Glenn Yarbrough
Glenn Robertson Yarbrough (January 12, 1930 – August 11, 2016) was an American folk singer and guitarist. He was the lead singer (tenor) with the Limeliters from 1959 to 1963 and also had a prolific solo career. Yarbrough had a restlessness and dissatisfaction with the music industry which led him to question his priorities, later focusing on sailing and the setting up of a school for orphans.
Glenn Yarbrough
Glenn Robertson Yarbrough
August 11, 2016 (aged 86)
Nashville, Tennessee, U.S.
- Singer
- musician
- Vocals
- guitar
1951–2010
Early life[edit]
Glenn Yarbrough was born in Milwaukee on 12 January 1930, later moving to New York where his parents were practicing social workers. However, because there were few jobs available during the Great Depression, his father traveled around the country from one job to another, and Yarbrough lived with his mother in New York City helping to support her as a paid boy soprano in the Choir of Men and Boys at Grace Church in Manhattan.[1]
He was offered a scholarship at St. Paul's School, located at Brooklandville, Maryland,[2] graduating in 1948. After a year travelling around the US, Canada and Mexico,[3] he enrolled in college at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, where his roommate was Jac Holzman, later the founder of Elektra Records. Yarbrough said that initially Holzman had wanted to call the label Elektra-Stratford Records, but "I suggested Elektra Records because it was a little shorter, and that's what we went with: Elektra Records".[4]
When Woody Guthrie performed an impromptu performance for the roommates, Yarbrough became interested in folk music and learned the guitar.[5] Holzman later recorded Here We Go Baby, (also known as Songs by Glenn Yarbrough) an early solo album by Yarbrough in 1957. Greg Adams noted that the album was "ahead of the game in terms of combining pop and folk music" and while not a success commercially [was] "an entertaining and fascinating artifact from the pre-dawn of the folk boom".[6] The album was also described in the liner notes as a departure from the more traditional folk music on the Elektra label and a "showcase to highlight and display [Yarbrough's] virtuosity...undertaken for the sake of an unusual talent".[7] Yarbrough was approached by Fred Hellerman and asked if Pete Seeger could play the banjo on some tracks, and this put Yarbrough in touch with the politics of the McCarthyism era of blacklists of musicians. Yarbrough felt at the time that having Seeger on the record was a risk, and expressed disappointment with his attitude and quality of work, asking Erik Darling to replace him.[4]
Yarbrough served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, initially deciphering codes and later with the entertainment corps.[8] After military service, he moved to South Dakota to help his father run a square dance barn and started appearing on local television shows. In the mid-1950s, Al Grossman, who ran the Gate of Horn, a small folk club in Chicago, booked Yarbrough for a two-week engagement. Here, he developed some of the most important relationships of his career with artists like Odetta and Shel Silverstein.[9]
Interest in sailing[edit]
He had originally planned to do a movie on sailing, an area of special interest to Yarbrough not just because of a personal sense of awe of "waves 40 to 50 feet above you in a storm", but also as it provided the opportunity to get away from being "bombarded...[as consumers]...by the media and the big corporations".[31] One journalist said that Yarbrough's love of sailing reflected the fact that while he had been successful in the entertainment industry, "he saw through to the bottom of that illusory world, its temporary nature, its phoniness".[38]
As an avid sailor, Yarbrough took many cruises on his 45-foot boat the Armorel and felt very attracted to staying in New Zealand, a country he described as having "the perfect form of government for a country its size...[and was]...almost like the United States must have been at the turn of the century".[24] After divorcing his first wife Peggy Goodhart in 1964 and marrying Annie Graves, Yarbrough spent five years on a 57-foot boat that he had built. As a result of requests from promoters at the time for the Limeliters to re-form, Yarbrough joined them for a reunion concert at Chicago's Orchestra Hall to a sold-out audience in 1973. The group stayed together until 1981, after which Yarbrough spent most of the next twenty years on his boat, only returning to record and give concerts when necessary to finance his sailing.[39] One review of a reunion concert at the Cocoanut Grove in 1976 said that with "Yarbrough on guitar along with his lugubrious vibratoed vocal instrument", the sound of the Limeliters was intact, concluding that their harmonies meant they remained "one of the best sounds around, untouched by age or fashion".[40]
In January 1993, Yarbrough presented a programme of songs and a lecture at the Sailing Adventure Series at Orange Coast College. In a preview of the programme, the Los Angeles Times described Yarbrough as an "accomplished seaman...[with]...his new boat, a 34-foot junk rig...designed for single-handed cruising". In the same article, Yarbrough said sailing was both harder and "more frightening" than singing, but he still enjoyed the "give and take" with an audience, "communicating and touching people...but sailing is entirely different".[41]
Children's school[edit]
Yarbrough began raising funds to establish a school for orphans in the late 1960s and said at that point, it was the only reason he continued to perform. The school which was said to have needed an annual budget of $250,000 to operate was described at Yarbrough as taking "a very radical approach to learning...to learn something about education and what helps the mind retain information"[42] After selling many of his expensive possessions including cars, a house in New Zealand and a banana plantation in Jamaica, Yarbrough eventually opened a school for disadvantaged youth in Los Angeles but it ran out of money and had to be closed down in the early 1970s.[1] While unsuccessful, the school did reflect Yarbrough's desire to do something meaningful with his life to help families.[42]
Personal life[edit]
In the hope of saving his faltering singing voice, Yarbrough had elective surgery on his larynx in 2010. The surgery was unsuccessful, and he went into cardiac arrest while in the recovery room and was put on a ventilator. He survived, but began to suffer from dementia and never sang in public again. From that time, Yarbrough had to be cared for full time by his daughter, Holly Yarbrough Burnett, in Nashville and died there in 2016 from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Though he suffered from dementia in the last years of his life, according to Burnett, her father remained a "warm, happy man".[8]
Yarbrough married four times. The first three to Peggy Goodhart, Ann Graves and Laurie Ann Pool ended in divorce and at the time of his death, he was separated from his fourth wife Kathleen Pommer. Yarbrough is survived by his daughter Holly, two children from his first marriage, Stephany Yarbrough and Sean Yarbrough; two stepdaughters, Brooke and Heather, from his marriage to Poole; a grandson; and a great-grandson.[15]
As both a solo singer and member of the Limeliters Yarbrough was nominated several times for Grammy Awards.[43]
8th Annual Grammy Awards (1966)
Nominated for:
6th Annual Grammy Awards (1964)
Nominated for:
5th Annual Grammy Awards (1963)
Nominated for:
4th Annual Grammy Awards (1962)
Nominated for: