Famed folk singer Eliza Gilkyson discusses her father, Hollywood song man Terry Gilkyson
When I undertook an assignment recently on behalf of a folk festival, the last thing I expected it to spawn was an article for a classic film column.
Yet one of the names of the many performers on the roster - Gilkyson - kept haunting me.
I played the artist's promotional CD - Eliza was the first name - and, within two tracks, added myself to the woman's long list of fans, an enthusiastic convert to her punchy, earnest lyrics set to resonant Western melodies.
Western! That was it; she was the daughter, I was sure of it, of one Terry Gilkyson, a sometime contributor, as both actor and composer, to some of the more obscure Hollywood Westerns - and, as I was about to discover, the man behind one of filmdom's most popular songs.
Terry Gilkyson - apologies are offered here to tie-dyed in the wool folkies familiar with all of this already - was a Philadelphia blueblood who, as a young man, went West, where he was soon working as a ranch hand. It was in that Depression-era atmosphere, the formative years of American folk music, that he began to absorb the idiom by which he would make his mark.
By the war years - when not serving as part of his country's last cavalry unit - he was the hit of Armed Forces Radio, known as "The Salutin' Singer." Though he welcomed his success, the shame of not belonging to a fighting unit would plague him, Eliza revealed to me, for the rest of his life.
During a 1949 relocation to Los Angeles, he befriended The Weavers, the seminal folk group featuring Pete Seeger. Though he contributed to the group's first number one hit, the alliance was an uneasy one; Gilkyson was everything that The Weavers were not: establishment, operatic in tone, and no fan of the group's pet cause, the burgeoning union movement.
These differences led to the formation of his own trio, The Easy Riders, whose fans would grow to include one of Hollywood's legendary figures - Walt Disney.
After a few years working on some of the lesser Westerns - his credits include 1951's Slaughter Trail with Brian Donlevy and 1956's Raw Edge starring Rory Calhoun - Gilkyson, who had by then penned hits for Doris Day and Dean Martin, got the call from animation's God.
Disney wanted him to convert a series of stories into song - stories, ironically, that had been a staple of the Gilkyson home when Terry's daughters, Eliza and her sister, were young: Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book.
Gilkyson threw himself into the project with considerable enthusiasm. But difficulties arose between he and Disney over ownership. In the end, Disney turned to the ever-loyal Sherman Brothers -though he did have the foresight to give in over one of Gilkyson's tunes: Terry's children's masterpiece, The Bare Necessities.
I doubt there is a child in North America born between The Jungle Book's release in 1967 and today who cannot sing that song - make that the world, as the ditty has been translated into over 100 languages.
Its success, sadly, was to be Gilkyson's final triumph. He retired to New Mexico in 1969, where a lifelong battle with alcoholism finally took him in the mid '90s.
He lives on, however, in several forms: on recordings by The Weavers, Day and Martin; in the hearts of folk music aficionados everywhere; in a place held dear by Western film fans; on DVD-equipped flat screen TVs in children's playrooms; and through his daughter, the accommodating and talented Eliza.
