Burl Ives

Maternal grandson of Cyrus (1860-1938) and Sarah (née Flyn) White (1858-1928). Both were born in the state of Indiana and died in the state of Illinois.

Son of Levi (1880-1947), born in Illinois, and Cordelia (née White) Ives (1882-1954), born in Indiana. Both died in Jasper County, Illinois.

Burl Ives was one of six children born to a Scottish-Irish farming family. He first sang in public for a soldiers' reunion when he was age 4. In high school, he learned the banjo and played fullback, intending to become a football coach when he enrolled at Eastern Illinois State Teacher's College in 1927.

He dropped out in 1930 and wandered, hitching rides, doing odd jobs, street singing.

Summer stock in the late 1930s led to a job with CBS radio in 1940; through his "Wayfaring Stranger" he popularized many of the folk songs he had collected in his travels.

His Broadway debut was in 1938, though he is best remembered for creating the role of Big Daddy in the 1950s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) when it ran on Broadway through the early 1950s.

He strongly opposed the United States entering World War II until the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, after which he avidly campaigned for the US to declare war on Germany and Italy.

His four-decade, 30+ movie career began with Ives playing a singing cowboy in Smoky (1946) and reached its peak with (again) his role as Big Daddy role in the movie version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and winning an Oscar for best supporting actor in The Big Country (1958), both in 1958.

An activist liberal Democrat, in 1952 he named fellow folk singer Pete Seeger and others as possible Communists to the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) in order to avoid being blacklisted.

By the 1960s, he had hits on both popular and country charts. He recorded over 30 albums for Decca and another dozen for Columbia.

He was the visual inspiration for the original illustrations of DC Comics super-villain Hector Hammond (created in 1961), one of the Hal Jordan/Green Lantern's archenemies. Ives was 60 years old at the point. Eventually, Hammond was played by Peter Sarsgaard in Green Lantern (2011).

In 1964 he was singer-narrator of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964), an often-repeated Christmas television special.

Burl Ives was the voice of Sam the Eagle, the narrator of the classic Disneyland attraction "American Sings" (1974-1988) in Tomorrowland.

Ives officially retired from show business on his 80th birthday in 1989 and settled in Anacortes, Washington, although he continued to do frequent benefit performances at his own request.

During the first season The Ren & Stimpy Show (1991) episode "Stimpy's Invention" featured a record, "Happy Happy Joy Joy," which contained a variety of spoken-word segments meant to parody some of Ives' albums from the 1960s. When Ives saw the episode, he contacted Ren and Stimpy Show creator John Kricfalusi and said that he would have been willing to do the voice over work for it.

Was inducted into the DeMolay Hall of Fame on June 24th, 1994.