Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 28, 1993 TAG: 9306260171
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MARY CAMPBELL ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
Back in his hometown of Hunt, Ill., when he was 4, Burl Ives was invited to sing at an Old Soldiers Reunion picnic. The year was 1913. He got paid $1.
"Ever since, I been singin' and I been chargin'," the gravelly voiced folk singer and Oscar-winning actor said a few years ago.
That's now 80 years of singing, more than 100 albums and countless concerts, 32 movies, radio shows and other performances.
In New York recently to take part in "Folksongs U.S.A.," a benefit concert for the YMHA, Ives had a reunion with fellow folk singer Pete Seeger, who's a decade younger. Performing together for the first time in 40 years, they sang "Blue Tail Fly," Ives' best-known ditty.
Ives, who turned 84 on June 14, lives in a house in Anacortes, Wash., with a view of Mount Baker. He sings mostly benefit concerts these days, but he also has out a new, two-cassette album of 25 songs, "The Magic Balladeer," which is being marketed on TV.
In the years before he retired from touring in 1991, Ives often would go to Nashville and, with some of the musicians he'd worked with through the years, record two or three songs.
Of all his albums, he prefers those cut in Nashville.
"Ballads are rural. It fits," he says. "You see, Nashville commercial songs are offshoots from authentic balladry."
When he was 21, in 1930, Ives left Eastern Illinois State Teachers College and started traveling around North America as a troubadour, riding the rails and hitchhiking, singing, playing banjo, teaching himself guitar, doing odd jobs.
Along the way he collected songs, songs learned from lumberjacks, cowboys, steelworkers, fishermen and folks living in small towns.
"I was not consciously a collector of songs, never consciously, never academic," says Ives, who wears a bandana around his head in the style of Willie Nelson. "If you sit and start singing ballads, somebody else sings one. It becomes a happening."
Those songs were added to his repertoire of some 100 songs of Scottish, Irish and English origin he'd learned from his pipe-smoking, tobacco-chewing grandmother, Katie White.
"At one time I had 500 songs under my belt," he says. "But not now. I know them but I don't know that I know them." Tapping his forehead, "They're in there. I never got tired of any of them."
After he moved to New York in 1937, he says, "I was privy to the library in Columbia University. I spent a lot of time there reading balladry. There's a tremendous literature, especially early Scottish history in verse. Sir Walter Scott wrote in verse.
"If I'd run across a good one, I'd bend it to my use."
He thinks he was drawn to ballads "probably because I played the guitar. It was sort of a natural progression. I didn't write a lot of songs. I edited a lot of them, made them singable, in some cases made them moral.
"I got `Foggy, Foggy Dew' from Carl Sandburg. He sang me the whole song, the sort of risque version."
Ives had a daily, 15-minute radio show, "The Wayfarin' Stranger," from 1940 to '42.
He always intended to act as well as sing, he says. He came to New York, "because if you're going to do acting as a profession, you go to New York. That's where it is."
In 1938 on Broadway, Ives was in "I Married an Angel" and "The Boys from Syracuse" and in 1942, "This Is the Army."
He won the Donaldson Award for best supporting actor of the 1944-45 Broadway season for "Sing Out, Sweet Land."
"At the same time," he says, "I went into supperclubs. I played Cafe Society Downtown and Uptown and rooms in Chicago. It was from that I really think that I got to the movies. They bought me as a singer.
"The first movie I was in, `Smoky,' [1945] with Fred MacMurray and Anne Baxter, I sang `Foggy, Foggy Dew' and `Blue Tail Fly.' "
City audiences as well as rural liked Ives' folk ballads. "They're simple and honest," he says. "And anything that has a repetitive ring to it is always popular."
Folk audiences were well-behaved, too. Ives recalls a time he was appearing outdoors for a Bureau of Land Management's clean-up campaign. "I was going to do a little wingding in Bend, Ore. It came on the radio that I was going to perform. All the tourists turned their cars right around for Bend. We thought we'd have hundreds of people. We had 54,000, four policemen and no trouble. Even the traffic was no trouble."
His wife, Dorothy, then an interior designer, met her husband of 23 years when a friend recommended her to decorate his Hollywood apartment. He'd moved there in 1969 for TV's "The Bold Ones."
"I knew him as an actor," she says. "Then I heard him sing `The Times They Are A-Changing' and I thought, `Why is he wasting his time hanging around here?' "
So, Ives went back on the concert trail - for nearly 20 years. As well as the folk songs, people remembered his hymns and children's songs, "Big Rock Candy Mountain" and "Holly Jolly Christmas" as well as his 1960s pop hits, "A Little Bitty Tear," "Call Me Mr. In-Between" and "It's Just My Funny Way of Laughin'."
As for the rolled pink bandana around his forehead, matching his pink cardigan, Ives says, "I wore it before Willie Nelson did, and he says so, too."
He wears thin white gloves because, he says, "My hands are a little chilly."
One of Ives' best known acting roles was as Big Daddy in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" on Broadway in 1955, then in the movie with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman in 1958.
He won an Oscar as best supporting actor for his part in "The Big Country," also in 1958. "I was the father of Chuck Connors and a couple of other boys. We were at odds with another rancher, Charlie Bickford. It was sort of a feud thing."
Others of his 32 movies are "Green Grass of Wyoming," "So Dear to My Heart," "Station West," "Sierra," "East of Eden," "The Power and the Prize" "Desire Under the Elms," "Our Man in Havana," "Let No Man Write My Epitaph" and "Two Moon Junction," his last one, in 1988.
by CNB