Fascinating discussion, with many things I never knew.

It bears reiterating that, with Burl Ives, it was the *songs.* Burl had an instinctive feel for a good song, and drawing on his grandmother's repertoire, his adolescent listening to early country music radio shows, fellow singers, and the work of folklorists, came up with a core repertoire of traditional songs (and a few that were non-traditional) that were a revelation to people living in the 1940s and 50s, most of whom had heard very little of that sort.

It's hard to realize now, but he made tons of songs into folk standards that till then had been barely heard of by the wider US listening public. Lavender Blue. Colorado Trail. Aunt Rhody. Riddle Song. Sourwood Mountain. etc.

To pick an example: Blue Tail Fly, until he began circulating it, was an obscure minstrel-derived song; to the best of my knowledge it was almost completely unknown. He made it an American standard, one of those songs just about anybody could hum, almost as widely familiar in the national heritage as the "songbook songs" like I've Been Workin' On the Railroad or Polly Wolly Doodle.

And he did this for song after song ... 40, 50, 60 of the folksongs now best known. In about ten to fifteen years he took all those obscure songs, known only to folklorists or printed in not widely known books, and built them into a good part of the standard American folksong repertoire.

More: he put folksongs themselves in the limelight at a time when few, other than the traditional people, knew them. Before Burl there was no mass-recognized folksong repertoire to speak of. For the wider public, not reached by the other folksingers nor by the folklorists, he, more than anyone else, created it.

That's his enduring achievement.

Bob