Wayfaring Stranger

First published in 1948, this autobiography from Burl Ives, whom Carl Sandberg calls “the greatest folk ballad singer of them all,” is as fresh and wholesome as a summer’s breeze out of an Illinois cornfield. His ballads have long been an authentic expression of his land and its people—songs his grandmother taught him in the Midwestern farm country, songs remembered by old-timers in small towns all over the land, songs he heard hobos singing—songs we have come to know and love. In Wayfaring Stranger, writing in the stirring imaginative language of the ballad, Burt Ives tells of a night spent in a haystack with a pig, and of a brief fight with a railroad cop on top of a boxcar. He hitched a ride with Al Capone’s master bootlegger; he barely escaped the clutches of an old maid in Maine; he fell in love on a Great Lakes steamer; he played for evangelists and politicians; in speakeasies and public parks. Always he listened to the people, and he learned their songs. Anywhere he could get an audience, he sang his ballads: Barbara Allen, The Riddle Song, Fair Eleanor, Old Smokey, Silver Dagger, Foggy Foggy Dew. Now in Wayfaring Stranger, he has written his own story—as warm and appealing as the songs he sings. “It’s a fine book, warm, and full-bided, like Burl himself. Burl gives the reader the combination which is in everything he sings: a sense of dignity without pretentiousness, of simplicity without sentimentality. He makes the folk feeling richly alive. Some of his little character sketches remind me of the unforgettable etchings in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg. In short, Burl tells stories just the way he plays and sings—naturally, unaffectedly, poignantly.”—Louis Untermeyer