Representative Songs: "Tom Dooley," "Where Have All the Flowers Go," "M.T.A."
Biography
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: Blind Lemon Jefferson, Benny Goodman & His Orchestra, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin -- 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, of which the Trio themselves were the defining ensemble for the next five years.
On a purely commercial level, from 1957 until 1963, the Kingston Trio were the most vital and popular folk group in the world. Their record was incontestable, one of the most popular acts in the history of Capitol Records and the American record industry, making them the most popular folk group in history, surpassing the Weavers' earlier success. Equally important, the trio -- Dave Guard, Nick Reynolds, and Bob Shane -- made folk music immensely popular among many millions of listeners who previously had ignored it.
The group's success transcended their actual sales. Without the enviable record of popularity and sales that they built up for folk music, it is unlikely that Columbia Records would ever have had any impetus to allow John Hammond to sign an unknown singer/guitarist named Bob Dylan, or to put Weavers co-founder Pete Seeger under contract; for Warner Bros. to record the Greenwich Village-based trio Peter, Paul & Mary; or Vanguard Records to do as many albums as they actually ended up recording with the re-formed Weavers in the late '50s and early '60s.
The group was founded in Palo Alto, CA, by Dave Guard (1934-1991), a graduate student from Stanford University, and two of his close friends, Bob Shane (born 1934) and Nick Reynolds (born 1933), from Menlo College. Guard and Shane had both been born in Hawaii, and had originally played together in high school in Honolulu. Reynolds hailed from Coronado, CA, the son of a career Navy officer, and had previously attended San Diego State and the University of Arizona before enrolling at Menlo College as a business major. He first spotted Shane asleep in the back of the hall during a very boring lecture on accounting, and the two became friends. They soon started hanging out, drinking, and chasing women together, and this, in turn, led to playing music, initially as a way of being popular at parties -- Shane's guitar and Reynolds' bongos became a fixture at local frat gatherings, and after a few weeks of this, Shane introduced Reynolds to Dave Guard.
It turned out that Hawaiian music fit in perfectly with the luaus that people were throwing locally, and Shane and Guard taught Reynolds some genuine Hawaiian songs. The group was playing at a local tavern two nights a week, but the formation of the Kingston Trio was still not quite in place. Shane returned to Hawaii for a time to work for his father's sporting goods company, and tried to become the future island state's answer to Elvis Presley as a solo act -- meanwhile, Guard and Reynolds began playing with Joe Gannon on bass and singer Barbara Bogue, and became Dave Guard & the Calypsonians. Reynolds then left for a time following his graduation and was replaced by Don McArthur in a group that was known as the Kingston Quartet.
Fate stepped in when a local publicist who'd seen the Calypsonians offered to help out the group, but only if they got rid of Gannon, whose bass playing was less than rudimentary. When he left, Bogue exited as well, and in the resulting shuffle, Reynolds and Shane (back all the way from Hawaii) were brought back into the group, now rechristened the Kingston Trio.
Their initial approach to music was determined by the skills that each member brought or, more accurately, didn't bring to the trio -- Bob Shane sang most of the lead parts simply because he had no familiarity with harmony singing, while Nick Reynolds sang a third above the melody, and Guard handled whatever was left above or below. Guard had taken some banjo lessons, but otherwise they were completely self-taught on their instruments, with Shane teaching Guard his first guitar chords while they were still in high school. Reynolds swapped his ukulele for a tenor guitar.
They were booked into the Purple Onion, a leading night spot in San Francisco, opening for comedienne Phyllis Diller. Guard then sent out postcards to 500 people that all three of them knew at Stanford and Menlo, inviting them to a week's worth of shows at the Purple Onion. The result was a series of sell-out shows, and a one-week engagement that was doubled, before the Trio got its own headlining gig at the club, lasting five months from June to December of 1957. During that summer, the group was spotted by Bob Hope's agent, Jimmy Saphier, who brought demo tapes of the trio to Dot and Capitol Records -- the latter label sent producer Voyle Gilmore, who had previously recorded Frank Sinatra and the Four Freshmen, to the Purple Onion, and a seven-year contract was signed soon after.
The group spent the next few months intensively rehearsing, refining, and polishing their act as they went along, secure in their position at the Purple Onion. They recognized that musical ability alone was not going to keep audiences entertained, and they quickly developed a comic stage banter, which grew out of their own personalities, and learned how to pace themselves, their songs, and their banter for maximum effect, and also how to make it sound spontaneous to audiences night after night.
The group followed the Purple Onion engagement with a national tour that took them to the Holiday Hotel in Reno, NV, Mr. Kelly's in Chicago, and the Village Vanguard in New York, all of them successful appearances. During this tour, the group recorded their self-titled debut album in a series of sessions held over the three days. That record contained a brace of classic Kingston Trio songs, including "Scotch and Soda," "Hard, Ain't It Hard," and "Tom Dooley." The latter song, picked up by a deejay in Salt Lake City who began playing it, became a single in July of 1958 -- it spent October through January in the Billboard Top Ten, selling over three million copies, and becoming, in the estimation of historian Bill Bush, one of that handful of records, such as Elvis' "Heartbreak Hotel" and the Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand," that transformed the musical landscape. In the process, the trio earned appearances on The Dinah Shore Show and The Kraft Music Hall. "Tom Dooley" was so successful that it became the basis for a feature film, The Legend of Tom Dooley -- a sort of low-budget variant on Love Me Tender -- starring Michael Landon as the doomed title character.
Their residence in San Francisco was now at the much more prestigious Hungry I. It was there that they recorded their second album, before a live audience in the summer of 1958. The album sold well despite the fact that it broke little new ground, merely showcasing the group's engaging interaction with their audience and some spirited singing. At Large, the trio's third album, was their first done in stereo, and the first recording on which the group began to change their sound, advancing it significantly from their roots. There was extensive use of overdubbing, with multiple voices, guitars, and banjos, so that there were upward of a half-dozen trio "members" heard at any one time singing and playing. By that time, they had broadened their repertory as well, to embrace R&B as well as folk songs. The trio made the cover of Life magazine on August 3, 1959, and were voted the Best Group of the Year for 1959 in the pages of both Billboard and Cashbox magazines, the twin recording industry bibles, as well as two Grammy awards.
None of this exactly pleased the serious folk audience, who felt that the Kingston Trio, in popularizing traditional songs, also cheapened them. Although the group got a reasonably enthusiastic reception at the Newport Folk Festival, they were never embraced by the folk audience of the late '50s. There was also probably some professional resentment, owing to the fact that these three college graduates in their twenties, who had never paid their dues in the labor or anti-Nazi struggles of the 1930s and '40s, or endured the frosty anti-Left political atmosphere of the early and mid-'50s, were suddenly making hundreds of thousands of dollars with the very same repertories that these serious folkies had performed for decades.
The group was, however, immensely popular with almost every segment of the mass audience, but most of all among college students, who found both relaxation and validation in their mix of folk songs, humor, and good spirits. They were sufficiently well liked by older listeners, and embraced by younger audiences to justify their appearances on television series such as The Jack Benny Show (where they mimed to their recordings of "I'm Going Home" and "Tijuana Jail," the latter sung on a set made up as -- you guessed it -- a Tijuana jail).
By the early '60s, there were lots of Kingston Trio imitators running around: the Limeliters (featuring Glenn Yarborough), who actually were contemporaries of the trio; the Highwaymen (from Wesleyan University), who scored big with "Michael"; Bud & Travis; the Journeymen, whose ranks included John Phillips and Dick Weissman, who were probably the most promising of them all; the Halifax Three (with Denny Doherty) from Canada; and, on the "big-band" folk side, the New Christy Minstrels under Randy Sparks, and the Serendipity Singers from the University of Colorado; the Big 3 (with Cass Elliot) and, later, the Shilos (featuring Gram Parsons), all capable of recording popular versions of old folk songs. None matched the trio's exposure or sales, but there was plenty of work to go around in those days, in any case -- folk music was what was happening, and other record labels and folk clubs were willing to try anything to imitate Capitol's success with the Trio. Even Roulette Records, best known for rock & roll acts and as a recording haven for veteran jazz acts such as Count Basie, had a resident folk trio in the Cumberland Three, featuring a singer/songwriter/guitarist named John Stewart. This era was later recalled and satirized in Christopher Guest's comedy A Mighty Wind, in which the Kingston Trio and other collegiate-type folk groups of the period were parodied in the guise of "the Folksmen."
The trio's record of hits continued unabated for the next two years, into 1961 -- according to Bill Bush, they accounted for 20 percent of Capitol Records' profits for the entire year of 1960, during a period when the label's roster also included such legends (and sales powerhouses) as Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole. They defined the entire folk-pop genre in much the same way that the Beach Boys defined surf music and the Beatles later defined both the so-called "Merseybeat" sound and the entire British Invasion. Their influence extended far beyond their corner of the music marketplace -- the Trio not only recorded an enviable array of hits but also introduced to the world a number of songs that became hits in the hands of others, including "It Was a Very Good Year" during the 1950s and, in the early '60s, "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." As a reflection of the group's impact, their manager, Frank Werber, was one of the most influential behind-the-scenes figures in music, occupying a position in early-'60s popular music not too far from that occupied by Beatles manager Brian Epstein in England from 1963 onward -- he could literally give some aspiring musician a good living and a future at the stroke of a pen, and record labels were eager to audition his clients as potential recording artists.
The Trio's youthful exuberance and mix of upbeat sensibilities and traditional songs seemed perfectly of a piece with the dawn of the Kennedy administration, and their music a veritable soundtrack for college life during the era. Before the new president had even taken office, however, the Kingston Trio faced its first major crisis. In January of 1961, amid growing differences over the musical direction of the group, Dave Guard left the Kingston Trio. The most serious and cerebral member of the group, Guard was the one who knew a lot of the folk songs, especially the songs from other countries, that the Trio had performed and recorded. His very sophistication, however, resulted in his departure, out of a desire to explore folk music on a broader level, with fewer concessions to popular taste. After leaving the Trio, Guard founded a quartet called the Whiskeyhill Singers with Judy Henske, David "Buck" Wheat (who had been the Trio's bassist), and Cyrus Faryar -- their one album for Capitol, done in a style very different from that of the Trio, met with little success, and the group later appeared on the soundtrack of the blockbuster Western How the West Was Won (1962).
The Kingston Trio carried on, however, its success unabated, with new member John Stewart, beginning in early 1961. Stewart, a onetime aspiring rock & roller who had switched to folk music and gotten two of his songs recorded by the Trio, was part of the Cumberland Three when Guard left the Kingston Trio. He was brought into the Kingston Trio following a lag of several months while Shane and Reynolds took time off -- their first break since 1958 -- and his arrival reinvigorated the Trio personally and professionally. Beginning with "Take Her out of Pity," a group original featuring Stewart's first lead vocal with the Trio, and such Stewart compositions as "Coming From the Mountains," the group continued evolving musically, and their records kept selling.
Fate intervened soon after he arrived when the group happened to catch a performance by the trio Peter, Paul & Mary, and heard their rendition of a Pete Seeger song entitled "Where Have All the Flowers Gone." The Kingston Trio duly recorded their own version of the song, which marked a new era for the group -- though the Trio had avoided being topical in a confrontational way, they had added Woody Guthrie songs such as "Pastures of Plenty" to their repertory during the Guard era, and recorded the anti-Nazi ballad "Reuben James" on their first album with Stewart, and introduced some politics in their concerts as time went by; College Concert, recorded in December of 1961, included the comment in the intro of "Goin' Away for to Leave You" describing a piece of square dance music requiring the dancer to throw one's partner "as far right as possible" as "the John Birch Polka," a reference to the ultra-right wing John Birch Society (whose followers believed, among other things, that President [and former General of the Army] Dwight Eisenhower was a communist stooge).
The Trio's version of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" reached number 21, not as high a place as many of their earlier singles, on the pop charts, but it also got picked up by a new category of radio station and listener, making number four on the Billboard Easy Listening chart. More than that, as a song of social protest and serious intent, it became the favorite Trio song for millions of younger folk listeners who had come along in the years since "Tom Dooley." What's more, the timing of the single could not have been better if it had been planned -- it gave the previously apolitical group an antiwar statement to their credit on the pop charts, just as American college campuses were slowly becoming politicized again for the first time since the 1940s; and although American troops' involvement in combat in Vietnam was still a few years away, the Cuban Missile Crisis in the fall of 1962 spurred a small but vocal antiwar movement into existence, whose members often overlapped with the folk music audience.
The trio was still doing standing-room-only business into 1962 and early 1963 -- by then they'd even recorded one song that expressed the goals and hopes of the burgeoning civil rights movement, "Road to Freedom" on the album #16. The mere fact that it was their 16th album posed problems for the Trio, however -- coming up behind them were performing groups that were more directly political than they were, and more attuned to the next wave of folk music. Where the Trio did Seeger and Guthrie songs, other performers, most notably Peter, Paul & Mary, had picked up on the compositions of Guthrie's self-appointed successor, Bob Dylan, and were soon topping the charts and raising the public consciousness with recordings of "Blowin' in the Wind" and other songs.
The Kingston Trio, by contrast, still had pure entertainment as a big part of their image and purpose, and looked too much like part of the establishment. It was a problem similar to that of the Chad Mitchell Trio, rivals to the Kingston Trio, who had embraced some of Dylan's work (but, thanks to a producer's misjudgment, never issued any of it as singles), and who were known to be "irreverent" -- "irreverent" was fine for comics and entertainers, and acceptable to parents, but it made the Mitchell Trio and the Kingston Trio seem like establishment lackeys, while Dylan (and, to a lesser degree, Phil Ochs) were generating in-your-face challenges to a ton of social and political assumptions that helped hold campuses (or, at least, the communities where they were based) together, in Dylan's case in a voice that was equal parts Woody Guthrie, Dave Van Ronk, and Furry Lewis, and none of it "pretty" in the traditional sense that middle-class audience defined pretty.
By 1962, there was a split in the folk music audience. On one side was the newly identified topical folk audience, principally younger college students and more serious high-school students, augmented by older activist-oriented types who had kept their heads down and their profiles low for most of the late '50s. They identified with Seeger, Guthrie, Lee Hays, and the leftist/union background of the Almanac Singers, which extended into modern politics in antiwar sentiment and a deepening involvement in the civil rights movement. They didn't constitute a majority of listeners, even on many college campuses, but they were committed to folk music and their dedicated attendance at concerts and clubs amplified their influence. On the other side were the pop-folk listeners, or what the leftist listeners would have called the right-wing folk audience. It wasn't that groups like the Kingston Trio or the New Christy Minstrels were right-wing (even if the Minstrels' first Columbia album featured a quote endorsing them from former President Dwight Eisenhower -- Ike was hardly an ideologue, but it would be difficult to imagine him endorsing Bob Dylan's first album, also issued on Columbia), so much as simply offering music that -- the occasional topical, purposeful song aside -- tended to be upbeat and enjoyable without a lot of heavy-lifting in the analysis department. Others would say that the Kingston Trio and their like didn't exploit folk music for political purposes.
The Trio might've survived the loss of the folk listeners, and gotten through this period with their audience of middle-of-the-road college students, augmented with younger children (whose parents always regarded folk music as a safe haven), and older listeners, except that those middle-brow college students had no real commitment to folk music; they liked what sounded good to them, and by early 1963, they were ready to move on to other sounds. The kids going to college in 1962 and 1963, after all, had grown up with rock & roll as part of their musical environment, and while the student attending college in, say, 1957-1961 might've thought of Elvis Presley or Jerry Lee Lewis or Chuck Berry as beneath him, the college student of the early '60s was a lot more flexible.
And just about then, a new wave of rock & roll acts had begun emerging, heralded by the Beach Boys (ironically, also a Capitol act, and who wore striped shirts remarkably like those of the Kingston Trio), the Kingsmen, and similar others. Along with a growing number of R&B-based acts, this music began drawing away the more boisterous, fun-loving segment of the college audience that had always been part of the Trio's core fandom. The situation that the group faced was summed up, albeit in hindsight, in the movie Animal House, in the toga party scene. A drunk Bluto Blutarsky (John Belushi) comes staggering down the stairs, passing a folksinger serenading a group of coeds with "The Cherry Song" ("I gave my love a cherry that had no stone...."), reaches over, smashes the singer's guitar to bits, and stumbles on, muttering, "sorry," while Sam Cooke's "Twistin' the Night Away" plays in the background.
With the college audience gone, all that the Trio could find as listeners were the folkies. But on that stage, they found themselves undercut by the likes of Bob Dylan on the left and Peter, Paul & Mary from the center. The Kingston Trio found themselves swamped by a wave of relevance and topicality on one side and their seeming musical irrelevance on the other. Their sales plummeted toward the end of 1963, and the arrival of the Beatles and the British Invasion in early 1964 sealed their fate. Capitol Records clearly had bigger fish to fry, and in the late spring of that year they and the label parted company.
The Trio continued recording and performing, first for Decca before calling it quits in June of 1967. Ironically, they still had an ear for good songs -- "I'm Going Home" was as fine a folk-style single as anyone recorded in 1964, and they subsequently did excellent recordings of works such as Tom Paxton's "The Last Thing on My Mind" and "Where I'm Bound," and Gordon Lightfoot's "Early Morning Rain." But the group that had so embodied the confidence and boldness of the Kennedy years seemed totally out of place in Lyndon Johnson's America, with its campuses torn by antiwar protests and its inner cities ablaze in racial strife. Ironically, the same month that the Beatles and Capitol Records were to release yet another album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, that would effect a seismic shift in popular music, few people noticed the Trio's farewell gig at the Hungry I in San Francisco on June 17. Stewart went on to become a very successful songwriter ("Daydream Believer") and recording artist ("Gold"). Nick Reynolds left the music business, moving to Oregon, where he ranched sheep and ran a theater, among other activities. Dave Guard remained active as a musician until his death from cancer in March of 1991, writing several music instruction books and becoming deeply involved with what had become known as world music.
Bob Shane had opposed the breakup, however, and in 1972 re-formed the Kingston Trio (initially as the New Kingston Trio), amid the same '50s nostalgia boom that had already given performers like Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley new careers. By the late '70s, with George Grove and Roger Gambill joining Shane, the group had found a small but enthusiastic audience. In 1981, as part of a concert taped for a public television broadcast, the current and former group members gathered together into a sort of Kingston Trio mega-group (à la Yes on Union), of Bob Shane, Nick Reynolds, Dave Guard, John Stewart, George Grove, and Roger Gambill, with Mary Travers as host, with Lindsey Buckingham -- a longtime Trio fan -- as special guest. The untimely death of Gambill in the late '80s led to Nick Reynolds rejoining, and the Kingston Trio has kept going, as a sort of "folk oldies" outfit, into 1999. A current version of the group, featuring Shane, Grove, and new member Bob Haworth (born 1946), who succeeded Nick Reynolds on the latter's retirement in 1999, continued working through 2004, nearly 50 years after Guard, Shane, and Reynolds first started singing together. ~ Bruce Eder, All Music Guide
The Kingston Trio was one of the most commercially successful 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)[1], 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.[2] Four albums charted during the same week among the Top 10 selling albums in October 1960, a record unmatched for nearly 50 years[3], and the group still ranks after half a century in the all time top ten of Billboard's charts for most weeks with a #1 album (46 weeks for a #6 ranking)[4], most total weeks charting an album (1262 weeks for a #10 ranking)[5], most consecutive #1 albums (4 for a #7 ranking)[6], and most top ten albums (14 for a #9 ranking).[7]
As significantly, the international popularity 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.[8]
The Kingston Trio was organized in spring 1957 in the Palo Alto, California, area by Dave Guard (b. Donald David Guard, October 19, 1934 - d. March 22, 1991), Bob Shane (b. Robert Castle Schoen, February 1, 1934), and Nick Reynolds (b. Nicholas Wells Reynolds, July 27, 1933 - d. October 1, 2008).
Guard and Shane 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 and 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 Reynolds, a native San Diegan with an extensive knowledge of folk and calypso songs (in part from his guitar-playing father, a U.S. Navy career officer),[11] a refined ability to sing tenor harmonies derived from family singalongs, and ability to play both guitar and bongo and conga drums. Shane and Reynolds performed at frat 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,[12] usually 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.[13] 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.[14] Bogue left with Gannon, and Guard, Reynolds, and Werber were unanimous that they should invite Shane to rejoin the now more formally organized band.[15] 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.[16]
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 an eclectic repertoire of calypso, folk, and foreign language songs, suggested by all three of the musicians though usually arranged by Guard[17] with some harmonies created by Reynolds.[18]
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[19] and Werber plastered the city with handbills announcing the engagement.[20] 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.[21] 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 Blue Angel 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 45rpm 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.[22] 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.[23] On Gilmore's strong recommendation, Capitol signed the Kingston Trio to an exclusive seven year deal.[24]
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.[25] 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, calypso-flavored tunes reminiscent of the hugely popular Harry Belafonte recordings of the time, and a mix of both foreign language and contemporary songwriter numbers.
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.[26] 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.[27] "Tom Dooley" also spurred the debut album to a #1 position on the charts ( the first album by a group to do so)[28]and a gold record, and that album remained charted on Billboard's weekly reports for 195 weeks.[29]
This was the beginning of a remarkable 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,[30] roughly $175 million in 2009 dollars[31] 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. 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
The Kingston Trio's second troupe after Guard's departure: John Stewart, Nick Reynolds, Bob Shane
By early 1961 and despite the Kingston Trio's nearly unprecedented success in record sales, 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,[33] 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,[34] 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.[35] Shane and Reynolds felt that the formula for song selection and performance that they had painstakingly developed and rehearsed endlessly still served them well.[36]
In addition, over $100,000 appeared to be missing from the Trio's publishing royalties (an accounting error eventually rectified)[37] and provided an additional irritant to both sides - to Guard because he regarded it as inexcusable carelessness and to Shane and Reynolds because it highlighted 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).
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[39] 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.[40] 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 (see The Kingston Trio discography) and several of the group's most successful singles including "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" and "Greenback Dollar" charted as well.
Beginning in 1964, however, the Kingston Trio's dominance in record sales and popularity began to wane, due partly to the aforementioned imitators in the pop-folk world but also to the rise of commercial groups like Peter, Paul and Mary whose music had a decidedly more political bent than the Trio's did. In addition, the British Invasion spearheaded by The Beatles, who were signed by Capitol early that year 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,[41] 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 Werber and Shane the Trio 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.[42] 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.[43] 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 as well.[44]
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)[45] 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.[46]
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
The 1981 Reunion Concert: Nick Reynolds, Bob Shane, Dave Guard
In 1976, Bill Zorn left the New Kingston Trio to work as a solo performer and record producer in London.[47] 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.[48]
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, Tommy 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."[50] 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.[51] Guard implicitly disparaged Shane's current group, and Shane asserted a distaste for performing again with Guard,[52] 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) prior to Guard's death at age 56 from lymphoma nine years later in March 1991.
The Kingston Trio in 2003: George Grove, Bob Shane, Bobby Haworth (bassist Paul Gabrielson).
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.
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.[53]
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.[54]
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, featured prominently and without compensation on nearly all of their album covers.[63] 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."[64] And in Time Magazine, critic Richard Corliss asserted, "In my youth, they changed pop music, and me with it."[65]
The Kingston Trio won a Grammy for "Best Country And Western Performance" in 1959 for the single of "Tom Dooley". At the time, no "Folk" category existed. When a "Best Performance – Folk" category was initiated in 1960, the Trio won its second Grammy (the first awarded in this category) for its album The Kingston Trio At Large.
References
^ Rubeck, Shaw, Blake et al., The Kingston Trio On Record (Naperville IL: KK Inc, 1986), p. 11 ISBN 978-0961459406
