Picture the scene. It's the late 1920s. OK, I'm
picturing it. And we are sitting in this stuffy
wood paneled lecture hall at Eastern Illinois
State Teachers College. It's in Charleston, Illinois.
You can probably smell the chalk dust. Oh, absolutely.
The chalk dust, the floor wax. And there's this
college junior sitting there. He's a genuinely
massive guy. He actually plays on the varsity
football team. Right. And he's squeezed into
a desk that is just entirely too small for him.
At the front of the room, you've got this professor
groaning on and on, like just reading straight
from the old English epic poem, Beowulf. Oh,
man. The quintessential mind -numbing collegiate
experience right there. Seriously. It's the kind
of lecture where you can literally feel yourself
aging in real time. Exactly. It's that kind of
boredom that almost borders on physical pain.
But suddenly, this college junior, he has an
epiphany. OK. He realizes with just absolute
terrifying clarity that he is completely wasting
his life sitting in that chair. Wow. Just right
then and there. Right then and there. So right
in the middle of the lecture, while the professor
is mid -sentence, this giant of a student simply
stands up. He doesn't say anything? Nope. He
doesn't pack his bag. He doesn't say, excuse
me. He just walks straight down the aisle toward
the exit. I love it. And the professor, who is
clearly offended by this, makes some snide remark
to his back. And in response, and this is the
best part, this student grabs the heavy classroom
door, walks out, and slams it behind him with
every single ounce of his football player strength.
Oh my gosh. He slams it so hard that the thick
glass window in the center of the door completely
shatters, just bursts into hundreds of pieces
raining down all over the hallway floor. That
is, I mean, that is the ultimate literal mic
drop. Decades before microphones were even a
thing, people dropped, you know? Right. He didn't
just leave a room. He violently severed his tie
to a conventional life path. And the guy who
shattered that glass, that college dropout who
just walked away from the expected path to go
wander the earth, that was Burl Ives. Such a
perfect origin story. It really is. That literal
mic drop kicked off an 85 year journey. One that
took him from a jail cell in Utah for singing
a dirty folk song all the way to the stage of
the Academy Awards. And eventually into the living
rooms of basically every single person listening
right now. Exactly. Welcome to the deep dive,
everyone. Today, we're tracking that journey.
And what is deeply poetic about that opening
moment, the Beowulf incident, is the aftermath.
Because, get this, 60 years after he shattered
that glass and walked out, that very same teacher's
college, which is now Eastern Illinois University,
they actually named a building after him. Shut
up! Really? Yeah. The school's most famous, most
destructive dropout eventually became its namesake.
That is so good. It perfectly captures the whiplash
of his entire existence. And I think for anyone
listening who feels stuck in a career right now
or, you know, feels like they've backed themselves
into a corner, Burlives is the absolute blueprint
for relentless reinvention. Our mission today
is to trace exactly how he navigated these massive
transitions in his life, how he took the raw,
unpolished tools of his youth and just carried
them across all these different mediums. From
live folk singing to the radio. Right, from the
intimate glow of radio to the golden age of Hollywood
and finally into immortal pop culture. And you
really can't understand those pivots without
looking at where he started. I mean, his ability
to shape shift later in life comes directly from
the dirt under the fingernails reality of his
childhood. So let's paint that picture. June
14th, 1909, he's born in a place called Hunt
City, Illinois. And when we say city, we are
being very generous here. Right, it's kind. It's
an unincorporated community in Jasper County.
His parents are Levi, who goes by Frank, and
Cordelia, who goes by Deli. Frank is a farmer.
Later on, he pivots into contracting work for
the county. So this is a very rural, working
class, deeply terrestrial beginning. And Burl
is one of seven kids. Wow, seven. Yeah. Artie,
Clarence, Argola, Lilburn, Norma, and Little
Burl. In a household of seven children in rural
1910s America, you have to find a way to stand
out. Or at the very least, entertain yourself,
right? Because the entertainment wasn't coming
from a screen. No, not at all. It was entirely
self -generated. And that self -generated entertainment
actually sparks his first real performance, completely
by accident. How so? Well, he's just a little
boy. out in the garden with his mother, Deli,
and they are singing together. Not for an audience,
just, you know, to pass the time while working
the soil. But his uncle happens to be walking
by and overhears them. Oh, wow. Yeah. And the
uncle stops in his tracks. He is so floored by
the natural resonance of this little kid's voice
that he immediately invites his nephew to sing
at the local old soldiers reunion in Hunt City,
which is a massive cultural event in the town
like that. I mean, an old soldiers reunion. in
the late 1910s or early 1920s meant you had veterans
of the Civil War sitting in the audience. Really?
Civil War veterans? Yeah, it was the absolute
social peak of the county. That's incredible.
So he gets up on that makeshift stage, and he
belts out a rendition of the traditional folk
ballad, Barbara Allen. Oh, classic. Right, it's
this old, tragic Scottish ballad about unrequited
love and death. So to have a young kid singing
a song with that much emotional weight and doing
it beautifully, it completely wowed the crowd.
I bet. But looking at these early years, I want
to talk about a paradox. Because I really struggled
to wrap my head around this when I was looking
at the source material. What's the paradox? We
have this image of him slamming doors and rebelling
against the rigid structure of college, right?
The ultimate hobo free spirit. But simultaneously,
as a young man, he is aggressively seeking out
some of the most rigidly structured organizations
in the world. Ah, you're talking about his fraternal
affiliations. Yes. It is a brilliant contradiction.
It makes no sense to me. Even before 1924, when
he's just a young teenager. He becomes a lone
scout, which was this rural program that eventually
folded into the Boy Scouts of America. Right.
Then when he gets to high school and college
in Charleston, he joins the Order of Demille,
which is a Masonic youth organization. And then
in 1927, the very same year he graduates from
Newton High School, he is initiated into Scottish
Rite Freemasonry. Yeah, to a modern listener,
joining the Freemasons at 18 might sound like
a bizarre esoteric hobby. for a teenage rebel.
That's exactly what I thought. But we have to
place this in the context of 1920s rural America.
Fraternal organizations were not just secret
handshakes and aprons. They were the ultimate
social safety net. Interesting. In an era before
robust government welfare, before widespread
national insurance, these lodges were the fabric
that held men together. They provided networking,
moral instruction, and this profound sense of
ancient community. So it wasn't about him wanting
to wear a cool ring. It was about seeking a foundation.
Precisely. Burr Lives wasn't a pure anarchist.
The guy who broke the glass in the Beowulf Lecture
didn't hate community. He just hated hollow,
irrelevant academic posturing. Ah, that makes
sense. Freemasonry, the Scouts, the Demolay,
these organizations offered rituals that actually
meant something. They offered a lineage. And
if you think about it, folk music operates on
the exact same psychological level. Wait, really?
How so? Folk music is a system of belonging.
It's a centuries -old ritual passed down from
voice to voice, creating this invisible fraternity
of the working class. He was drawn to ancient
systems of belonging, whether that was a Masonic
Lodge or a ballad from the Scottish Highlands.
Wow. That totally reframes him for me. He's building
his safety net before he jumps, because he does
try to play the conventional game first, right?
On July 23, 1929, he actually attempts to enter
the formal music industry. Right, the recording
session. Yeah. He travels to Richmond, Indiana,
to a studio run by the Star Piano Company. He's
there to make a trial recording for their Genet
label. In Richmond, Indiana, the 1920s was a
bizarrely important hub for early jazz and folk
recordings. I mean, Gino Records recorded early
legends like Louis Armstrong and Big Spiderback.
So it's a big deal. He goes into the booth. He's
20 years old. He records a song called Behind
the Clouds. But... The recording is rejected.
And the studio doesn't just shelve it. A few
weeks later, they literally destroy the master.
The physical recording is obliterated. Later
in his life, Ives didn't even remember the session
happening. The fragility of early media is just
heartbreaking. Recording in 1929 was an arduous
mechanical process. You are often singing into
this massive acoustic horn that physically vibrated
a stylist to cut grooves into a wax master. That
sounds intense. And if the label executives didn't
think it was commercially viable instantly, they
would just melt the wax down to reuse it. The
raw material was too expensive to preserve failures.
That's brutal. So the door was slammed in his
face. The physical evidence of his dream was
literally melted down. And I think that rejection,
combined with the onset of the Great Depression,
pushes him fully into the lifestyle that would
define his early mythos. The Hobo years. The
1930s arrive and Burl Ives hits the open road.
He travels across the United States as an itinerant
singer. He's hopping freight trains, earning
his meals by doing odd jobs and just playing
his banjo. He becomes the living, breathing archetype
of the American hobo. He is walking into the
crucible of the American folk experience. I mean,
the 1930s during the Dust Bowl and the Depression
was an era of mass, desperate migration. Millions
of people were displaced. Yeah. So when Ives
is riding in a box car, He is absorbing the visceral
reality of that pain. He's smelling the coal
dust. He is feeling the hunger. It wasn't an
act. Exactly. He isn't sitting in a library reading
sheet music about the working man. He is standing
in the soup kitchen line next to him, trading
songs for a piece of bread. And sometimes the
authorities didn't appreciate a massive bearded
man with a banjo rolling into town. Which brings
us to a defining incident in Mona, Utah. Oh,
this is a great story. He gets arrested. The
local police throw him in a jail cell for vagrancy.
But the arrest report is what makes this legendary.
The authorities were specifically offended because
he was singing an English folk song called Foggy
Do, which they deemed a body song. Which is hilarious
from a modern perspective, but very serious in
1930s conservative Utah. Right. I looked into
Foggy Do. There are a few variations, but the
English version he likely sang is essentially
a subtle, slightly cheeky ballad about a weaver
who ends up in bed with a frightened young woman
he's courting, allegedly to protect her from
the bugaboo or the foggy dew. Why the foggy dew?
By today's standards, it's incredibly tame. By
Mona, Utah standards, it was a threat to public
morality. The fact that he was jailed for the
content of his song is the ultimate badge of
honor for a folk singer. I mean, it proved that
his music had teeth. It wasn't just background
noise. It had the power to disrupt the social
order of a town. Totally. But I want to push
back on this romantic image of the wandering
authentic hobo for a second. OK, let's hear it.
Because there is a massive detail from this era
that seems to contradict the whole simple vagabond
and narrative. Around 1931, he starts performing
on WBOW radio in Terre Haute, Indiana. Right.
He goes back to school, attending classes at
Indiana State Teachers College. And then in 1933,
the absolute kicker, he attends the Juilliard
School in New York. Ah, yes. the Juilliard School,
the single most prestigious performing arts conservatory
in the United States. So help me reconcile this.
I struggle to put the guy sleeping in a Utah
jail cell in the same body as the guy doing vocal
warmups in a pristine Manhattan conservatory.
Was the Vagrant Hobo Act just a calculated brand?
Was he faking it? That is the most crucial question
of his early career. And the answer is neither
was fake. Both were entirely necessary for what
he was about to become. OK, unpack that for me.
The vagrant lifestyle gave him his unassailable
authenticity. When he sang a hobo song, the audience
implicitly trusted him because they knew he had
the dirt under his fingernails. He possessed
the raw material. But raw material isn't enough
to sustain a multi -decade career across different
media. Jillyard gave him the mechanics to broadcast
that raw material perfectly. What do you mean
by the mechanics? At Jillyard, he was studying
the physical science of his own body. breath
control, diaphragmatic support, pitch -perfect
resonance. He was learning how to take the raw
emotional pain of a Dust Bowl ballad and project
it to the back row of a theater without destroying
his vocal cords. Oh, wow. Yeah. He learned how
to manipulate his tone so that a whisper could
be heard perfectly. He wasn't abandoning his
folk roots at Jilliard. He was sharpening the
nights. He was turning his voice into a precision
instrument. So he took the soul of the boxcar
and wrapped it in the technique of the opera
house. Beautifully put, yes. And all of that
training, combined with his life experience,
converges perfectly in 1940. He launches his
own radio show. He titles it The Wayfaring Stranger,
taking the name from one of the haunting traditional
ballads he loved to sing. This is the moment
the trajectory shifts. Radio in the 1940s was
the ultimate cultural catalyst. It really was.
We think of mass media today as so fragmented,
but radio back then was a shared national campfire.
Over the next decade, through this show, Burl
Ives almost single -handedly popularizes traditional
folk songs for an enormous mass audience. We
are talking about songs that had been localized
in specific valleys or regions for decades. Suddenly,
he is broadcasting Foggy Doo, the very song that
got him arrested in Utah, to millions of people
without a single cop being able to stop him.
He popularizes the Blue Tail Fly, an old minstrel
tune that most people know as Jimmy Crack Corn.
He brings Big Rock, Candy Mountain, the ultimate
fantasy song of a starving hobo, straight into
middle -class living rooms. Think about the mechanics
of early radio, though. It is a blind medium.
It completely strips away the visual. The listener
cannot see the performer's facial expressions,
their physical size, or their costume. The entire
emotional weight of the performance has to travel
invisibly through the airwaves and reassemble
itself in the listener's mind. It relies purely
on the warmth, the storytelling capability, and
the subtle emotional finesse of the voice. And
by December 1943, his mastery of this medium
is undeniable. He moved to New York City to work
for CBS radio, earning $100 a week, which was
a very solid living at the time. Oh yeah, great
money. To understand his specific vocal magic,
there is a quote from the music critic John Rockwell
in our sources that I want to dissect. Let's
do it. Rockwell described Ives' voice as having,
quote, the sheen and finesse of opera without
its latter -day Puccinean vulgarities and without
the pretensions of operatic ritual. It was genteel
and expressive impact without being genteel and
social conformity. It is a dense piece of criticism
for sure, but it unlocks exactly why Ives was
so successful. So let's break it down. The sheen
and finesse of opera. That is obviously the Jilliard
training doing its job, the breath control, the
perfect vibrato. But Rockwell adds, without its
latter -day Procinian vulgarities, what is Rockwell
getting at there? He means that eyes wasn't showing
off. In late opera, particularly around Puccini's
era, there can be a tendency toward vocal acrobatics.
Singers proving how loud they can get or how
long they can hold a high note simply for the
sake of the spectacle. Right, it becomes about
the singer, not the song. Exactly. I've stripped
all that ego away. He used operatic -level technique
purely to serve the simple emotional core of
a folk song. He made world -class vocal control
sound entirely effortless. And then there's the
second half of the quote, genteel and expressive
impact without being genteel and social conformity.
He sounded incredibly polite, warm, and inviting.
He sounded like a favorite grandfather sitting
in your living room. But the lyrics he was delivering,
songs about hobos, rebellious workers, vagrants,
these were inherently anti -establishment. He
was essentially Trojan horse. He really was.
He sneaked counterculture sentiments into the
mainstream American living room by rapping them
in this velvet, perfectly controlled voice. And
radio was serving as an incubator for his next
phase. Yeah. When you perform only on a microphone,
you develop a profound sense of dramatic timing.
You learn exactly how long a pause needs to be
to make the listener lean in. You learn how to
modulate your volume to create suspense. He was
getting a nightly master class in acting. solely
through audio. And that audio mastery was about
to become physical. The momentum of his radio
success was pulling him out of the sound booth
and onto the physical stage. This leads us into
his early Hollywood and theatrical crossovers.
But as with everything in his life, history had
a way of interrupting. Before he could fully
conquer Hollywood, the world went to war. Yeah,
in early 1942, like millions of other young men,
Ives is drafted into the United States Army.
He spends time at Camp Dex in New Jersey and
Camp Upton in New York, but the military recognizes
that his true value isn't necessarily holding
a rifle in a trench. His artistic skills intersect
with his service. He joins the cast of Irving
Berlin's legendary production. This is the Army,
which was a massive touring morale boosting military
musical. It featured a cast composed entirely
of soldiers. He attains the rank of corporal.
And when the production eventually moves to Hollywood
to be adapted into a film, he is transferred
to the Army Air Forces. Ultimately, he is honorably
discharged in September 1943, reportedly for
medical reasons. But that military theater experience
seems pretty vital. It was. It kept him performing
under incredibly rigorous, disciplined conditions.
It kept him the public eye during a global conflict.
He was serving his country by doing exactly what
he did best. So after his discharge, he moves
to California. briefly sharing an apartment with
the actor Harry Morgan, actually. Well, that's
a fun fact. And he begins to make his first real
incursions into Hollywood, but he does it in
a highly calculated way. In 1946, he's cast in
the film Smokey and his role, a singing cowboy.
The singing cowboy was a wildly popular archetype
in the 1930s and 40s. Think Gene Autry or Roy
Rogers. It was a staple of Western cinema. To
me, this is a brilliant transition strategy.
Playing a singing cowboy isn't a massive stretch
from his wayfaring stranger radio persona. It's
like a modern day pop star getting a cameo, playing
a musician in a feature film. Yeah, that's a
great comparison. It's the safest way to dip
a toe into Hollywood acting. It's a transitional
mechanism because film acting is a deeply technical
medium. You have to hit specific tape marks on
the floor. You have to understand where your
key light is. You have to match your actions
from take to take for continuity. It's a lot
to juggle. If he had jumped straight into a heavy
Shakespearean dramatic role, the technical demands
of the camera might have completely overwhelmed
him. But by playing a singing cowboy, he could
rely on his world class singing ability to carry
him while he learned the quiet mechanics of film
set. He was getting paid to practice. And the
musical crossovers keep elevating him. In 1949,
he introduces the song Lavender Blue in the Disney
film So Dear to My Heart. His version becomes
a massive hit, and the song itself is nominated
for an Academy Award for Best Original Song.
Wow. Concurrently, his recording career is hitting
new peaks. In 1947, he records a new energetic
version of The Blue Tail Fly. But he doesn't
do it alone. He is paired with the absolute titans
of 1940s pop music, the Andrews sisters. Oh,
smart move. Very smart. He correctly figured
their massive mainstream success would help the
record sell, and it became a huge billboard hit.
He is solidifying his mythos on all fronts. In
1948, he publishes his autobiography. And of
course, he titles it The Wayfaring Stranger.
Naturally. So let's pause and look at where Burl
Ives is at the dawn of the 1950s. He is sitting
on top of the world. He is a beloved folk singer,
a national radio star, a rising Hollywood presence,
and a best -selling author. He has successfully
woven all the disparate threads of his life into
this golden parachute. It looks like an unbroken
upward trajectory, but the foundation of that
success, his deep ties to the folk music community,
was about to become a massive political liability.
Yeah. The Cold War was freezing over Hollywood,
and Ives was walking right into the crosshairs.
This brings us to the crucible of his life, the
blacklist, the bitter betrayals, and the forced
pivot to serious acting. To truly understand
the stakes of what happens next, we have to rewind
slightly and look at the associations he formed
during his early folk music days in New York.
Ives was closely associated with a folk singing
group called the Almanacs. The Almanacs were
essentially the architects of the mid -century
American folk revival. We're talking about legendary
figures here, Woody Guthrie, Will Gere, Marilyn
Lampelle, and Pete Seeger. These were the heavyweights.
But they weren't just musicians. They were deeply
political. The Almanacs were active in a group
called the American Peace Mobilization, or the
APM. Now, we need to carefully explain the political
climate here, focusing strictly on the source
material. The APM was a far -left group. Initially,
in the late 1930s and early 1940s, they were
staunchly isolationist. Meaning they wanted no
part of the war. Exactly. They were strongly
opposed to American entry into World War II and
fiercely criticized President Franklin Roosevelt's
pro -allied policies. They recorded aggressive
pacifist songs with titles like, Get Out and
Stay Out of War, and Franklin Over Franklin.
But global politics shifted abruptly, and the
APM shifted right along with them. In June 1941,
the Axis powers invaded the Soviet Union. The
moment that happened, the APM abandoned its pacifist
stance entirely. They reorganized into the pro
-war American people's mobilization. Because
defending the Soviet Union was now a priority
for the far left, and Ives and the Almanacs pivoted
right alongside them. They re -recorded several
of their songs to reflect this new pro -war stance,
suddenly favoring U .S. entry into the conflict.
They recorded songs like Dear Mr. President and
Reuben James, which was a famous track about
a U .S. destroyer sunk by German U -boats before
America officially entered the war. At the time,
performing these songs just seemed like topical
folk music. But these associations, singing with
the Almanacs, working with the APM, and visibly
mirroring political stances that aligned with
Soviet interests, it created a paper trail. Yeah.
And that paper trail was a ticking time bomb.
Fast forward to the post -war era, the dawn of
the 1950s. The Red Scare is sweeping through
the United States. Senator Joseph McCarthy and
the House Un -American Activities Committee,
or HUAC, are aggressively hunting for communist
sympathizers in American society, particularly
in the media and entertainment industries. In
1950, a pamphlet called Red Channels is published.
Red Channels was essentially a conservative watchdog
report. It listed the names of 151 actors, writers,
musicians, and broadcast journalists who allegedly
had communist ties or sympathies. And Burl Ives'
name was in that pamphlet because his name was
printed? He was blacklisted. We really have to
make you, the listener, feel the claustrophobia
of the Hollywood blacklist. It wasn't just a
bad review or a temporary cancellation. It was
a total absolute quarantine. Yeah, it was devastating.
If you were blacklisted, studios legally and
socially could not hire you. Radio networks wouldn't
let you near a microphone. Record labels dropped
you. You were economically radioactive. Your
entire livelihood just vanished overnight. Faced
with the absolute destruction of everything he
had built since he shattered that glass window
in college, Ives is backed into a corner. Two
years pass. The pressure is immense. And in 1952,
he makes a decision that would haunt him for
the rest of his life. He agrees to cooperate.
He agrees to cooperate with HUAC. He sits before
the government committee and he testifies. And
our sources state explicitly that he did this
out of fear of losing his source of income. He
was terrified of losing the career he had fought
so incredibly hard to build. And his testimony
did exactly what he needed it to do. It acted
like a controlled burn in a forest fire. By naming
names, by identifying fellow artists who had
been involved in those left -wing circles, he
proved his loyalty to the committee. Wow. The
committee cleared him, the blacklist was lifted,
and he was allowed to return to acting and singing.
But the cost was catastrophic. He saved his career
by feeding his friends to the fire. for decades.
Pete Seeger, who was essentially the moral center
of the folk revival, was furious. Seeger accused
Ives of the ultimate betrayal, naming names and
sacrificing cultural freedom just to save his
Hollywood paycheck. Seeger publicly and fiercely
ridiculed audience for trying to distance himself
from the very organizations and working class
ideals he had built his entire wayfaring stranger
persona upon. It is the ultimate moral crucible.
You have to hold two opposing truths in your
head when looking at this. On one hand, You have
a man desperately protecting his art and his
survival against an oppressive, tyrannical government
committee. Right. On the other hand, his survival
directly contributed to the ruin of his peers.
Seeger and many others spent years in the wilderness
unable to work because men like Ives gave the
committee what it wanted. It's just devastating.
Imagine the psychological friction. Here is the
man who built his fame singing the songs of the
marginalized, the poor, the rebels. And now he's
sitting in a suit whispering names to government
investigators to protect a studio contract. The
folk clubs in Greenwich Village were permanently
closed to him. His musical home was gone. Gone
overnight. So how does an artist process that
level of isolation? How does this massive loss
alter his output? It fundamentally forced a pivot.
it changed his creative DNA. Because his testimony
alienated him so thoroughly from the folk revival
movement, he could no longer rely on his identity
as the smiling, benevolent folk hero. The bridge
back to his past was burned to ash. There was
no going back. Exactly. This isolation, this
absolute severing of his roots, pushed him to
fully commit to the one avenue he had just sacrificed
his friends to keep open. dramatic acting. He
had to prove it was worth it. He had become undeniable
on screen. If he was going to survive the fallout,
he couldn't just be the guy strumming a banjo
and a cowboy hat anymore. He had to become a
heavyweight. And interestingly, while he was
dealing with the immediate toxic fallout in America,
he was finding safe harbor internationally. During
the worst of the blacklist pressure, he frequently
traveled to the UK. He played on BBC Radio's
Children's Hour, singing favorites like Big Rock
Candy Mountain and Lavender Blue. The contrast
is mind boggling. In America, he's at the center
of a vicious, life -destroying political witch
hunt. In the UK, he is gently singing whimsical
folk songs to British toddlers over the radio.
It's absurd. He also performs at the Royal Coronation
Festival in 1952 in London, and there's this
incredible historical footnote about that. Purportedly,
sitting in the audience at that coronation festival
watching burlives perform were two young boys
named John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Wait, seriously,
that is amazing. The cultural cross -pollination
of the 20th century never fails to amaze. I know.
But eventually he returns to America. He has
to face the music, or rather, the lack of it.
Cut off from his musical roots, Ives attacks
his acting career with a new, dark intensity.
And against all odds, fueled by the complex trauma
of the previous few years, he succeeds spectacularly.
This is the era where the entertainer truly transforms
into an artist. We move into the mid -1950s.
The singing cowboy is dead. Ives starts taking
on massive, serious, dramatically heavy roles.
In 1955, he plays Sam, the sheriff of Salinas.
in the classic James Dean film, East of Eden.
He takes on dense, challenging roles in Desire,
Under the Elms, Wind Across the Everglades, and
the adaptation of Graham Greene's Our Man in
Havana. These are complicated, morally gray characters.
These are not light, fluffy musicals. But his
defining role, the one that etches his name into
the history of American theater, starts on Broadway
in 1955. He is cast as Big Daddy Paulet in Tennessee
Williams' masterpiece, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Yes, iconic. He dominates the Broadway stage
in that role from 1955 to 1956, and his performance
is so monumental that he is brought to Hollywood
to reprise the role for the legendary 1958 film
adaptation starring opposite Paul Newman and
Elizabeth Taylor. Big Daddy Paulet is a towering
achievement. He is one of the most imposing,
terrifying, vulgar, and emotionally complex tree
arcs in all of modern theater. He is a dying,
wealthy southern plantation owner trying to control
his fractured family. And this is where I need
you to explain the mechanics of this transformation
because the contrast is unbelievable. How does
the gentle radio singer, the guy who made a living
sockily crooning about the blue tail fly, physically
and emotionally pull off the domineering, menacing
gravity required to play Big Daddy? If you look
closely in his history, the raw materials were
always there. He just had to recalibrate them.
First, physically, he was an enormous man. He
was a former college football lineman. Right
from the Beowulf Lecture. Exactly. When he stood
up and commanded a room, he cast a massive shadow.
But more importantly, let's go back to Julliard.
He had immense, rigorously trained vocal control.
He knew exactly how to support his diaphragm
to project a booming, terrifying roar that could
shake the back walls of a theater just as easily
as he could whisper a lullaby. He used his breath
control not to sing, but to weaponize Tennessee
Williams' dialogue. Wow. And you have to wonder
how much the blacklist played into that performance.
Oh, it is impossible to separate the two. Think
about the well of emotion he was drawing from,
the itinerant struggles of the 1930s, the brutal
trauma of the HUAC testimony, the loss of his
closest friends, the public vilification from
Pete Seeger. That's a lot of baggage. All of
that pain, guilt, and survival instinct lent
a gravelly, hard -earned, terrifying authenticity
to Big Daddy. He wasn't a singer pretending to
be an angry patriarch. He was an actor tapping
into a deep, very real well of psychological
survival. He commanded the screen because he
had sacrificed a piece of his soul just to be
allowed on it. Man. And that command reached
its absolute cinematic peak the very same year,
in 1958. He stars as Rufus Hanasi in the sweeping
Western epic, The Big Country. Rufus Hanasi is
another imposing, unforgettable, violently stubborn
patriarch locked in a feud over water rights.
And for that performance, Burl Ives, the college
dropout, the former hobo thrown in a Utah jail
for a body song, the man who nearly lost his
career to the Red Scare, wins the Academy Award
for Best Supporting Actor. It is the ultimate
validation. He proved that his pivot wasn't just
a desperate escape, it was a transition into
mastery. He follows up the Oscar win the next
year by starring in a bleak, claustrophobic film
noir called Day of the Outlaw in 1959. He had
completely rewritten his narrative. He had conquered
the folk world, mastered the intimacy of radio,
survived the political blacklist, and reached
the absolute undeniable pinnacle of Hollywood
acting. You would think, at this point, entering
his 50s with an Oscar on his mantle, he would
just coast. Most people would. The legacy was
completely secure. But Burr lives wasn't done
shape shifting, not even close. In the 1960s,
he would initiate one final massive transition.
He would synthesize all of his past lives, the
gentle singer, the booming actor, the intimate
storyteller into an enduring pop culture legacy
that would outlast almost everything else he
ever did. This is the era where he ascends from
being a famous actor to becoming a ubiquitous,
immortal cultural fixture. Let's look at how
he did it, starting with his return to music.
In the early 1960s, he pivots genres. He leaves
the pure folk behind and transitions into country
music. He moves to recording in Nashville for
Decker Records, and he starts working with a
producer named Owen Bradley. Owen Bradley is
a titan of the music industry. Along with Chet
Atkins, Bradley essentially invented what became
known as the Nashville sound. What exactly made
the Nashville sound different from what Ives
was doing before? Traditional folk and early
country music were raw. It was fiddles, acoustic
guitars, and twang. It was porch music. Right.
Owen Bradley realized that to sell country music
to a massive, urban mainstream pop audience,
you had to smooth out those rough edges. The
Nashville sound replaced the fiddles with lush,
sweeping string sections. They added smooth,
background vocal choirs. It was polished, sophisticated,
and highly produced. And that sophisticated sound
was the perfect vehicle for Ives' Julliard -trained
voice. Bradley used the famous Nashville A -Team
of session musicians, including the pristine
harmonies of the Anita Kerr singers, to back
Ives up. The results were immediate. Oh, huge
hits. Massive. In 1962, he releases a string
of crossover hits. Little Bitty Tear, Call Me
Mr. In -Between, and Funny Way of Laughing. These
songs didn't just top the country charts. They
crossed over and conquered the mainstream pop
charts. He had taken his operatic folk voice
and successfully mapped it onto the most commercial
sound of the decade. But the most enduring collaboration
between Burl Ives and the Nashville recording
apparatus wasn't for a standard album. It was
a recording session for a television special.
And this is where the legend is truly cemented.
The creation of a holiday immortal. In 1964,
the Rankin -Bass production company is putting
together a family special for NBC called Rudolph
the Red -Nosed Reindeer. Rankin -Bass utilized
a specific type of stop motion animation called
animagic. It was a painstaking frame by frame
mechanical process using small dolls with wire
armatures. It has a very distinct, slightly jerky,
but incredibly warm and charming visual style.
But the visual style needed a voice to ground
it. They hire Burl Ives to voice a character
specifically designed for him. Sam the Snowman.
I love Sam the Snowman. Everyone does. Sam is
a banjo playing snowman wearing a plaid vest
who serves as the on -screen host and the narrator
of the entire story. He's the absolute perfect
synthesis of his entire career. Think about it.
Sam the Snowman directly addresses the camera,
explaining how Rudolph uses his nonconformity
to save Christmas from a blizzard. Ives uses
the intimate, fireside storytelling timing he
perfected on the Wayfaring Stranger radio show.
He uses the warm, avuncular folk persona he built
in the 30s. He uses the theatrical enunciation
he perfected on Broadway so that every child
can understand every word. He sings the soundtrack,
composed by Johnny Marks. He sings the title
track. He sings Silver and Gold. And of course
he sings A Holly Jolly Christmas. And those specific
recordings? Transcended television. they became
structural pillars of the American holiday season.
To understand the sheer permanence of what he
recorded in that booth, look at the billboard
data. A Holly Jelly Christmas made the billboard
year -end chart in 2022. That is insane. That
is 27 years after Burl Ives died. That is almost
60 years after he recorded it. It still charts
annually on the billboard holiday top 100 into
the 2020s. Every December, his voice returns
to every mall, every radio station, and every
living room in the country. It is a level of
cultural immortality that Oscar winners and chart
-popping pop stars dream of, but very few ever
actually achieve. He became the voice of December.
But his ubiquitous presence in the 60s and 70s
wasn't limited to Christmas. He was everywhere
on television and his resume is wildly, wonderfully
eclectic. He stars in Disney's live -action film
Summer Magic with Hayley Mills. He plays a literal
genie in a bottle in the 1964 movie The Brass
Bottle alongside Tony Randall. Which is so funny.
Why would an Academy Award -winning dramatic
actor take a role as a genie? Because he had
completely liberated himself from being boxed
into a single genre. He realized that his presence,
his physical size, and his boony voice was a
tool that could be applied to any tone, from
high drama to slapstick comedy. He stars in a
short -lived 1965 comedy series called OK, Crackerby,
playing the presumed richest man in the world.
He pivots back to drama, playing Walter Nichols,
a senior attorney in the hit series The Bold
Ones, The Lawyers from 1969 to 1972. But then
he takes these incredibly bizarre dark turns.
Yes. He does macabre, spooky television. In 1970,
he stars in a TV movie called The Man Who Wanted
to Live Forever. And his character is a man who
operates an isolated mountain facility where
he tries to harvest human organs from unwilling
donors to extend his own life. Which is deeply
unsettling. Sam the snowman is harvesting organs.
Exactly. He uses that warm, grandfatherly voice
to be absolutely terrifying. In 1972, he guest
stars in an episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery
called The Other Way Out, playing a man seeking
a highly gruesome psychological revenge for a
murder. Wow. And let's not forget his legendary
1970s guest appearance on Little House on the
Prairie. In season three, episode 10, he plays
an old, blind fur trapper who is terrified to
leave his cabin but ends up using his knowledge
of the woods to help Laura Ingalls rescue her
severely injured father. He took the massive
theatrical gravity he used on Broadway and learned
how to compress it for the small, intimate box
of a 1970s television set. He was completely
fearless in his later career. He was also everywhere
in commercial and civic life. He spent the 70s
and 80s as the commercial spokesman for Louisiana
Tea. He became the face of the U .S. Bureau of
Land Management's This Land Is Your Land Keep
It Clean campaign, appearing alongside the fictional
spokesman Johnny Horizon. Which is a beautiful
callback to his vagabond days. The hobo who used
to sleep in the dirt was now the national spokesman
for keeping the American landscape pristine.
He even narrated the 1971 NFL season highlight
film for the Washington Redstones. His voice
was so iconic that Disney hired him to be the
main voice host playing an audio animatronic
named Sam Eagle for the America Sings attraction
that opened at Disneyland in 1974. When you look
at this entire sprawling synthesis, it all clicks
together perfectly. Every skill he picked up,
every persona he inhabited, he kept in his toolbox.
And his later life brought a wave of major honors
that reflected all these different facets. In
1966, the Boy Scouts of America, the organization
he joined as a young lone scout, inducted him
and awarded him their highest honor, the Silver
Buffalo Award. His home state of Illinois awarded
him the Order of Lincoln in 1976, their absolute
highest honor in the performing arts. And he
remained deeply dedicated to the organizations
that gave him a foundation early on. In 1987,
Sixty years after he was first initiated into
Freemasonry as an 18 -year -old, he was elevated
to the 33rd and highest degree of the Scottish
Rite and later elected the Grand Cross. He was
also inducted into the Demille International
Hall of Fame in 1994. Looking briefly at his
personal life, he was married twice. First, in
1945, to a scriptwriter named Helen Peck -Ehrlich.
They had a son, Alexander, in 1949. They eventually
divorced in 1971, and shortly after, he married
Dorothy Coaster -Paul. Over his later years,
they lived a wonderfully varied life. They had
a waterfront home in Anacortes, Washington, a
place in Galistio, New Mexico, and in the 60s,
he even had a home on a remote barrier island
in the Bahamas. Right. He remained a wayfaring
stranger to the very end, just traveling a bit
more comfortably. But there is one final vital
moment in his later life that brings his entire
journey full circle. The reconciliation. Yes.
For decades, the wound from the HUAC testimony
remained open. The folk community had moved on,
but the betrayal was a historical scar. However,
time and age have a way of softening rigid lines.
In 1993, there was a benefit concert in New York
City. Burl Ives, who was 84 years old and using
a wheelchair, came out on stage. And joining
him on that stage was Pete Seeger. That must
have been something to see. They had actually
managed to reconcile privately years earlier,
but this was their public moment. Together, the
two men who had been violently torn apart by
the geopolitical paranoia of the 1950s, the man
who named names and the man who was blacklisted,
sat together and sang The Blue Tail Fly. It is
a profoundly moving resolution. It brought closure
to the deepest, most agonizing crucible of his
life. After all the reinventions, the Oscar win,
the Nashville hits, the Christmas immortality,
his story was allowed to end on a note of genuine
harmony with his original community. The wayfaring
stranger was finally welcomed back home. Burroughs
had officially retired from show business on
his 80th birthday in 1989. In the summer of 1994,
the longtime pipe and cigar smoker was diagnosed
with oral cancer. After undergoing several operations,
he made the decision to refuse further surgery.
He passed away on April 14th, 1995 at his home
in Washington at the age of 85. He was brought
back to where his journey began, buried at Mound
Cemetery in Hunt City Township, Illinois. From
singing in a Jasper County garden to broadcasting
to millions to shaping the golden age of cinema
and back to the soil of Illinois. Which brings
us to the ultimate takeaway for you, the listener.
We've spent this time charting one of the most
chaotic, multi -faceted careers in entertainment
history. When you are facing a massive pivot
in your own life, whether that pivot is forced
upon you by an economic shift, a personal crisis,
or a choice you make to walk out of a situation
that is draining your soul, remember the mechanics
of Burr Lives. Absolutely. He didn't just change
jobs. He didn't erase his past. He took the tools
he gathered, his unmatched Juilliard vocal control,
his deep hobo knack for storytelling, his ruthless
resilience, and he adapted them to the medium
of the moment. He survived by refusing to be
defined by a single title. He proved that a life
isn't a single straight rail line. It is a series
of interconnected jumps. We are so often conditioned
to think we must pick a path and stubbornly stay
on it, but consider the alternative history.
If Burl Ives had never stormed out of that Beowulf
lecture, if he had just sat there, been a good
student, and finished his teaching degree, or
if the brutal claustrophobic pressures of the
Cold War hadn't forced him to completely abandon
his folk persona and reinvent himself as a serious
dramatic actor, would he have ever held that
Oscar? Would he have ever become the voice of
our holidays? The friction, the rejection, and
the forced transitions are what created the art.
So we want to leave you with a final thought
to mull over. What shattered window in your own
life, what bridge you had to burn, what door
you angrily slammed, what sudden chaotic break
from your expected path might actually be the
exact starting point of your greatest reinvention.
Sometimes the broken pieces of glass on the floor
are just pointing the way to a new open road.
A perfect thought to end on. Thank you for joining
us on this deep dive into the legacy of the ultimate
wayfaring stranger, Burl Ives. Keep looking for
those open roads.