The Wayfaring Stranger Burl Ives: “It’s Just Me and My Guitar”
(And his wife, Dorothy.) He’s a beloved folk singer in the “age of rock”)
The Washington Star, December,18, 1977: Now 68, Burl Ives looks just like everybody remembers he looked before electronic music all but drowned out “The Blue-Tail Fly” and the rest of the folk songs he made famous as he traveled the land with his guitar. Baldish, with graying red hair. Red-gray beard. That incredible girth. That incredible baritone-to-basement voice that comes from those depths. Yup. Same twinkly blue eyes. Same warmth flowing out through the voice, through the guitar strings. Incredibly, there’s more to both that girth and voice than there ever was.
“People come up to me. Old people sometimes. Maybe somebody 90-years-old, and he tells me he remembers seeing me when he was just knee-high.” Burl Ivanhoe Ives laughs, deeply profundo. “You see, they’ve mixed me up with those old ballads.” But it is true that the fatherly image Ives projected in his years as a “balladeer” (he prefers that to “folk singer) hasn’t changed. There’s just more of it.
You can see and hear for yourself. Today. Burl Ives is appearing this afternoon at Constitution Hall as guest artist in the U.S. Navy Band production, “For the Love of Christmas,” conducted by Commander Ned Muffley. Admission is free, on a first-come, first-serve basis.
After a 25-year absence, “The Wayfaring Stranger” took to the road again, in 1974. Usually, “It’s just me and my guitar. No introduction. And I have a friendly talk with the audience,” he says, quietly.
He loves it. After years of stage, screen and television roles, he’s back to his irreducible minimum. But with a difference: From the ’30s through the mid-50s when he was out on the road, he traveled alone. And he didn’t like it.
Now he travels with his pretty, blonde, second wife Dorothy, 50, a former interior decorator, who is giving him “a second shot. It’s like a new life. Without Dorothy, I wouldn’t be here.” He was separated from his first wife in 1956; he and Dorothy have been married eight years. She had three children by a former marriage; he has a son, Alexander. It is abundantly clear that in his second wife, Ives has found a mentor, a friend and a comfort.
Dorothy Ives has so closely identified herself with her husband and his career that she says things like “We’ve played 40 concerts for Johnny Horizon. We did films. We were cleaning up the country for the Bicentennial.” (Johnny Horizon was the Bureau of Land Management’s symbol for community clean-up campaigns for several years, and Ives was Johnny Horizon’s voice.)
So naturally, she is there for the interview (although she has graciously asked if she should leave). There is a representative for the President’s Commission on the Handicapped, to which Ives has given much time. And Dorothy’s son, Robbie, 23. “He’s our roadie,” Ives points out proudly. Robbie, a budding pianist, is baggage carrier and majordomo in the Ives’ entourage. “He is my stepson and, I hope, a friend,” Ives says, expansively,
They are Burl Boosters, one and all Ives, a modest man, flinches when someone helpfully suggests the interviewer refer to him as a Santa Claus. “Don’t!” he says. “I don’t like this Santa Claus business.” And he recalls his early days on radio. “Because I was obese, they wanted to make this a subject of humor. I would have become a buffoon.”
Ives knew enough to put his foot down. His refusal “was the reason got ‘Cat’ “ (the role of Big Daddy in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” which he played in both the stage and movie productions). He also had major roles in “Big Country” (the movie for which he won an Oscar) and O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms.” Had he played comedy, he feels, he wouldn’t have been selected for those “heroic” dramatic roles
And although people think of Ives as a folk singer, his acting credits are long. He’s never really been out of the public eye, thanks to many television appearances, including a leading part in the series, “The Bold Ones.” He has just completed an ABC movie, “The Bermuda Depths,” which airs early next year. And he is also waiting for the release of his latest movie, “Baker’s Hawk,” which he calls a “conventional Western.” He plays the part of an old falconer who teaches a little boy how to work with a red-tail hawk, a role and movie he liked very much.
Dorothy is talking about Ives’ part as the snowman’s voice in “Rudolph,” the perennial television Christmas special. “Children recognize him as the snowman when they hear his voice,” she says. Ives is listening with one ear. He hums. He goes “bum, bum, bum” very fast. He’s tuning up his voice for the rehearsal with the Navy Band, which will soon follow: he has tuned out the chorus of praises and further amplification.
After “Cat,” Ives dropped out of the concert scene. Dorothy is explaining how, in 1974, 25 years to the day, and in the same place, Colorado Springs, Ives began touring again, with Glen Campbell’s group for a backup. Everybody said he had guts to go out there again after so long, and after such changes in America’s musical tastes. “But,” Dorothy Ives says. “it was so quiet, it was like a church. The audience was electrified. And we have been very fortunate in selling out wherever we go. The biggest one, we played to 24,000 people in Bend, Oregon.”
“Hmm, bum, bum, bum.” Ives exercises his voice; he never stopped, even during those years he was off the concert circuit. Now, it seems, he is packing houses wherever he goes. Without amplifiers. “At the height of this (rock). I was a bit dubious about going out with this tinky, tinky, tinky (pantomime playing of a guitar) and one voice competing with this tremendous amount of sound people are listening to these days. I thought people wouldn’t hear me. If I went out and sang, ‘I gave my love a cherry,’ they’d say, what’s going on there? Where is he? Just the smallness of it compared to all this amplified business.”
Does that express his feelings about music today? “What music?” he answers wryly, slyly. “I can’t understand it,” he admits. I can’t understand the words and there’s too much percussion. I’m not with it.” People, he says, have been more fascinated with the electronic sounds of the instruments, than the lyrics, but things are coming full circle — he makes a graceful circle with his large hands — and folk music is popular again.
Only Ives doesn’t really like that word folk. It doesn’t have the right connotation for what he is doing, he says. He considers his a literary art. “The words and the ideas and the poetry. There is no way to define a folk song, except to each individual there is a texture; and that makes it so. Everybody thinks ‘The Blue-Tail Fly’ is a folk song, but it’s a commercial song written for a stage show. Things become folk. There is a fine line between folk and tradition.”
Ives recites the beginning of a Carl Sandburg poem: “From here on up the hills don’t get any higher but the hollers get deeper and deeper.’” The words have been set to music and you hear them all the time these days, he says.
Speaking of Sandburg reminds Dorothy of an article written by novelist MacKinlay Kantor in which he quoted Sandburg as calling Ives “the mightiest balladeer of this or any other century.” Ives protests. “It embarrasses me, Dorothy, and, well, I don’t like it and I think it’s a ridiculous statement.”
There’s a humorous story about it, in fact. “I’ll tell you how it happened,” Ives says, bringing his wife to a temporary halt. “MacKinlay Kantor brought Sandburg and myself together. And, well, we all liked ballads. We were ballad mongers. When Mac introduced Carl to me he said (and here Ives’ voice takes on a rough, broad jovial, ho, ho, ho imitation), ‘Well, I’m certainly glad to have gotten the greatest novelist and the mightiest ballad singer together.’ At which point Sandburg said (again the imitation), ‘Well, Burl Ives is the mightiest ballad singer of any century.”
A bit of kidding among the three became a quote, Ives explains, because Kantor was doing an article on Ives at the time.
“Yes,” says Dorothy, ‘that was Colliers’ Magazine, July 1954.” Ives joins the general laughter. “That article did an awful lot for Burl.” “It did,” concedes Dorothy’s husband. “It was a good quote, but it’s embarrassing.”
Dorothy Ives also reveals that Ives will join ABC’s Howard K. Smith in Galesburg, Jan. 6 (it would have been Sandburg’s 100th birthday) for “Carl Sandburg Day” and concert; that National Geographic Magazine will be doing an issue on Ives this spring; that under construction at Western Illinois State College in Macomb, is a Burl Ives Center for the Performing Arts; that after the Beatles heard Ives’ “Coronation Concert” in London, in 1993, “they all went out and bought guitars” and that “some man in Canada did a book on folk music and on the first page is a great, big picture of Burl, and under it it says ‘In the beginning there was…’.”
Ives shakes his head and says things like, “I would say that’s a bit of an exaggeration.” Or, amused: “As Carl Sandburg would say, I contain multitudes.” Or: “Umm, bum, bum, bum, umm.” Well, there’s nobody there passing out Burl Ives bios.
The bio: Ives was one of seven children — the only one “who don’t have a tin ear.” He was born in Hunt Township, III. In his junior year at Eastern Illinois State Teachers College, in 1930, he dropped out to bicycle all over the country, playing the banjo and singing, accumulating a large repetoire of folk songs along the way. He eventually ended up in New York where he took voice lessons, which he says were useless, and went into acting.
Now that he has made his own full circle, and is out on the road again, he says he still has to work exceptionally hard. Not only exercising his daily “Umm, bum, bum, bum.”
There has to be total concentration when he sings — “to make the ancient ballads hold water before a modern audience. They must be highly concentrated within the person who is singing. If they are not, the essence of the ballad won’t be there. You cannot learn to play the guitar and learn all the words to it and just sing it. I have to get my mind back to a state of innocence. The source must be innocent.”
Original Title:
The Wayfaring Stranger Returns to the Road: ‘It’s Just Me and My Guitar’
