Burl Ives, the prominent folk singer and actor, was born on this day in 1909 — 105 years ago — near Hunt City, Illinois. To almost anyone born in the 1950s or later, Ives is best known for his voiceover work as the jovial Sam the Snowman in the Rankin-Bass animated Christmas special “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” But Ivess Holly Jolly Christmas phase came relatively late in a very long and interesting career during which he helped to both usher in the folk-music revival of the 1940s and 50s and undermine it during the height of the anti-Communist Red Scare. Asked about the beginning of his interest in music, Ives once said, There wasnt any beginning. He was surrounded from birth by a large, music-loving family and he began singing in public for loose change at the age four. With a massive library of Scots-Irish folk ballads in his head and no further interest in pursuing his formal education, Ives quit college in 1929 to become an itinerant banjo-playing folk singer. In 1937, having visited and performed in 46 of the 48 United States, Ives went to New York City, where he would become an important part of the budding folk-revival movement. In New York, Ives fell in with a group of folk and blues musicians that included Pete Seeger, Josh White, Alan Lomax and Lead Belly, often performing in union halls and at benefits for everything from Spanish Civil War refugees to Kentucky coal miners and Alabama sharecroppers. The leftist politics that went hand-in-hand with the early folk revival, however, would come back to haunt Ives a decade later, when he was named in 1950 as a Communist sympathizer in the infamous Red Channels list along with Seeger, White, Lomax and others from the folk scene. By this time, Ives was an established recording star, best-known for popularizing songs like Blue Tail Fly and Big Rock Candy Mountain and for more than a dozen popular albums of traditional folk songs, childrens songs and hymns on both the Columbia and Decca record labels. He would go on to record and release many more successful albums, to publish several canonical books of collected folk songs and to earn acclaim as an actor on Broadway, where he originated the role of Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams “Cat On A Hot Tin Roof.” In Hollywood, he reprised the Big Daddy role on film and also won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role opposite Gregory Peck in 1958s The Big Country. None of his success in the 1950s and beyond would have been possible, however, had Ives not chosen to cooperate with and name names to the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952. While others named by Red Channels would lose their livelihoods to the anti-Communist blacklist — Pete Seeger, most prominently — Ives would repudiate his early connections to the Communist Party while naming several associates from the 1930s New York folk scene as Communist sympathizers. He stated that he was not a member of the Communist Party but that he had attended various union meetings with fellow folk singer Pete Seeger simply to stay in touch with working folk. He stated: You know who my friends are; you will have to ask them if they are Communists. Ivess statement to the HUAC ended his blacklisting, allowing him to continue acting in movies. But it also led to a bitter rift between Ives and many folk singers, including Seeger, who accused Ives of betraying them and the cause of cultural and political freedom in order to save his own career. Ives countered by saying he had simply stated what he had always believed. Forty-one years later, Ives reunited with Seeger during a benefit concert in New York City. They sang Blue Tail Fly together. Ive’s acting career took on memorable proportions when he was cast as Big Daddy in the film of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” He nailed the concept of mendacity — the woven fabric of lies that many families weave for themselves — with this line: “What’s that smell in this room? Didn’t you notice it, Brick? Didn’t you notice the powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room?” Ives was a renowned pipe smoker; the cover of his first album depicted a pipe and a fishing hat with the words Burl Ives in between. He also smoked cigars. In the summer of 1994 he was diagnosed with oral cancer after being hospitalized for back surgery. After several operations he decided against having further surgery. In April 1995 he fell into a coma. Ives died from complications of oral cancer on April 14, 1995 at the age of 85, at his home in Anacortes, Washington. He was 85. Here, Ives appears with Johnny Cash on his TV show in 1970. Thanks History
Posted on: Sat, 14 Jun 2014 05:13:34 +0000
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