Musicians and poets at a St Ives festival fringe event, September 2006

Burl Ives sings from Rudolph the Red-Nosed reindeer

A Night of Ives
A Collection of David Ives Comedies

Directed by Angela D. Miller

This is a Play Trailer / Preview for a production running at UTAS Annexe Theatre July 10th-11th only. Bookings: 6324 4450
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Playler™ Design: Chris Jackson ©2008  less

Burl Ives sings from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

Princess and I enjoying a beautiful Indian Summer. Princess is 10 weeks old now.
Music is "Goober Peas" - Burl Ives

It's my version of what it would sound like if Celtic Frost sang Froggie Went A Courtin' to the tune of Circle of the Tyrants.

This is one of the best-known of all the ballads collected by Francis James Child. There are hundreds of variations and many different tunes. The story is straightforward: The heroine rejects her lover's   more...advances. He dies of a broken heart. She realises she made a mistake and dies as well. They are buried side by side, a rose grows from his heart and a briar from hers, and they tie themselves into a lover's knot - so love has triumphed after death.

The first known reference to the song occurs in the diary of Samuel Pepys, on January 2, 1666, when he reports hearing it sung by an actress he liked by the name of Mrs. Knipp, though no printed versions have been found until the following century.

I first heard this sung by Burl Ives on his 1953 10 inch Decca Album, "Folksongs about the Fair Sex". He learned this song as a young child, and sang it at his first performance - at a reunion of old soldiers in Hunt City.

I loved Burl Ives' rendition of this song from an early age, so much so that, as a teenager, I made a home movie with my younger brothers and sisters in which we acted out the story, with Burl Ives' song as the sound track. The 8mm film was unfortunately destroyed in a fire some years later.

The song has been recorded by many performers including Joan Baez, The Everly Brothers, Crystal Gayle, Simon and Garfunkel and Emmy Rossum (in the movie, "Songcatcher"),

I have uploaded an a capella version of the song previously, but this rendition is much closer to the Burl Ives version I learned as a child.

My a capella version of this song is on my fourth CD, "Pigs Might Fly and Other Politically Incorrect Ballads".  less