My first post to The You Tubes

Last week, I had a song stuck in my head that I hadn't heard in years, Ghost Riders In The Sky. While I concede it's a little corny and old fashioned, I like it a lot. I'm not sure what brought it to mind, but I think it might be that it's similar in rhythm to an old folk song named Buffalo Skinners, which I have on my iTunes list sung by Raphael Boguslav, a folk musician in the 1950s and 1960s who went into calligraphy as a profession. You can see his calligraphy work on The You Tubes through this link.


Thinking about Ghost Riders In The Sky running through my head, it only made sense I get a version on my computer. I mean, what's 99 cents? And 99 cents on a credit card bill seems even smaller. There are about a jillion versions, the most famous by the baritone singer Vaughn Monroe. The song is made to be dramatic and bombastic, and after Monroe made a big hit of it, every version thereafter seemed to be about virtuosity or big production values.

But then I listened to about thirty seconds of a version by Burl Ives. He was the first to record the song in February 1949 and his version is very simple, just Burl singing in his haunting tenor voice and strumming a guitar. much sparser than Monroe's big hit recorded a month later or the famous jangly guitar version by Duane Eddy decades after. I decided to plunk my money down to get the Burl Ives version.

I went to The You Tubes to see what was there. There were lots of versions, naturally, including one by Burl Ives. But it was a later recording that made a big production number of it, like almost all recordings after Monroe set the standard. I decided I would put up the Burl Ives original.


I made a "video" with iMovie. It's just a title card and pictures of Burl alternating with illustrations of the story. I thought it would be better than looking at a blank screen.

The process takes a while, but now that I know how to do it, I'll be adding more videos to my channel. For the most part, I'll stick to putting up songs of my own to avoid any copyright hassles, but I'm also thinking of putting up some of the really rare stuff I have on my ITunes collection, most especially the songs of Raphael Boguslav from his album from the 1950s Songs From A Village Garrett.

Let me know what you think, either with comments here or in the comment section of the video.