The Kingston Trio
is an American folk and pop music group that helped launch the folk revival of the late 1950s to late 1960s. From its origin as a San Francisco Bay Area nightclub act through its rise to international popularity fueled by their unprecedented sales of 33 1/3 rpm long-playing record albums, The Kingston Trio helped to alter the direction of popular music in the U.S. [1]
The Kingston Trio was one of the most prominent folk music groups of the era's relatively short-lived pop-folk boom that their success helped to create. Beginning with their first album released in 1958 (which included the hit recording of "Tom Dooley" that sold over three million copies as a single), [2] the Trio released nineteen albums that made Billboard's
Top 100, fourteen of which ranked in the top 10, and five of which hit the number 1 spot. [3] Four albums charted during the same week among the Top 10 selling albums in December 1959, [4] a record unmatched for nearly 50 years [5], and the group still ranks after half a century in the all time top ten of many of Billboard's
charts, including those for most weeks with a #1 album (46 weeks for a #6 ranking) [6], most total weeks charting an album (1262 weeks for a #10 ranking) [7], most #1 albums (5 for a #10 ranking),most consecutive #1 albums (4 for a #7 ranking), and most top ten albums (14 for a #9 ranking).
The "phenomenal popularity" [8] and massive record sales of the Kingston Trio in its early days made acoustic folk music commercially viable, paving the way for singer-songwriter, folk rock, and Americana artists who followed in their wake.
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Formation of the Trio
Dave Guard (b. Donald David Guard, October 19, 1934–d. March 22, 1991) and
Bob Shane (b. Robert Castle Schoen, February 1, 1934) had been friends since junior high school at the
Punahou School in
Honolulu, Hawaii where both had learned to play
ukulele in required music classes. They had developed an interest in and admiration for native Hawaiian
slack key guitarists like
Gabby Pahinui.
[9] While in Punahou's secondary school, Shane taught first himself and then Guard the rudiments of the six string guitar,
[10] and the two began performing at parties and in school shows doing an eclectic mix of Tahitian, Hawaiian, and
calypso songs.
After graduating from high school in 1952, Guard enrolled at
Stanford University in
Palo Alto, California while Shane matriculated at nearby
Menlo College. At Menlo, Shane became friends with
Nick Reynolds (b. Nicholas Wells Reynolds, July 27, 1933–d. October 1, 2008), a native San Diegan with an extensive knowledge of folk and calypso songs—in part from his guitar-playing father, a career officer in the U.S. Navy career officer,
[11] a refined ability to sing
tenor harmonies derived from family singalongs,
[12] and the ability to play both guitar and bongo and conga drums. Shane and Reynolds performed at fraternity parties and
luaus for a time, and eventually Shane introduced Reynolds to Guard. The three began performing at campus and neighborhood hangouts, sometimes as a trio but with an aggregation of friends that could swell their ranks to as many as six or seven, according to Reynolds.
[13] They usually billed themselves under the name of "Dave Guard and the Calypsonians". Without serious aspirations to enter professional show business at the time, however, Shane returned to Hawaii following his graduation in late 1956 to work in the family sporting goods business.
Still in the
Bay Area, Guard and Reynolds had organized themselves somewhat more formally into an entity named "The Kingston Quartet" with friends bassist
Joe Gannon and vocalist Barbara Bogue, though as before they were often joined in their performances by other friends. At one engagement at
Redwood City's Cracked Pot beer garden, they met a young San Francisco publicist named Frank Werber, who had heard of them from a local entertainment reporter. Werber liked the group's raw energy but did not consider them refined enough to want to represent them as an agent or manager at that point, though he left his telephone number with Guard.
[14] Some weeks later (and following a brief period in which Reynolds was temporarily replaced in the quartet by Don MacArthur), Guard and Reynolds invited Werber to a performance of the group at the Italian Village Restaurant in San Francisco, where Werber was so impressed by the group's progress that he agreed to manage them providing they replace Gannon, in whose professional potential Werber had no faith.
[15] Bogue left with Gannon, and Guard, Reynolds, and Werber were unanimous that they should invite Shane to rejoin the now more formally organized band.
[14] Shane, who had been performing as a solo act at night in Honolulu, readily assented and returned to the mainland in late February of 1957.
The four drew up a contract as equal partners in Werber's office in San Francisco, deciding both on the name "Kingston Trio" because it evoked through its association with
Kingston, Jamaica the calypso music popular at the time and the uniform of three-quarter-length sleeved vertically striped shirts that the group hoped would help their target audience of college students to identify with them.
[17]
Era of peak success, 1957-1961
Werber imposed a stern training regimen on Guard, Shane, and Reynolds, rehearsing them for six to eight hours a day for several months, sending them to prominent San Francisco vocal coach Judy Davis to help them learn to preserve their voices, and working on the group's carefully prepared but apparently spontaneous banter between songs. At the same time, the group was developing a varied and eclectic repertoire of calypso, folk, and foreign language songs, suggested by all three of the musicians though usually arranged by Guard
[18] with some harmonies created by Reynolds.
[19]
The first major professional break for the Kingston Trio came in late June of 1957 when comedienne
Phyllis Diller canceled a week-long engagement at a small San Francisco club called The Purple Onion. When Werber convinced the club's owner to give the untested Trio a chance, Guard sent out five hundred postcards to everyone that the three musicians knew in the Bay Area
[20] and Werber plastered the city with handbills announcing the engagement.
[17] When the crowds did in fact come, the Trio had been well prepared by months of work, and they achieved such local popularity that the initial week's engagement stretched to six months.
[22] Werber built upon this initial success, booking a national club tour in early 1958 for the Trio that included engagements at such prominent night spots as
Mr. Kelly's in Chicago, the
Village Vanguard in New York, Storyville in Boston, and finally a return to San Francisco and its showcase nightclub, the
Hungry i, in June of that year.
At the same time, Werber was attempting to leverage the Trio's popularity as a club act into a recording contract. Both
Dot Records and
Liberty Records expressed some interest, but each proposed to record the Trio on 45 rounds per minute (rpm) singles only, whereas Werber and the Trio members both felt that 33 1/3rpm albums had more potential for the kind of music that the group was doing.
[23] Through Jimmy Saphier, agent for
Bob Hope who had seen and liked the group at The Purple Onion, Werber contacted
Capitol Records, who dispatched one of their top producers
Voyle Gilmore to San Francisco to evaluate the Trio's commercial potential.
[24] On Gilmore's strong recommendation, Capitol signed the Kingston Trio to an exclusive seven year deal.
[25]
The group's first album, Capitol T996
The Kingston Trio
, was recorded over a three day period in February 1958 and released in June the same year just as the Trio was beginning its engagement at the Hungry i. Gilmore had made two important supervisory decisions as producer—first, to add the same kind of "bottom" to the Trio's sound that he had heard in live performance and consequently recruiting Purple Onion house bassist Buzz Wheeler to play on the album, and second to record the group's songs without the secondary orchestral accompaniment that was nearly universal (even for folk-styled records) at the time.
[26] The song selections on the first album reflected the repertoire that the musicians had been working on for two years—re-imagined traditional songs inspired by
The Weavers like "Santy Anno" and "Bay of Mexico," calypso-flavored tunes reminiscent of the hugely popular
Harry Belafonte recordings of the time such as "Banua" and "
Sloop John B," and a mix of both foreign language and contemporary songwriter numbers, including
Terry Gilkyson's "Fast Freight" and "Scotch and Soda," whose authorship remains uncertain as of 2009.
[27]
The album sold moderately well—including on-site sales at the Hungry i during the Kingston Trio's engagement there through the summer, but it was DJ Paul Colburn at station KLUB in Salt Lake City whose enthusiasm for a single cut on the record spurred the next development in the group's history. Colburn began playing "
Tom Dooley" extensively on his show, prompting a rush of album sales in the Salt Lake area by fans who wanted to listen to the song, as yet unavailable as a single record.
[28] Colburn called other DJs around the country urging them to do the same, and national response to the song was so strong that a reluctant Capitol Records finally released the tune as a 45rpm single on August 8, 1958; it reached the #1 spot on the
Billboard
chart by late November, sold a million copies by Christmas, and was awarded a
gold record on January 21, 1959.
[29] "Tom Dooley" also spurred the debut album to a #1 position on the charts (the first album by a group to do so)
[30]and a gold record, and that album remained charted on Billboard's weekly reports for 195 weeks.
[31]
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The success of the album and the single earned the Kingston Trio a
Grammy award for
Best Country & Western Performance at the awards' inaugural ceremony in 1959. At the time, no folk music category existed in the Grammy's scheme. The next year, largely as a result of
The Kingston Trio
and "Tom Dooley", the RIAA instituted a folk category and the Trio won the first
Grammy Award for Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording for its second studio album album
At Large.
This was the beginning of a three-year run for the Trio in which their first five studio albums achieved #1 chart status and gold records and by 1961 had earned more than $25 million for Capitol,
[32] roughly $175 million in 2009 dollars
[33] and accounting for 15% of Capitol's total sales,
[32] remarkable in an era when that company was also recording
Frank Sinatra and
Nat "King" Cole at the peaks of their careers.
[clarification needed] The Trio also charted several single records during this time, made numerous television appearances, and played upwards of 200 engagements per year.
Change and a second phase, 1961-1967
thumb,
Nick Reynolds,
Bob Shane
Despite the Kingston Trio's nearly unprecedented success in record sales, by early 1961 a rift developed and deepened between Guard on one side and Shane and Reynolds on the other. Guard had been referred to in the press and on the albums' liner notes as the "acknowledged leader" of the group,
a description never wholly endorsed by Shane and Reynolds, who felt themselves equal contributors to the group's repertoire and success. Guard wanted Shane and Reynolds to follow his lead and learn more of the technical aspects of music and to redirect the group's song selections,
[35] in part because of the withering criticism that the group had been getting from more traditional folk performers for the Trio's smoother and more commercial versions of folk songs and for the money-making copyrights that the Kingston group had secured for their arrangements of
public domain songs.
Shane and Reynolds felt that the formula for song selection and performance that they had painstakingly developed and rehearsed endlessly still served them well.
[35]
Furthermore, over $100,000 appeared to be missing from the Trio's publishing royalties (an accounting error eventually rectified)
[35] and that created an additional irritant to both sides—to Guard because he regarded it as inexcusable carelessness and to Shane and Reynolds because it highlighted what they perceived as Guard's propensity to claim individual copyright for some of the group's songs,
[38] including "
Tom Dooley" (though Guard eventually lost a suit over copyright for that number to
Alan Lomax, Frank Warner, and
Frank Proffitt)
[39] and "
Scotch and Soda."
[38]
The situation became intolerable for all concerned, and Dave Guard resigned from the Kingston Trio in April of 1961, though pledging to fulfill group commitments through November of that year. Shane, Reynolds, and Werber bought out Guard's interest in the partnership for $300,000
[41] to be paid over a number of years and moved to replace him immediately. The remaining Trio partners settled quickly on
John Stewart, a 21-year-old member of the Cumberland Three, one of the myriad groups that sprang up in imitation of the Kingston Trio's success. Stewart was already well-acquainted with Reynolds and Shane, having sold two of his early songwriting efforts to the Trio, and he was a proficient guitarist, banjoist, and singer who seemed to the partners to be perfectly positioned to replace Guard.
[28] Stewart began rehearsing and recording with the group nearly immediately, commencing public appearances with the Trio in September of 1961.
The transition from Guard to Stewart appeared nearly seamless as six of the group's next seven albums between 1961 and 1963 continued to place in
Billboard's
Top Ten and several of the group's most successful singles including "
Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" and "Greenback Dollar" charted as well.
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Beginning in 1964, however, the Kingston Trio's dominance in record sales and popularity began to wane, due partly to the number and popularity of the aforementioned imitators in the pop-folk world but also to the rise of other major commercial folk groups like
Peter, Paul and Mary whose music had a decidedly more political bent than the Trio's. In addition, the
British Invasion spearheaded by
The Beatles, who were signed by Capitol just as the Trio's seven year contract was running out, depressed sales of acoustic folk albums significantly, and Capitol did not make a serious effort to re-sign the group. Werber secured a generous signing bonus from
Decca Records, and the last four albums of the Kingston Trio's first decade were released by that label. Without the production facilities of Capitol, however, and the expertise of Voyle Gilmore and engineer Pete Abbott, the Decca releases lacked the aural brilliance of the Capitol albums,
[43] and none of the four sold especially well.
By 1966, Reynolds had grown weary of the touring and Stewart wanted to strike out on his own as a singer-songwriter, so with the Trio, Werber, and Shane developed an exit strategy of playing as many dates as possible for a year with an endpoint determined to be a final two-week engagement at the Hungry i in June 1967.
[44] The group followed this strategy successfully, and on June 17, 1967, the Kingston Trio ceased to be an actively performing band.
Hiatus and the New Kingston Trio
Following the Hungry i engagement, Reynolds moved to
Port Orford, Oregon and pursued interests in ranching, business, and race cars for the next twenty years.
[45] Stewart commenced a long and distinguished career as a singer-songwriter, composing hit songs like "
Daydream Believer" for
The Monkees and "Runaway Train" for
Roseanne Cash as well as recording more than 40 albums of his own (most notably the landmark
California Bloodlines
) and flirting with chart success with both several singles and albums.
[45]
Bob Shane decided to stay in entertainment, and he experimented both with solo work. He recorded several singles, including a well-received but under-marketed version of the song "
Honey" that later became a million-seller for
Bobby Goldsboro,
[47] and with different configurations with other folk-oriented performers. Though finances were not an immediate concern—the Kingston Trio partners Werber, Shane and Reynolds still owned an office building, a restaurant, other commercial real estate, and a variety of other lucrative investments—Shane wanted to return to a group environment and in 1969 secured permission from his partners to use the mutually-owned group name for another band, with Reynolds and Werber insisting only that Shane's group be musically as accomplished as its predecessors and that Shane append "new" to the band's title.
[48]
Shane agreed and organized two troupes under the name of "The New Kingston Trio." The first consisted of guitarist Pat Horine and banjoist Jim Connor in addition to Shane and lasted from 1969 to 1973, the second including guitarist Roger Gambill and banjoist Bill Zorn from 1973 until 1976. Shane tried to create a repertoire for these groups that included both the older and expected Kingston Trio standards like "
Tom Dooley" and "
M.T.A." but that would also feature more contemporary songs as well, including country and novelty tunes. The attempt did not meet with any significant success. The only full-length album released by either group was
The World Needs a Melody
in 1973 (though 25 years later FolkEra Records issued
The Lost Masters 1969-1972
, a compilation of previously unreleased tracks from the Shane-Horine-Connor years), and its sales were negligible. Though both troupes of the New Kingston Trio made a limited number of other recordings and several television appearances, neither generated very much interest from fans or the public at large.
The Kingston Trio's third phase, 1976-2009
In 1976, Bill Zorn left the New Kingston Trio to work as a solo performer and record producer in London.
[49] Shane and Gambill replaced him with George Grove, a professionally-trained singer and instrumentalist from North Carolina who had been working in Nashville as a studio musician.
[50]
The same year, Shane secured from Werber and Reynolds the unencumbered rights to use the band's original name of the Kingston Trio without the appended "new" in exchange for relinquishing his interest in the still-profitable corporation, whose holdings included copyrights and licensing rights to many of the original Trio's songs.
[49] Since 1976, the various troupes headed and owned by Shane have performed and recorded simply as the Kingston Trio.
The Shane-Gambill-Grove Kingston Trio existed from 1976 through 1985, when Gambill died unexpectedly from a heart ailment at the age of 45. The nine years of this configuration was to that point the longest period of time that any three musicians had worked together as the Kingston Trio, and the group released two albums of largely original material.
It was during this period as well that
PBS producers JoAnne Young and Paul Surratt approached Shane and the other principals of the original group with the idea of arranging a reunion concert that would be taped and used as a fundraiser for the network. Agreement was reached, and on November 7, 1981, Dave Guard, Nick Reynolds, and John Stewart joined the Shane-Gambill-Grove Trio and guest performers
Mary Travers of
Peter, Paul and Mary,
Tom Smothers of the
Smothers Brothers, and
Lindsey Buckingham of
Fleetwood Mac at the
Magic Mountain amusement park north of Los Angeles for a show billed as "The Kingston Trio And Friends Reunion."
[52] The different configurations of the Trio took turns performing sets of the group's best-known songs with all the artists joining onstage for a finale.
More than twenty years had passed since Dave Guard had left the group, but residual tension surfaced between Guard and Shane in an article in the
Wall Street Journal that appeared in March 1982 following the national broadcast of the taped show.
Guard implicitly disparaged Shane's current group, and Shane asserted a distaste for performing again with Guard,
who had spent the intervening decades living and performing in Australia, touring sporadically as a soloist, and writing about and teaching music. Despite the unpleasantness, Shane and Guard reconciled to a large degree (even to the point of planning a possible reunion tour)
[53] prior to Guard's death at age 56 from lymphoma nine years later in March 1991.
Following the 1985 death of Roger Gambill, Kingston Trio personnel changed several times, though Shane and Grove remained constants. Bob Haworth, a veteran folk performer who had worked as a member of
The Brothers Four for many years initially replaced Gambill from 1985 through 1988 and again from 1999 through 2005. In 1988, original member Nick Reynolds rejoined the band until his final retirement in 1999. When heart disease forced Bob Shane's retirement from touring in March 2004, he was replaced by former New Kingston Trio member Bill Zorn. A year later, following Haworth's departure, Grove and Zorn were joined by Rick Dougherty, who had performed for a time with Zorn as second-generation members of another popular folk group from the 1960s,
The Limeliters.
Both the Grove-Zorn-Haworth and Grove-Zorn-Dougherty troupes of the Kingston Trio have released original CDs and DVDs, and the latter configuration continues to tour extensively under the direction of the only surviving original member Bob Shane, now sole owner of the band.
Capitol Records,
Decca Records, Collector's Choice Records, and Folk Era Records have released and continue to release compilations of older albums as well as previously-unreleased tapes of both studio and live recordings from the Kingston Trio's first ten years.
Folk music label
Almost from its inception, the Kingston Trio found itself at odds with the traditional music community.
Frank Proffitt, the Appalachian musician whose version of "Tom Dooley" the Trio re-arranged, wrote of their performance of the song on a television show:
“They clowned and hipswung. Then they came out with ‘This time tomorrow, reckon where I’ll be/If it hadn’t a’ been for Grayson/I’d a been in Tennessee.’ I began to feel sorty sick. Like I’d lost a loved one. Tears came to my eyes. I went out and bawled on the ridge.” [54]
As recently as 2006, folk traditionalist and influential banjo master Billy Faier remarked "I hear and see very little respect for the folk genre" in their music and described the Trio's repertoire as "a mishmash of twisted arrangements that not only obscure the true beauty of the folk songs from which they derive, but give them a meaning they never had."
[55]
In addition, the urban folk musicians of the time (to whom Bob Dylan referred in
Rolling Stone Magazine
as "the left-wing puritans that seemed to have a hold on the folk-music community")
[56] frequently associated folk music with leftist politics and were contemptuous of the Trio's deliberate political neutrality.
Peter Dreier of Occidental College observed that "Purists often derided the Kingston Trio for watering down folk songs in order to make them commercially popular and for remaining on the political sidelines during the protest movements of the 1960s."
A series of scathing articles appeared over several years in
Sing Out!
magazine, a publication that combined articles on traditional folk music with political activism.
[57] Its editor
Irwin Silber referred to "the sallow slickness of the Kingston Trio"
[58] and in an article in the spring 1959 issue Ron Radosh said that the Trio brought "“good folk music to the level of the worst in
Tin Pan Alley music" and referred to them as "prostitutes of the art who gain their status as folk artists because they use guitars and banjos."
[59] Following the Trio's performance at the premier
Newport Folk Festival in 1959 folk music critic Mark Morris wrote "What connection these frenetically tinselly showmen have with a folk festival eludes me...except that it is mainly folk songs that they choose to vulgarize."
[60]
However, Trio members never claimed to be folksingers and were never comfortable with the label. The liner notes for the group's first album featured a quotation from Dave Guard asserting that "We are not folksingers in the accepted sense of the word."
[61] Guard later told journalist Richard Hadlock in
Downbeat Magazine
: "We are not students of folk music; the basic thing for us is honest and worthwhile songs that people can pick up and become involved in."
[62] Nick Reynolds added in the same article: "We don't collect old songs in the sense that the academic cats do... We get new tunes to look over every day. Each one of us has his ears open constantly to new material or old stuff that's good."
[63] Bob Shane remarked years later: "To call the Kingston Trio folksingers was kind of stupid in the first place. We never called ourselves folksingers... We did folk-oriented material, but we did it amid all kinds of other stuff. But they didn't know what to call us with our instruments, so Capitol Records called us folksingers and gave us credit for starting this whole boom."
[64]
Over the years, the Kingston Trio expanded its song selection beyond the rearranged traditional numbers, calypso songs, and Broadway show tunes that had appeared on its first several albums. In an obituary for Nick Reynolds (d. October 1, 2008), Spencer Leigh wrote in Britain's
Sunday Independent
:
Looking at their repertoire now, it is apparent that the Kingston Trio was far more adventurous than is generally supposed. They introduced "It Was A Very Good Year" in 1961, later a standard for Frank Sinatra, and they were one of the first to spot the potential of English language versions of Jacques Brel's songs by recording "Seasons in the Sun" in 1963. They encouraged young songwriters including Hoyt Axton ("Greenback Dollar"), Rod McKuen ("Ally Ally Oxen Free", "The World I Used to Know") and Billy Edd Wheeler ("Reverend Mr Black"). Best of all, in 1962 they introduced listeners to one of the most poignant songs ever written, the anti-war ballad "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?" by Pete Seeger, formerly with the Weavers. [65]
Further, Peter Dreier points out that "the group deserves credit for helping to launch the folk boom that brought recognition to older folkies and radicals like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and for paving the way for newcomers like Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs, who were well-known for their progressive political views and topical songs. By the time these younger folk singers arrived on the scene, the political climate had changed enough to provide a wide audience for protest music."
The passage of time may well have made the controversy moot. Writing in
The Guardian
, again in an obituary for Reynolds, Ken Hunt asserted that "The Kingston Trio helped to turn untold numbers of people on to folk music... they put the boom in folk boom. The Kingston Trio carried the torch overseas, most notably with their international hit of 1958, Tom Dooley. They were the greatest of the bands to emerge after the McCarthy-era blacklisting of folk musicians and breathed new air into the genre."
[66]
Influence
The Kingston Trio's influence on the development of American popular music has been considerable. According to music critic Bruce Eder writing for the internet AllMusic Guide:
In the history of popular music, there are a relative handful of performers who have redefined the content of the music at critical points in history—people whose music left the landscape, and definition of popular music, altered completely. The Kingston Trio were one such group, transforming folk music into a hot commodity and creating a demand—where none had existed before—for young men (sometimes with women) strumming acoustic guitars and banjos and singing folk songs and folk-like novelty songs in harmony. On a purely commercial level, from 1957 until 1963, the Kingston Trio were the most vital and popular folk group in the world, and folk music was sufficiently popular as to make that a significant statement.
Discussing his earliest musical influences in a 2001
Rolling Stone
interview,
Bob Dylan remembered:
There were other folk-music records, commercial folk-music records, like those by the Kingston Trio. I never really was an elitist. Personally, I liked the Kingston Trio. I could see the picture...the Kingston Trio were probably the best commercial group going, and they seemed to know what they were doing. [56]
Even some staunch traditionalists from both the urban and rural folk music communities had an affinity for the Kingstons' polished commercial versions of older songs. Folk historian Ronald D. Cohen reports that a high school-aged
Joan Baez "recalled listening to the Kingston Trio driving across country; they remained her secret favorites."
[68] Even
Arthel "Doc" Watson of North Carolina, one of the most respected and influential musicians performing traditional music, remarked, "I’ll tell you who pointed all our noses in the right direction, even the traditional performers. They got us interested in trying to put the good stuff out there – the Kingston Trio. They got me interested in it!"
[69]
Other artists including
Lindsey Buckingham of
Fleetwood Mac,
[70] Timothy B. Schmit [71] and
Bernie Leadon [72] of
The Eagles,
The Beach Boys'
Al Jardine,
[73] banjo master
Tony Trischka,
[74] pop group
ABBA,
[75] Jefferson Airplane founding member
Paul Kantner,
[76] Buffalo Springfield founding member
Richie Furay,
[77] Byrds co-founder
Gene Clark,
[78], roots musician and master mandolin player
David Grisman,
[79] singer-songwriters
Jimmy Buffett,
[80] Steve Goodman [81] (composer of "
The City Of New Orleans"), and
Michael Smith [82] (composer of "The Dutchman"), folk and rock musician
Jerry Yester,
[83] and progressive jazz vocal group
Manhattan Transfer [84] among many others cite the Kingston Trio as a formative influence in their musical careers.
The
C.F. Martin & Company guitar manufacturers has attributed the dramatic rise in demand for its instruments in the early 1960s in large part to the Kingston Trio's use of their guitars,
[85] featured prominently and without compensation on nearly all of their album covers.
[86] A Martin company press release in 2007 announcing yet another Kingston Trio commemorative model guitar stated that
...The Kingston Trio changed everything about popular music - and the entire acoustic guitar industry along with it...
It was the rise of The Kingston Trio that really established Martin as "America's Guitar"...The Kingston Trio wasn't just a musical group. It was a phenomenon, as influential in its time as The Beatles would become in theirs. [87]
Satirist
Tom Lehrer has acknowledged the Trio's pioneering of college concerts, observing that before the Kingstons "there was no real concert circuit...The Kingston Trio started all that,"
[88] and in
Time
magazine, critic
Richard Corliss asserted, "In my youth, they changed pop music, and me with it."
[89]
Discography and videography
Top 40 Hits In Chronological Order
- "Tom Dooley", #1 in 1958
- "The Tijuana Jail", #12 in 1959
- "M.T.A.", #15 in 1959
- "A Worried Man", #20 in 1959
- "El Matador", #32 in 1960
- "Bad Man Blunder", #37 in 1960
- "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?", #21 in 1962
- "Greenback Dollar", #21 in 1963
- "The Reverend Mr. Black", #8 in 1963
- "Desert Pete", #33 in 1963
Awards and recognition
Grammy Awards
- 1959 Best Country and Western Recording - "Tom Dooley"
- 1960 Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording - At Large
Vocal Group Hall of Fame
Library of Congress National Registry Of Historically Significant Recordings
References
- Bruce Eder, "The Kingston Trio" Biography from http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:aifexqq5ld6e~T1
- Rubeck, Shaw, Blake et al., ''The Kingston Trio On Record'' (Naperville IL: KK Inc, 1986), p. 11 ISBN 978-0961459406
- ''The Kingston Trio On Record'' , p. 12.
- Matt Fink, "Review of ''Here We Go Again,''" AllMusic Guide from "http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:kpfwxqwgld6e
- Peter Dreier, "The Kingston Trio and the Red Scare|http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/the-kingston-trio-and-the_b_134683.html
- Joel Whitburn, ''Joel Whitburn Presents the Billboard Albums'', 6th edition, ISBN 0-89820-166-7 from http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Billboard_200
- Joel Whitburn, ''Joel Whitburn Presents the Billboard Albums'', 6th edition, ISBN 0-89820-166-7, from http://www.beatlelinks.net/forums/showthread.php?t=3008
- Richie Unterberger, Liner Notes For ''The Modern Folk Quartet'' retrieved from http://www.richieunterberger.com/modernfolk1.html 7/18/09
- ''The Kingston Trio On Record'', p. 54
- Elizabeth Wilson, "The Dave Guard Interview," ''Popular Folk Music Today'' (Spring, 1991) retrieved from http://www.kingstontrioplace.com/dgs91p21.htm 7/16/09
- ''Kingston Trio On Record'', p. 101
- Randy Lewis, Nick Reynolds obituary, LA Times (10/2/09) http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-reynolds3-2008oct03,0,6426162.story
- ''Kingston Trio On Record'', p. 97
- ''Kingston Trio On Record'', p.17
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- Bush,''Frets Magazine'' (June 1984), p. 26
- Bush,''Frets Magazine''(June 1984), p. 26
- ''Kingston Trio On Record'', p.25
- Dave Guard's name is on the copyright, but the complex story of the song's origin is related here[1].
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