Irving McNeil Ives (January 24, 1896 – February 24, 1962) was an American politician. A member of the Republican Party, he served as a United States Senator from New York from 1947 to 1959. He was previously a member of the New York State Assembly for sixteen years, serving as Minority Leader (1935), Speaker (1936), and Majority Leader (1937–1946). A moderate Republican, he was known as a specialist in labor and civil rights legislation.

Irving Ives was born in Bainbridge, New York, to George Albert and Lucie Hough (née Keeler) Ives. His ancestors came from England to the United States, where they settled in Boston, Massachusetts in 1635; they later helped found Quinnipiac Colony in 1638, and lived in Vermont before moving to New York in 1795. His father worked in the coal and feed business. He received his early education at public schools in Bainbridge and Oneonta, graduating from Oneonta High School in 1914.

Ives attended Hamilton College for two years before enlisting in the U.S. Army following the entry of the United States into World War I in 1917. During the war, he served with the American Expeditionary Forces in France and Germany, participating in the Meuse-Argonne and Saint-Mihiel campaigns. He was honorably discharged as a first lieutenant of the Infantry at the war's end in 1919. He then resumed his studies at Hamilton, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1920 and graduated as a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

Burl Icle Ivanhoe Ives (June 14, 1909 – April 14, 1995) was an American actor, writer and folk music singer. As an actor, Ives's work included comedies, dramas, and voice work in theater, television, and motion pictures. Music critic John Rockwell said, "Ives's voice ... had the sheen and finesse of opera without its latter-day Puccinian vulgarities and without the pretensions of operatic ritual. It was genteel in expressive impact without being genteel in social conformity. And it moved people."

Ives was born in 1909 near Hunt City, an unincorporated town in Jasper County, Illinois near Newton, Illinois; the son of Levi "Frank" Ives (1880–1947) and Cordelia "Dellie" White (1882–1954). He had six siblings: Audry, Artie, Clarence, Argola, Lillburn, and Norma. His father was at first a farmer and then a contractor for the county and others. One day Ives was singing in the garden with his mother, and his uncle overheard them. He invited his nephew to sing at the old soldiers' reunion in Hunt City. The boy performed a rendition of the folk ballad "Barbara Allen" and impressed both his uncle and the audience.

Charles Edward Ives (October 20, 1874 – May 19, 1954) was an American modernistcomposer. He is one of the first American composers of international renown, though Ives' music was largely ignored during his life, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Over time, Ives came to be regarded as an "American Original". Ives combined the American popular and church-music traditions of his youth with European art music, and was among the first composers to engage in a systematic program of experimental music, with musical techniques including polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatoric elements, and quarter tones, foreshadowing many musical innovations of the 20th century.

Sources of Ives' tonal imagery are hymn tunes and traditional songs, the town band at holiday parade, the fiddlers at Saturday night dances, patriotic songs, sentimental parlor ballads, and the melodies of Stephen Foster.

Charles Ives was born in Danbury, Connecticut in 1874, the son of George Ives, a U.S. Army bandleader in the American Civil War, and his wife Mary Parmelee. A strong influence of Charles's may have been sitting in the Danbury town square, listening to his father's marching band and other bands on other sides of the square simultaneously. George Ives' unique music lessons were also a strong influence on Charles; George Ives took an open-minded approach to musical theory, encouraging his son to experiment in bitonal and polytonal harmonizations. It was from his father that Charles Ives also learned the music of Stephen Foster. Ives became a church organist at the age of 14 and wrote various hymns and songs for church services, including his Variations on 'America' .