Burl Ives

I was getting my hair cut the other day and my barber mentioned that she was a relative of Burl Ives, had I heard of him?

Had I heard of him? Burl Ives was one of the greatest American folk singers. He had such an iconic voice, in fact there are few voices in our musical lexicon as beautiful, singular and pure. Fogerty, Ives, Ray Charles, Seeger, the list is not that long.

Ives was a man who wandered around playing his banjo in the depression. He was jailed in Mona, Utah for vagrancy and for singing a song the authorities deemed "bawdy."

He eventually hooked up with fellow singers Woody, Seeger, Will Geer, Lampell and Lee Hays in a New York City band called the Almanacs. The Almanacs were, like the Weavers, pretty left politically and Ives was called before the HUAC committee to name communists. Seeger thought that Ives fingered him, a charge Ives denied and they had a long falling out.

I, like most of the people my age, grew up with Jimmy Crack Corn, Comin around the mountain and Big Rock Candy Mountain, a hobo song he learned on the road. Camp songs and purely American songs. It pains me that the youth of today have little knowledge of people like Ives and are not exposed to his lovely whisky tenor anymore.

An American legend.