first season episode "Stimpy's Invention” featured a record, “Happy Happy Joy Joy”, which contained a variety of spoken-word segments meant to parody some of Ives' albums from the 1960s. When Ives saw the episode, he contacted Ren and Stimpy Show creator John K. and said that he would have been willing to do the voice-over work for it.
Ives is known to Star Wars fans for his role as the narrator in the 1984 made-for-TV film Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure.
During his lifetime, Ives and his wife lived with their children in a home located alongside the water in Anacortes, in the Puget Sound area of Washington, where he died of cancer of the mouth at the age of 85. Burl Ives is interred in Mound Cemetery in Jasper County, Illinois.
| Preceded by: Red Buttons for Sayonara |
Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor 1958 for The Big Country |
Succeeded by: Hugh Griffith for Ben-Hur |
[edit] Selected discography
- Christmas at the White House
- Christmas Day in the Morning (1952)
- Christmas Eve with Burl Ives (1957)
- The Versatile Burl Ives! (1962)
- Songs Of The West (1962)
- It's Just My Funny Way Of Laughin' (1962)
- Scouting Along with Burl Ives (1963)
- Burl Ives (1964)
- Chim Chim Cheree & Other Children's Choices (1964)
- Have a Holly Jolly Christmas (1965)
- Sings the Great Country Hits (1968)
- Songbook (1973)
- Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1995)
- Songs I Sang in Sunday School (2001)
[edit] References
- Burl Ives Song Book,1953, Ballantine Books, New York.
- More Burl Ives Songs, 1966, Ballantine Books, New York.
