#24: Mary Ann Regrets by Burl Ives

City: Kingston, ON
Radio Station: CKWS
Peak Month: January 1963
Peak Position in Kingston ~ #6
Peak position in Vancouver ~ #38
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #39
YouTube: “Mary Ann Regrets”
Lyrics: “Mary Ann Regrets”

Burl Icle Ivanhoe Ives was born in 1909 in Hunt City, Illinois. As a youngster, one day Ives was singing in the garden with his mother, and his uncle overheard them. He invited his nephew to sing at the old soldiers’ reunion in Hunt City. The boy performed a rendition of the folk ballad “Barbara Allen” and impressed both his uncle and the audience. He went to college from 1927 to 1929, but decided he was wasting his time. In 1930, he began traveling across the USA as an itinerant singer during the early 1930s, earning his way by doing odd jobs and playing his banjo. He was jailed in Mona, Utah, for vagrancy and for singing “Foggy Dew” (an English folk song), which the authorities decided was a bawdy song. Around 1931, he began performing on WBOW radio in Terre Haute, Indiana.

In 1933, Ives also attended the Juilliard School in New York. He made his Broadway debut in 1938 with a small role in Rodgers and Hart hit musical, The Boys from Syracuse. In 1939, he joined his friend and fellow actor Eddie Albert, who had the starring role in The Boys from Syracuse, in Los Angeles. The two shared an apartment for a while in the Beachwood Canyon community of Hollywood.

In 1940, Ives named his own radio show The Wayfaring Stranger, after one of his ballads. Over the next decade, he popularized several traditional folk songs, such as “Foggy Dew”, “The Blue Tail Fly” (an old minstrel tune now better known as “Jimmy Crack Corn”), and an old hobo song titled “Big Rock Candy Mountain”. He was also associated with the Almanacs, a pacifist folk-singing group whose members included Woody Guthrie, Will Geer, Millard Lampell, and Pete Seeger. After American entered WWII, the Almanacs changed their stance. Ives and the Almanacs rerecorded several songs in favor of US entry into the war.

In 1942, Burl Ives was drafted into the US Army. He was cast in Irving Berlin’s musical comedy film This is the Army. When the show went to Hollywood, he was transferred to the Army Air Forces. He was honorably discharged, apparently for medical reasons, in September 1943. Between September and December 1943, Ives lived in California with actor Harry Morgan. In December 1943, Ives went to New York City to work for CBS Radio for $100 a week. In 1944, he recorded “The Lonesome Train”, a ballad about the life and death of Abraham Lincoln. On December 1, 1945, he played to a packed house at Town Hall in New York City. In 1946, he was cast as a singing cowboy in the western Smoky.

In 1948, he recorded “Blue Tail Fly” with the Andrews Sisters, and it charted to #24 on the Billboard pop chart. The next year, “Lavender Blue” peaked at #1 on the Australian pop chart, and #16 on the Billboard pop chart. Ives introduced the song in the 1949 film So Dear To My Heart.

In 1949, he released his third songbook, Favorite Folk Ballads of Burl Ives: A Collection of 17 Folk Songs and Ballads with Guitar and Piano Accompaniment.

In 1950, the journal Counterattack published Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television. Burl Ives was named in the Report and blacklisted along with hundreds of other entertainers including Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, and Pete Seeger. While he was barred from American entertainment, Ives performed on the BBC program Children’s Hour. Ives also performed at the Royal Coronation festival on May 10, 1952, at the Royal Festival Hall.

In 1952, he cooperated with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and agreed to testify, fearful of losing his source of income. Ives’s statement to the HUAC ended his blacklisting, allowing him to continue acting in movies, but it also led to a bitter rift between Ives and many folk singers. Pete Seeger accused Ives of naming names and betraying the cause of cultural and political freedom to save his own career. Seeger publicly ridiculed Ives for attempting to distance himself from many of the far left organizations he had supported. In 1993, Ives, by then using a wheelchair, reunited with Seeger during a benefit concert in New York City, having reconciled years earlier. They sang “Blue Tail Fly” together.

His version of “On Top Of Old Smoky” reached #10 in 1951. That year, his children’s song “The Little White Duck” peaked at #15 in Australia. In 1953, Ives released the Burl Ives Song Book.

In the spring of 1955, Burl Ives was on the big screen as part of the cast for East of Eden, starring James Dean. In 1958, he appeared in the film Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman.

That year he also starred in Wind Across the Everglades and Desire Under the Elms. A fourth film, The Big Country, earned Burl Ives an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

Ives appeared on What’s My Line? as the Mystery Guest on the episodes for August 7, 1955 and February 1, 1959.

Burl Ives had a break from recording song after 1957. But he was back in 1961 with a Top Ten hit titled “A Little Bitty Tear”, climbing to #3 in Australia, and #9 in the UK and USA. And in 1962, “Funny Way of Laughin'” was a Top Ten hit in Australia and the USA. That year Ives appeared alongside Rock Hudson in the movie The Spiral Road. 

In 1963, he released the album, Burl, and a track from the album as a single which was titled “Mary Ann Regrets”.

“Mary Ann Regrets” was written by Harlan Howard. He was born in Detroit in 1927. He served as a paratrooper when he joined the United States Army in 1947. After he was discharged, he moved to Los Angeles and worked as a manual laborer while hoping to get a break as a songwriter. In 1958, his song “Pick Me Up on Your Way Down” became a #2 hit on the country charts for Charlie Walker. In 1959, he penned a Top 5 country hit for Kitty Wells titled “Mommy for a Day”. His biggest hit was “Heartaches By the Number”, a #2 hit for Ray Price on the country chart in ’59, which was a number-one hit for Guy Mitchell on the Billboard Hot 100.

In 1960, Howard was working in a book bindery in Huntington Park for $200 a week. He opened the mail one day and found Columbia Records had delivered him a royalty check for $48,000 for “Heartaches By the Number”. Within days another one, for $52,000, arrived. Harlan Howard told The Times in 1992, “I went out and did the typical hillbilly thing: I bought a brand-new white-on-white Coupe de Ville. Paid $5,200 cash for it…. The next thing I did was move to Nashville and hit the ground running, writing day and night for 10 to 12 years.”

In 1960, he penned two Top 5 country hits for Buck Owens: “Above and Beyond” and “Excuse Me (I Think I’ve Got a Heartache)”. Between 1958 and 1993, Harlan Howard had many of his songs crack the Top Ten on the Billboard country charts. This includes “I Fall To Pieces” for Patsy Cline, “Heartbreak U.S.A.” for Kitty Wells, “I’ve Got A Tiger By the Tail” for Buck Owens, “She Called Me Baby” for Charlie Rich, “I Don’t Know A Thing About Love” for Conway Twitty, “Why Not Me” for The Judds, “Somebody Should Leave” for Reba McEntire, and “Blame It On Your Heart” for Patty Loveless. He also wrote “Busted” for Ray Charles, and a number-one R&B hit for Joe Simon called “The Chokin’ Kind”. He was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, and died at the age of 74 in 2002.

“Mary Ann Regrets” is a song about a guy whose “saved up some money to buy my sweetheart some flowers.” He’s not made of money, but he adores Mary Ann. He set up a date with her on a Saturday. However, he gets a letter in the mail from her mother. It it she writes, “We’re leaving for Europe next week, and she’s busy til then.” Though Mary Ann loves the suitor, her parents view him as “too poor,” and he doesn’t fit in their plans for her. He doesn’t hear from her, but he reads in the papers (society columns) of the places she’s visited overseas. However, Mary Ann is inconsolable. He learns “Mary Ann died… she just wasted away.” Stricken with the news, he is convinced, “if I could have seen her, I know she’d be living today.” But instead of wearing his wedding ring, now she’s wearing a “blanket of stone.”

The album liner notes from Burl exclaim: Here’s Burl Ives again, the singer who has carved a niche for himself in the world of music. Burl is a man always true to the song he sings and always true to himself. Hence, any song he sings becomes popularly known as a “Burl Ives” song…. Now folksongs are not only a thing of the past. Men are the same today, and there are folksongs being created today.

The men who write of today’s “Heartaches,” as Burl calls them, come seeking him out to record the songs that he believes are their poetry. Burl says, “They have an authentic vital musicianship which will tell tomorrow’s generation of the things of which we dream, and to which we aspire in these tremendous years, the 60s…. From among these stand out Harlan Howard, Hank Cochran, Mel Tillis, and John C. Parkes, whose songs are always direct honest statements of life, sometimes whimsical, sometimes sad, but always material with which America’s greatest balladeer, Burl Ives, can sing directly to the hearts of Americans…  

“Mary Ann Regrets” peaked at #2 in Calgary, #5 in Lethbridge (AB) and Buffalo, #6 in Kingston (ON), Pittsburgh, Halifax (NS), and Toronto, #8 in Montreal and Eureka (CA), #9 in Leamington (ON), #11 in Vancouver (WA), and #13 in Ottawa. Internationally, “Marry Ann Regrets” peaked at #6 in Canada, #15 in Australia and #39 on the Billboard Hot 100.

In 1964, Burl Ives co-starred in the WWII-themed movie Ensign Pulver, and a fantasy-comedy movie with Tony Randall and Barbara Eden called The Brass Bottle, in which Ives played a genie. That year Ives was the narrator for the Christmas-themed animated film Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. 

From the film came “A Holly Jolly Christmas”, a perennial favorite during the holiday season. The single has peaked at #3 on the Billboard Hot 100, #6 on the RPM Canadian Top 100 Singles chart, #11 in Australia, #13 in Croatia, #15 in New Zealand, #16 in Latvia, #17 in Lithuania, and #18 in Hungary. Also in 1964, Burl Ives sang “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly” for the award-winning National Film Board of Canada 5-minute cartoon I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.

Ives last notable charting single was “Pearly Shells” in 1964, which made the Top 30 in Australia, and #12 on the Adult Contemporary Billboard chart in the USA.

In the 1965-66 TV season, Burl Ives starred as the lead in the sitcom O.K. Crackerby! about a billionaire widower from Oklahoma. From 1968 to 1972, he played an attorney in the TV show The Bold Ones: The Lawyers. From 1971 to 1973, Ives appeared as part of the main cast in the Western Alias Smith and Jones. He also had guest appearances on Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, Roots, Little House on the Prairie, and The New Adventures of Heidi, among others. In 1976, Ives was featured as a main character in Little House on the Prairie season 3 episode 10 titled “The Hunters”. In the 1970s and 80s, Ives appeared in TV commercials for Luzianne Tea.

Between 1946 and 1988, Burl Ives appeared in over forty movies. Over the decades, Burl Ives released over twenty songbooks. He also released one hundred albums. In his final years, Burl Ives lived in Anacortes, Washington State. Since 2017, the Anacortes Museum has featured a holiday exhibit each December

A longtime smoker, Burl Ives died at the age of 85 in 1995 of cancer.

December 2, 2024
Ray McGinnis

References:
“Burl Ives, the Folk Singer Whose Imposing Acting Won an Oscar, Dies at 85,” New York Times, April 15, 1995.
“Burl Ives Holiday Exhibit at the Anacortes Museum all December: Abominable selfies are back!,” Anacortes Museum, 2017.
Michele Delgado, “The Magical Animation of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” Smithsonian, December 23, 2019.
Burl Ives (singer/narrator), “I Know an Old Lady who Swallowed a Fly,” National Film Board of Canada, 1964.
Burl Ives, “Best Supporting Actor,” Academy Awards, 1959.
“The Wayfaring Stranger Burl Ives: “It’s Just Me and My Guitar,” Washington Star, December 18, 1977.
Studs Terkel, “Burl Ives Discusses his Background” (1960 ?)
Geoff Boucher, “Harlan Howard, 74, Prolific Songwriter,” Los Angeles Times, March 5, 2002.