I'm very new to Mudcat (and thankful for the serendipity that led me here) and had forgotten until reading other threads how much a part of my musical heritage are Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Homer & Jethro, the Rooftop Singers. Thanks for the reminders. Burl Ives occupies a less than major, but recurring place. I'm fairly sure my parents were fans of his radio program. I sang along to "Big Rock Candy Mountain" in grade school years (picture the reaction if a 2nd grader today joined in on "the buzzin' of the bees in the cigarette trees..") and from teen years remember "Mr. In-between." In my 20s, read something somewhere that implied he had been a snitch for Joe McCarthy, which inspired a two-decade Burl boycott that segued into soul-searching when I saw a picture of Pete Seeger (who didn't talk to HUAC and paid for it) performing with Ives not too long before Ives died. If there's some lesson here about separating artists from their politics, I'm not sure that I've fully come to grips with it.