According to TCM, Ives was born in 1909 to a family of poor farmers. A burly boy, he excelled at football and initially wanted to coach it professionally, enrolling in a teacher's college in the late 1920s. But college life was too staid for Ives, who dropped out in order to travel the West as a hobo, stealing rides on freight trains. (Ever the wit, Ives liked to call himself a "tourist without funds.")
By the 1930s he was singing and playing the banjo more or less professionally in bars, relying on his warm baritone voice and vast memory for lyrics. He had the gift of making audiences feel comfortable, and soon he found himself in demand as a singer. According to Find a Grave, he moved to Greenwich Village, in Lower Manhattan, in 1937, where he made his Broadway debut and starting cutting records. Many of these were folk songs from his hobo years, like "Big Rock Candy Mountain," but his repertoire expanded to include Nashville-style country, show tunes and, famously, Christmas carols.
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