Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 15, 1995 TAG: 9504170030
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: ANACORTES, WASH. LENGTH: Long
``Since I was a child, I knew I was going to be a performer,'' he said in a February 1993 interview. ``It was something I knew in my heart of hearts that I would always do.''
Roaming the country as a young man, he picked up songs and stories and sang with the likes of Josh White and Woody Guthrie. Ives chronicled that era in a 1948 autobiography ``Wayfaring Stranger,'' written when he was just 38. He later admitted to a few embellishments, lamenting, ``The truth is mundane.''
At the end of the Depression he was in New York City, trying to crack the big time with a passel of home-grown song favorites like ``Goober Peas,'' ``My Gal Sal'' and ``The Blue Tail Fly,'' which has the chorus ``Jimmy Crack Corn (and I don't care).''
Poet Carl Sandburg called him ``the mightiest ballad singer of this or any other century,'' but in the early days Ives took some ribbing about ``the songs of the people'' that he loved.
One night, he broke off from a tender ballad, ``I Gave My Love a Cherry,'' to mix it up with a member of a New York audience who jeered at the ``sissy song.''
Ives decked him and ``wound up with a couple of black eyes,'' he recalled. The day after the fracas, he ran into Elia Kazan, who was casting for Tennessee Williams' ``Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,'' who was impressed.
``He said he knew then I was an aggressive male,'' Ives said. ``It's one of the reasons I got `Cat.'''
He made the role his own, getting Kazan and Williams to go along with his suggestion that the Southern patriarch be played like an old-time preacher.
The part as written was ``dull as hell,'' grumbled Ives, who was known for his trademark goatee, twinkling eyes and rotund shape. Ives played Big Daddy on Broadway, 1955, and in the 1958 film. He also appeared in ``East of Eden,'' ``Desire Under the Elms'' and ``The Big Country,'' for which he won the 1958 Oscar for best supporting actor.
His music caught on, too, topping country-western and children's music charts during the 1940s and 1950s and establishing traditions for later generations with ``Frosty,''``Holly Jolly Christmas,'' ``Little White Duck,'' ``I Know an Old Lady (Who Swallowed a Fly)'' and ``A Little Bitty Tear.''
Asked in 1993 whether he still liked to entertain children, Ives allowed that ``I never did like to sing for kids much'' and recalled with relish singing racy songs for grownups.
In the late 1980s, a degenerative bone disease began slowing him down.
And in 1993 - interviewed at the home he and his wife, Dorothy, bought here in 1990 - he said watching old movies on television was as close to Tinseltown as he wanted to be. Visitor and longtime collaborator Randy Sparks, formerly of the New Christy Minstrels, remarked that Ives ``knows everybody on the screen.''
The couple moved here from California after a visit that introduced them to sunrises over Mount Baker and the local bald eagles.
``We came to look at this house and there were two eagles sitting in a tree,'' she recalled. ``Burl collects eagles. So that was that.''
The Iveses, who have organized numerous concerts and projects for a range of causes, ``are magnificent people,'' Mayor Doyle Geer said in 1993.
The do-gooder stuff was part of Ives' lifestyle, though it wasn't always applauded. After a benefit to raise money for food aid to China in the late 1940s, Ives was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee to testify about the Communist Party's alleged use of folk music for its own ends.
He prevailed, but never forgave his tormenters. ``Scalawags,'' he said nearly 50 years later.
Ives was born in Hunt, Ill., one of six children in a Jasper County farm family. He says his clay-pipe-smoking grandmother taught him many of the songs he sang all his life, including ``Barbara Allen.''
And he sang in church: ``Our church was a little church and everybody sang ... It was an uproarious, loud, happy kind of singing.''
Ives made his first public appearance, at a soldiers' reunion, when he was 4.
``I don't remember when I started singing,'' he once said. ``There wasn't any beginning.''
In a 1987 interview, Ives said he had no thought of retiring.
``I never want to know what that word means. Does the sun retire? I'm still learning, growing and changing,'' he said.
``When you've got goals and dreams, you don't feel old.''
From 1927-30, he studied at Eastern Illinois State Teachers College, now Eastern Illinois University; he also studied at New York University in 1937-38.
His concerts eventually made his music known around the world. He appeared on Broadway in ``The Boys From Syracuse'' in 1938, ``Sing Out Sweet Land'' in 1944, a 1954 revival of ``Showboat,'' and other shows.
For a time, he appeared with the folksinging group the Weavers. He began performing on CBS radio in the 1940s and on television from the '50s on.
Among his television acting credits were the title role in the ABC situation comedy ``O.K. Crackerby,'' 1965-66, and the role of lawyer Walter Nichols on the NBC drama ``The Bold Ones,'' 1969-72.
Ives died at his home, where he had slipped into a coma early Wednesday, said his agent and longtime friend, Marjorie Schicktanz Ashley. He had been suffering from complications of mouth cancer.
Ives' wife, Dorothy, and her three adult children were with him, Ashley said.
by CNB