Burns, Ethel

Ethel Burns (ca. 1908-1998, born Ethel Feingold) grew up in Brooklyn, the child of Russian immigrants. She studied piano and graduated from the Juilliard School and Columbia University. She began teaching music at Boys High School in Williamsburg in 1938. There, she formed the Melody Men, a racially integrated chorus that performed around New York City and the Catskills. Following a brief marriage to another teacher named Bernstein, she took a shortened version of that name.

In 1950, Burns took a job at WNYE, the radio/television station of the city's Board of Education, where she co-created a radio show about music for grade schoolers called It's Fun To Sing. She produced several other programs for the station before moving to WCBS in 1959. There, she co-created the television program American Musical Theatre. The show featured performers, writers and directors from the Broadway, opera and ballet worlds discussing and performing their art before an audience of students. An early form of public television, the show's guests included Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon, Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, Richard Rodgers, Harry Belafonte, Richard Burton, Sammy Davis Jr., Marc Blitzstein, Edward Villella, Abe Burrows, Sally Anne Howes, Stephen Sondheim, Roberta Peters, Shirley Verrett, Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Jule Styne, and Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Lowe. The weekly half-hour program, which ran for six years, won three Emmy Awards and was also broadcast in Australia, Japan, England and Canada.

Following the cancellation of American Musical Theatre, Burns produced Dial M For Music, a series featuring jazz musicians. Among its guests were the Count Basie Orchestra, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Herbie Mann, Carmen McRae, Coleman Hawkins, Cannonball Adderley, Art Blakey, Horace Silver, The Modern Jazz Quartet, Dave Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespie and Maynard Ferguson. That program, too, won an Emmy, as did Our American Musical Heritage, a series Burns produced featuring jazz and other types of American music.

The assassination of Robert Kennedy spurred Burns to produce A Contemporary Memorial, a musical tribute to Kennedy featuring Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, Dizzy Gillespie, the Woody Herman Orchestra, the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Horace Silver, Grady Tate and Joe Williams. Burns retired in the early 1970s.

Source: Blumenthal, Ralph, "The Legacy of a Stage-Struck Teacher; Dusty Treasures Reveal a Golden Era for Broadway, TV and Ethel Burns (Who?)," New York Times, October 22, 1998.

From the guide to the Ethel Burns papers, 1954-1975, 1954-1970, (The New York Public Library. Music Division.)