🎼Video to Vinyl: Carol Burnett Celebrates 90!🎂And, We Celebrate Her Musical Legacy🎶

The venerable comic superstar can do more with her voice than just "do the Tarzan yell"! We take a peek at Carol's little-known musical treasures for her April 26 Birthday!

Born in San Antonio, TX on April 26, 1933, Carol Creighton Burnett was raised in the Alamo city. Her parents divorced in the late ‘30s, and moved to Hollywood, with Carol moving in with her grandmother into a one-room apartment at the corner of Yucca and Wilcox (a block north of Hollywood Blvd.), near her mother. Carol attended Hollywood High School, from where she graduated in 1951:

Shortly after graduation, she received an anonymous envelope containing $50 for one year’s tuition at UCLA, where she initially planned on studying journalism.

During her first year of college, she switched her focus to theater arts (with musical comedy as a focus) and English, with the goal of becoming a playwright. She discovered, though, that she had to take an acting course to enter the playwright program. “I wasn’t really ready to do the acting thing, but I had no choice,” Carol told the Toronto Star in 2009.

During her first performance, she got a sudden impulse to speak her lines in a new way: “Don't ask me why, but when we were in front of the audience, I suddenly decided I was going to stretch out all my words and my first line came out, ‘I’m baaaaaaaack!’”

The audience response affected her deeply:

“They laughed and it felt great! All of a sudden, after so much coldness and emptiness in my life, I knew the sensation of all that warmth wrapping around me. I had always been a quiet, shy, sad sort of girl, and then everything changed for me. You spend the rest of your life hoping you’ll hear a laugh that great again.”

“I Made a Fool of Myself……”

Becoming highly popular as a performer on the New York City circuit of cabarets and clubs by 1957, she became a surprising hit in Washington D.C. for a hit parody number called, “I Made a Fool of Myself Over John Foster Dulles” (Secretary of State at the time). That year, she performed the number on both The Tonight Show and, here, The Ed Sullivan Show:

From a 2015 interview, Carol tells the story of how the song came about, and reactions:

Putting It Together: A 1958 TV Stand-up Spot Incorporating Her Singing

Later, she performed in nightclubs in New York City and had a breakout success on Broadway in 1959 in Once Upon a Mattress, for which she received a Tony nomination:

Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall

With her 1959-1962 success on the CBS-TV The Garry Moore Show, Burnett finally rose to headliner status and appeared in the CBS 1962 special, Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall, co-starring with her friend, Julie Andrews, with the show’s performances captured by Columbia Records (jacket shown above).

The show was produced by Bob Banner, directed by Joe Hamilton (who became Carol’s husband the following year), and written by Mike Nichols and Ken Welch.

Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Program Achievement in the Field of Music, and Burnett won an Emmy for her performance.

A clip (with Carol and Julie) from the 2023 CBS-TV Special, Carol Burnett: 90 Years of Laughter + Love:

1964: Broadway Musical, Fade Out-Fade In

In late September 1964 (while Fade Out-Fade In was still on its Broadway run), Carol joined Bob Newhart and Caterina Valente in the CBS-TV variety show, The Entertainers, taped in New York City in what is now The Ed Sullivan Theater.

In order to serve as a regular host on the show, it was necessary for Carol to leave her role in Fade Out, and she was predictably sued by the show’s producers for breach of contract, resulting in her return to the musical in February 1965 for what turned out to be its final weeks.

The Carol Burnett Show (1967-1978)

The pinnacle of her glittering career was the hour-long variety The Carol Burnett Show, with the reliably solid cast including Tim Conway, Harvey Korman, Lyle Waggoner, and an 18-year-old Vicki Lawrence!

CBS initially did not want her to do a variety show, believing the variety genre could only be popular if centered around a man, but Carol’s contract (to her credit and accumulated power-in-the-biz) required that it give her one season of whatever kind of show she wanted to make!

“They said it was a man’s game—Sid Caesar, Dean Martin, Milton Berle—because it hadn’t been done,” she told USAToday in 2017. “But, that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be done.”

She shrewdly chose to carry on the tradition of past variety show successes. Carol was well aware of not only her talent (after years of experience and successes) but recognized the inherent comedy prowess and comedic timing skills of her new TV ensemble.

From late 1971 (season 5, ep 8), witness the precision and vocally-challenging arrangement given (and executed flawlessly by) Carol, and guests Bernadette Peters (no stranger to singing and stage work), and Mama Cass Elliot on Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend” (whose landmark Tapestry album, with this song, had been released earlier in 1971).

Choreography, singing rehearsals learning harmonies and arrangements, and comedy skits…they did this every week! Such was the “animal” known as the ‘70s-era, hour-long variety show! And, no one did it better than Carol.

That same year, Julie Andrews and Carol reunited at Lincoln Center, and sang this creative medley of ‘60s rock and pop hits, with both singers tackling challenging harmonies beautifully (Columbia Records, 1971):

The ‘80s brought in Stephen Sondheim’s Follies, with Carol in the supporting role of Carlotta Campion in a 1985 concert performance. This clip features rare and revealing behind-the-scenes rehearsal footage of Carol singing into a mini-tape recorder to aid in rehearsing at home:

In November 2010, Carol guested on an episode of Glee as Doris, the mother of Jane Lynch’s cheerleading coach character, Sue Sylvester, as they dueted on the Leonard Bernstein/Betty Comden/Adolph Green chestnut, “Ohio” (the show was set in Lima, Ohio). The original spoken-word section of the song was replaced with a new lyric about Sue’s parents abandoning her to hunt Nazis:

From mid-April, Carol chats on Jimmy Kimmel Live, about her career and turning 90, on the eve of her CBS-TV 2-hour Special, “Carol Burnett: 90 Years of Laughter + Love”:

Carol and Lucille Ball were close friends for 30 years until Lucy’s death in 1989. Lucy regularly sent flowers, every year, on Carol’s birthday. When Carol awoke on the day of her 56th birthday in 1989, she learned on that morning’s news that Lucy had died. Later that afternoon, flowers arrived at Carol’s home with a note: “Happy Birthday, Kid. Love, Lucy.”

Happy Birthday, Carol. Love, Your Fans.