Burl Ives Biography Quotes 4 Report mistakes

Early Life and Roots
Burl Ives was born on June 14, 1909, in rural Illinois, and grew up amid the hymns, ballads, and fiddle tunes of Midwestern farm life. Those songs, carried in family gatherings and church services, formed the foundation of his musical character. He briefly attended Eastern Illinois State Teachers College but felt a stronger call to sing than to stay in a classroom. In the early 1930s he took to the road with a guitar, hitchhiking, working odd jobs, and absorbing the vernacular music of the places he passed through. That period of wandering gave him a bottomless repertoire and the plainspoken stage presence that later made him a central figure in American folk music.

From Itinerant Singer to Radio
By the late 1930s Ives had gravitated to New York, where coffeehouses and small theaters welcomed his unadorned voice and the old songs he carried. He came to national notice in the early 1940s with his radio program The Wayfaring Stranger, taking its title from one of his signature songs. The show introduced listeners to ballads and spirituals that had seldom reached a mass audience. His warm baritone, relaxed storytelling, and a gift for shaping a song without smoothing away its roots allowed him to bridge rural tradition and mainstream entertainment.

Stage and Screen Breakthrough
Success on radio and in recordings opened doors to the stage. The defining theater role of his career arrived when Tennessee Williams cast him as Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Ives brought a thunderous authority and sly humor to the part, embodying the contradictions of Williams's patriarch. He reprised Big Daddy in the 1958 film adaptation opposite Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor, delivering a performance that placed him firmly among the most memorable character actors of his era. In the same period he appeared in Desire Under the Elms with Sophia Loren and Anthony Perkins, further proving that a folk singer could command dramatic roles of weight and complexity.

An Academy Award and Hollywood Presence
Also in 1958 Ives played Rufus Hannassey in The Big Country, a western directed by William Wyler and starring Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston. The role, by turns menacing and wounded, earned him the Academy Award and a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor. Those honors were a rare feat for someone known first as a balladeer. Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s he moved easily between film sets and concert stages, building a career that was unusually broad, even by Hollywood standards.

Recording Success and Folk Influence
Parallel to his acting, Ives became one of the most recognizable voices in American popular music. He recorded and popularized traditional songs such as The Blue Tail Fly (Jimmy Crack Corn) and On Top of Old Smoky, while also embracing newer material. Lavender Blue, revived through his film work, reached a wide audience. In the early 1960s he crossed into the pop and country charts with the gentle, reflective hits A Little Bitty Tear and Funny Way of Laughin'. His recordings balanced simplicity and polish, keeping faith with the songs' origins while making them accessible to millions. Through his concerts, albums, and writings, including his autobiography Wayfaring Stranger, he helped validate folk music as a national art form.

Rudolph and the Holiday Songbook
Ives became a perennial presence in American homes through television, most famously as the voice of Sam the Snowman in the 1964 Rankin/Bass special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Working with producers Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass, he narrated the stop-motion tale and sang A Holly Jolly Christmas and Silver and Gold. Those performances, warm and genial, turned him into an unlikely Christmas icon. A Holly Jolly Christmas, re-recorded for radio play, became one of the lasting standards of the season, ensuring that new generations would know his voice even if they never encountered his earlier folk and film work.

Politics, Principle, and the Blacklist Era
Like many artists of his generation, Ives's career intersected with the political tensions of the mid-20th century. In 1952 he appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee, distancing himself from earlier associations on the political left. His testimony damaged relationships within the folk community, most notably with Pete Seeger and other members of the Weavers, for whom questions of artistic solidarity were paramount. The episode marked him with controversy that never fully dissipated, even as he continued to perform widely and remained popular with mainstream audiences. The divide underscored the complicated space he occupied between grassroots music-making and the demands of national celebrity.

Personal Life and Work Ethic
Offstage, Ives maintained a busy professional routine that included touring, recording sessions, and moderate film and television work. He married Helen Peck Ehrlich in 1945; the marriage ended in divorce in 1971. Later that year he married Dorothy Koster Paul, a makeup artist, and they remained together for the rest of his life. Family life and a preference for privacy kept him largely out of the tabloid glare that often surrounded his screen colleagues such as Elizabeth Taylor or Paul Newman. He devoted energy to children's recordings as well as song collections and projects that preserved and circulated American traditional music.

Later Years and Legacy
Ives continued to perform into his later years, his voice mellowing but retaining the clarity that had carried his career from one medium to another. He died on April 14, 1995, in Washington State. The arc of his life, from an Illinois farmhouse to Broadway, Hollywood, and living rooms across the country, mapped a distinctive American journey. He stood at the crossroads of folk tradition and popular culture, carrying old songs into new contexts, then turning around to embody dramatic characters for directors like William Wyler and to interpret the language of Tennessee Williams on stage and screen. His seasonal recordings with Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass keep him present every December, while the older ballads he cherished continue to circulate among singers who learned them from his records. The names around him tell the story of his range: Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor in cinema, Pete Seeger and the Weavers in folk music, Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston on the western frontier, and the unseen families who still gather to hear Sam the Snowman. His legacy rests on the power of a plain, steady voice to make distant songs feel close and shared.

Our collection contains 4 quotes who is written by Burl, under the main topics: Teaching - Spring - Road Trip - Wanderlust.