Before he sang a single note, he was already the voice welcoming you into the story.
Most artists on this list are remembered for a song. Burl Ives is remembered for a snowman.
When the stop-motion special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer went into production in 1964, its creators, Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass, needed a narrator with enough warmth and name recognition to satisfy their sponsor, and they landed on Ives — an Oscar winner, a folk singer with a genuinely enormous voice, and, as it turned out, exactly the right kind of avuncular presence to carry a children’s fable about being cast out for looking different. He became Sam the Snowman: banjo in hand, plaid vest, narrating Rudolph’s exile and eventual triumph with the unhurried patience of someone telling a story he already knows ends well.
Ives didn’t just narrate. He sang, too — two songs written for the special by Johnny Marks that had never existed before that broadcast, “A Holly Jolly Christmas” and “Silver and Gold,” alongside a newly recorded version of the title song itself, which had already been a hit for Gene Autry fifteen years earlier. The special aired on NBC on December 6, 1964, was seen by well over half the country that watched television that night, and has run every December since, making it the longest continuously broadcast Christmas special in American history.
What’s easy to overlook is how much of Ives’s Christmas legacy is really about voice and trust rather than performance in the conventional sense. Sam the Snowman doesn’t have flash or spectacle; he simply tells you, gently, that a reindeer with a glowing nose is going to be fine, and generations of children have believed him without question. The following year, Ives rerecorded the special’s songs with producer Milt Gabler and a fuller Nashville arrangement under Owen Bradley, releasing them as the album Have a Holly Jolly Christmas — the version most radio stations still reach for, six decades on, whenever they need something that sounds instantly, unmistakably like the season starting.
Ives had built an entire career on that same easy trustworthiness before Rudolph ever came along — folk records, film roles, a booming speaking voice that made him a natural fit for narration work of all kinds. But it’s the snowman that stuck. Ask anyone what Burl Ives sounds like, and most people won’t describe a singer at all. They’ll describe someone telling them, at the start of a story they’ve heard dozens of times, that everything is about to be okay.