Eleanor Roosevelt likes to ask young musicians to perform at the White House, and young musicians naturally like to be asked. Last week Mrs. Roosevelt put on "An Evening of Songs for American Soldiers." Six of the black and white performers were from a radio program: CBS's thrice-a-week Back Where I Come From, a sustainer devoted to U. S. folk songs. Among the White House guests: the Secretaries of War, Navy, Treasury & wives, the Chief of Staff of the Army, the Commandants of Marine Corps and Coast Guard, Mr. Knudsenhillman & wives, Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish—whose assistant-in-charge-of-folk-song-archives, Alan Lomax, was master of ceremonies.
Chief white singer was Burl Ives (full name: Burl Icle Ivanhoe Ives), who sang a ballad he picked up in Ohio, The Bold Soldier. A onetime Eastern Illinois State Teachers College footballer, Burl Ives bummed around the U. S. with a guitar. His specialty is Midwestern songs. The foot-tapping Golden Gate Quartet (TIME, Jan. 27), who went to Washington by taxi ($100 round trip), sang Noah and Things Are Gonna Come My Way. Negro Joshua White, who sings at rehearsals with a lighted cigaret behind his ear, sang John Henry, Man Goin' Roun' Takin' Names.
Back Where I Come From, directed by Nicholas Ray, comes mostly from the prodigious memories of Singer Ives and Scripter Lomax. Ives can sing for hours on any subject—love, death, the open road. For one ballad alone, There Lived an Old Lord on the Northern Sea, he knows 50 stanzas. When Woody Guthrie, "Okie" balladeer, was on the program, he and Alan Lomax spent an evening singing and listing songs about animals. In six hours they listed over 200. They stopped only because the neighbors were complaining.