According to Carl Sandburg, it was one of Abe Lincoln’s favorite songs. Nobody knows who wrote it, but its words got into print in 1848, in the Ethiopian Glee Book. About five years ago tubby troubadour Burl Ives first heard The Blue-Tail Fly:
When I was young I used to wait On master and give him his plate, And pass the bottle when he got dry, And brush away the blue-tail fly.
(CHORUS)
Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care, Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care, Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care, My master’s gone away.
One day he ride around the farm, The flies so numerous, they did swarm. One chanced to bite him on the thigh; The devil take the blue-tail fly!
The pony run, he jump, he pitch;
He threw my master in the ditch.
He died and the jury wondered why
The verdict was the blue-tail fly.
Burl Icle Ivanhoe Ives, 36, a jolly, round (270 Ibs.) “git-tar”-strumming balladeer, sang it on the radio, in nightclubs, on records and on Broadway (Sing Out, Sweet Land!). He made it a hit, and it helped make him one. He called it an “insect song,” just one of 350 ballads he had picked up while bumming around the U.S. singing (TIME, July 27, 1942). This month The Blue-Tail Fly turned up in a Burl Ives collection of rediscovered ballads (The Wayfarin’ Stranger; Leeds Music Corp., $1). And last week Burl sang it for the movies. Only then did it have trouble. Hollywood wanted to fancy up the lyrics.
Ives managed to talk 20th Century-Fox out of tampering with The Blue-Tail Fly, though he did have to bowdlerize his other favorite, Foggy, Foggy Dew, an old Irish ballad. The Hays Office objected to these lines:
So all night long I held her in my arms,
Just to keep her from the foggy, foggy dew..
Pink-faced, burly Burl has been on location for eight weeks at Kanab, Utah. In a rumpled, tan coat, baggy pants, and a red bandana around his throat, he looks more like a studio hand than a new star. Now about to be given a big Hollywood push, he well remembers his last trip to Hollywood, fresh out of the Army. He got a runaround. Says he: “Boy, it sure beats all the way they throw jobs at you when you finally land a good one, and the way they hide jobs on you when you haven’t got one.”
Some of Burl’s arty friends are a little afraid of what Hollywood will do to a natural, free-singing balladeer. He isn’t: “I’m strictly a fat boy who likes to set around . . . [and in the movies] you sure do. . . . It’s harder on your rear end than it is on your brain.”
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