Wayfaring stranger

Burls Ives' "long and treacherous journey" home to Illinois

By Ray Elliott

Carl Sandburg called him "the greatest ballad singer of this or any time," but Burl Icle Ives was first and foremost a southern Illinoisan. Although a citizen of the world and a longtime resident of California, Ives, who died in 1995 a month before his 86th birthday, chose to have his ashes buried beside his parents and other family members in Mounds Church Cemetery.

Nearly 80 years earlier, his family had moved from the nearby Gilbert Place, where the future balladeer was born on June 14, 1909, to Hunt City, a few miles to the northwest. He grew up there and went to Newton High School, where he played football and had the lead in an operetta called The Ring of Sawdust.

An early studio portrait of a svelte, pre "Big Daddy" Burl Ives, signed and dedicated to his mother. Photo courtesy Koger Ives

Excelling in both roles, he went on to Eastern Illinois State Teachers College in Charleston to play football and become a teacher and coach. But he took his banjo along and played for his football teammates and his fraternity brothers. That first year, Ives told me in a December 1981 interview, he made good grades, the second year not so good. The third year, Dr. Livingston Lord, the longtime college president transplanted from New England, called him into his office and said, "I think you've got too restless a spirit to be an educator.

Some say Ives took Dr. Lords advice and left without stopping by his fraternity house to gather his belongings. But in his 1948 autobiography, The Wayfaring Stranger, Ives said he left while he was sitting in an English class one day in the last semester of his junior year listening to a lecture on "Beowulf."

"There was a large map on the side of the wall, a map of the United States," he wrote. "As the teacher's voice grew dimmer, the map became more luminous. In my imagination 1 saw the mighty mountains, silver rivers, and wide sweeping plains, magnificent cities, a nation of people I knew nothing of. How I longed to see these things; how I longed to see the Liberty Bell and walk on the streets where Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin had walked.

"Before I realized what I was doing, I rose and started for the door, Ives wrote. "I went to my room and packed a change ol clothes, got my banjo, and started walking down the road."

Soon he was on the road, headed east.

"The cool wind blew in my face, he wrote, "and all at once I telt as it I had shed dullness from myself. Before me lay a long gray line with a black mark down the center. The birds were singing. It was spring. My heart jumped for joy. Life, excitement,

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experience was on this long road."

Ives walked nine miles that day and slept under a haystack that night. He stopped off in Terre Haute, Indiana, and landed a job singing for a radio station and playing semi-professional football. Then for the next several years, he traveled the country, reportedly getting to 46 of the then-48 slates. He hitchhiked or hopped Freight trains, stayed in the hobo jungles, learned new songs, and used the experiences from those years in his later work.

While in New York working to establish himself as a singer, which he later did with a radio show called "The Wayfaring Stranger," a teacher sent him to St. Paul's, an old church on the East side, to sing for the choirmaster.

"He came out and said, 'Where do you come from?' I said, Southern Illinois.' I [e said, 'What you doin' in town? Are you goin' to be a singer?' I said, 'Yeah.' He said, 'Go home,' and walked away."

Ives knew the choirmaster was wrong. Long before he started school, Ives sang in the church and learned songs from his Grandmother White.

"Somebody asked me why I became a ballad singer," he said. "I said for the same reason a dog takes alter a rabbit. It's a long way from the Gilbert Place to the Amy DuPont house (the mansion in Montecito, California, built by the DuPont heiress, where Ives lived during the 70s and '80s), though. It was a loooong, treacherous journey."

That journey took Ives into the Army during World War II for a couple of years, then on to acting in Broadway plays and movies and singing at concerts and nightclubs. It was in a New York club where, so the story goes, a heckler gave Ives' movie career a boost. He was singing while a man kept heckling him. Ives reportedly put his guitar aside, walked over to the heckler, and decked him.

One account says he did it with one punch. Another version said he came out of the fight with two black eyes. Regardless, Ives had previously planned to quit show business and head for California to sell real estate. But according to Ives, film director Elia Kazan heard about the fight and figured he had his man for Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. After landing that role, Ives never had to sell any real estate.

That year (1958) also saw him costar with Gregory Peck in Big Country and get the Academy Award for best supporting actor for his role as Peck's rival. Ives' nephew, Roger, says there's more to the story.

"Burl told me that they were going to nominate him for best supporting actor for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," Roger said at his Mattoon home. "He said the role of Big Daddy is not a supporting role in that film (which also starred Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor), but is a main character. And he told the Academy what they could do with the supporting actor nomination. So they nominated him for Big Country."

Ives continued to play concerts across the country and around the world. He was the first performer to sing alone with a guitar at Ely Palace in London and had tea with then-Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in her home during a concert tour of Israel. Meanwhile, he kept his cultural ties to the country and kept singing songs he'd known all his life. He came back to Illinois on occasion to visit family, attend funerals, and eat the country food to which he attributed his health: "cornbread, greens, everything right out of the earth."

On one trip back to Newton in the late '60s or early 70s, he said the Ives family went to a dinner for his sisters.

"I told 'em, I said, 'Now, look, I want some sassafras tea.'And we had greens. So I poured some sassafras tea. And the old sayin' when you pour your sassafras tea, they'd say, 'This is really good for you. It thins your blood.'

Ives continued: "Emory Gifford, a very bright guy who was married to my sister who passed away some time ago, was on the other side of the table and he said, T think it's the digging that thins your blood."'

In 1986, Ives returned to Illinois to receive an honorary degree from Eastern Illinois University where he'd walked away without a degree 50 years earlier.

Roger Ives said that for years his uncle kept a picture of his father, Frank, on the bathroom mirror. Every morning when Burl would walk in, he'd turn and say , "Morning there, Big Un."

When they brought Ives back for interment near Big Un and his family in Mounds Church Cemetery, singer Mel Tillis and three busloads of admirers came with him. President Bill Clinton sent his regards by letter. Scores of others came to pay their last respects, and cars lined the gravel road in front of the country church where, according to his widow, Dorothy, Burl asked to be buried next to his parents.

A year after his death, Dorothy and a few friends and relatives gathered to dedicate the tombstone that had an image of Ives etched in marble and Sandburg's definitive words, and a few lines about the artist's career carved below. The marker was set in the Ives family plot, next to his mother and father.

Burl Ives was away for a long while, but he was never far from home.

Ray Elliott is a retired high school English and journalism teacher, writer and founder of the Tales cultural journalism project born and raised near Oblong. Mr. Elliott just published his first novel, Wild Hands Toward the Sky, a coming-of-age novel set in southern Illinois during World War II and the years afterwards.

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