Tom Ligon Dead: ‘Bang the Drum Slowly’ Actor Was 85

Tom Ligon, who portrayed backup catcher Piney Woods and performed the cowboy ballad “Streets of Laredo” in the poignant baseball drama Bang the Drum Slowly, has died. He was 85. 

Ligon’s death was reported Monday by SAG-AFTRA New York Local. A longtime resident of Greenwich Village, he served as its National Seniors Committee chair and New York Seniors Committee co-chair.

The blue-eyed Ligon also starred as a hillbilly demolition derby driver in 1971’s Jump (also known as Fury on Wheels) and appeared two years later in another movie revolving around car racing, The Last American Hero, starring Jeff Bridges.

On television, Ligon was involved in a love quadrangle as Lucas Prentiss on the CBS soap opera The Young and the Restless from 1978-82 and recurred as the prisoner Alvin Yood, a small-town sheriff convicted of aggravated assault, on HBO’s Oz from 2001-03.

In 1969, he starred on Broadway opposite Geraldine Page in Angela and alongside Sandy Duncan in the two-hander Love Is a Time of Day, but both plays lasted a total of 12 performances.

In Paramount’s Bang the Drum Slowly (1973), directed by John D. Hancock, Ligon plays the guitar and sings “Streets of Laredo” (The Cowboy’s Lament) in the New York Mammoths locker room during a rain delay as his teammates, including those played by Robert De Niro — he’s the starting catcher who’s terminally ill with Hodgkin’s disease — Michael Moriarty and Danny Aiello, listen on.

Thomas Bryant Ligon was born in New Orleans on Sept. 10, 1940. His father, Walter, was a U.S. Army colonel who later worked for the Defense Department.

Ligon attended St. Albans School in Washington and then Yale University, where he starred as Kilroy in Tennessee Williams’ Camino Real and reportedly got the attention of the playwright.

He graduated from college as an English major in 1962 and pursued acting in New York, where he shared a $25-a-month sublet in the Village with another young actor, Sam Waterston.

He made it to Broadway in 1963 in Have I Got a Girl for You!, but the comedy closed on opening night.

In 1964, Ligon starred in the title role in Billy Budd at the Arena Stage in Washington and made his big-screen debut in Michael Roemer’s acclaimed drama Nothing But a Man, starring Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln.

He made a splash in 1968 with an off-Broadway turn in the long-running Your Own Thing, then appeared as a naïve youngster in Joshua Logan’s Paint Your Wagon (1969), starring Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin.

Meanwhile, he continued to act on the stage; in 1972, he starred off-Broadway with Rue McClanahan in God Says There Is No Peter Ott, and in 2007, he had the title role in an early Queens Theater workshop production of Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo (Robin Williams played the part in the 2011 Broadway production).

Ligon also was in the films Joyride (1977) and Cutting Class (1989) — his son in the latter was played by an unknown Brad Pitt — and appeared on episodes of Medical Center, Baretta, Charlie’s Angels, Police Woman, Starsky & Hutch, Baa Baa Black Sheep, Dallas, Law & Order and The Heart, She Holler.

In addition to The Young and the Restless, he worked on such other soaps as Loving, Santa Barbara, Another World and All My Children.

He was married to actress and dialect coach Katharine Dunfee Clarke (K.C. Ligon), daughter of actors David Clarke and Nora Dunfee, from 1976 until her 2009 death from a blood disorder at age 60.