''The Wayfaring Stranger'' (Asch 345) is an album consisting of three 10-inch, 78 rpm records by Burl Ives released on Asch in 1944. It should not be confused with Ives' 1944 album for
Columbia Records
Columbia Records is an American record label owned by Sony Music, Sony Music Entertainment, a subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America, the North American division of Japanese Conglomerate (company), conglomerate Sony. It was founded on Janua ...
(C-103) – also called '' The Wayfaring Stranger'' and itself a re-release of a 1941 album on
Okeh Records
Okeh Records () is an American record label founded by the Otto Heinemann Phonograph Corporation, a phonograph supplier established in 1916, which branched out into phonograph records in 1918. The name was spelled "OkeH" from the initials of Ott ...
– which contains different songs. The Asch album includes the first releases of two
signature song
A signature (; from la, signare, "to sign") is a Handwriting, handwritten (and often Stylization, stylized) depiction of someone's name, nickname, or even a simple "X" or other mark that a person writes on documents as a proof of identity and ...
The Blue Tail Fly
"Jimmy Crack Corn" or "Blue-Tail Fly" is an American song which first became popular during the rise of blackface minstrelsy in the 1840s through performances by the Virginia Minstrels. It regained currency as a folk song in the 1940s at th ...
."
The same collection of songs was reissued in 1947 on the Stinson label as a 78-rpm album (Stinson 345), then a 10-inch LP (Stinson SLP-1) in 1949, a 12-inch LP c. 1954 (also with catalog number Stinson SLP-1), retitled ''Blue Tail Fly and Other Favorites'', and finally a
cassette tape
The Compact Cassette or Musicassette (MC), also commonly called the tape cassette, cassette tape, audio cassette, or simply tape or cassette, is an analog magnetic tape recording format for audio recording and playback. Invented by Lou Ottens ...
(Stinson CA-1). All of the Stinson releases with the exception of the 78-rpm album had two bonus tracks: " The Fox" and "
Brennan on the Moor
William "Willy" Brennan (also known as John) was an Irish Highwayman caught and hanged in Cork in either 1804Norman Cazden, Norman Studer, ''Folk songs of the Catskills'', State Univ of New York Press, 1983, pg 414 1809 or 1812, whose story was i ...
."
In 1948 Burl Ives also released an autobiography with the same title. Ives, Burl (1948). Wayfaring stranger. Whittlesey House, New York, 253 pages