On 11 February 1949 Brisbane’s Courier-Mail newspaper reported that:
'The Foggy, Foggy, Dew' has been banned by the Australian Broadcasting Commission and the Federation of Commercial Broadcasting Stations. The song was featured in the film 'Smoky.' Brisbane radio stations have recordings which have been played on the air. They are by the American singer Burl Ives.The A.B.C. director of variety (Mr. H. Pringle) said in Sydney that although the song was good technically, it had suggestive implications. The president of the Australian Federation of Commercial Broadcasting Stations (Mr. J. E. Ridley) said that although the song was melodious, the words were 'a bit over the fence.'
Burl Ives was in the early years of his long career in show business, with a special emphasis on ‘folk songs’. His ‘Foggy Dew’ was not the well-known setting of the Charles O’Neill chronicle of the 1916 Easter rising in Ireland, but the traditional song with faintly risqué lyrics in which a bachelor weaver ‘woos’ a young woman ‘in the wintertime and in the summer, too’. Going by Burl’s rendition on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1953 he was not averse to spruiking the song’s double meaning. So, although Australian broadcasters considered the song 'a bit over the fence’, it doesn’t seem to have bothered American audiences.
Sing Out magazine (source of the image above) has an article on Burl at https://singout.org/remembering-burl-ives-on-the-100th-anniversary-of-his-birth/
(See previous posts on Burl downunder)
