The Kingston Trio
The Kingston Trio is an American folk and pop music group that helped launch the folk revival of the late 1950s to the late 1960s. The group started as a San Francisco Bay Area nightclub act with an original lineup of Dave Guard, Bob Shane, and Nick Reynolds. It rose to international popularity fueled by unprecedented sales of LP records and helped alter the direction of popular music in the U.S.[1]
The Kingston Trio
1957–67 (original lineups; continues to the present with different members)
- Mike Marvin
- Tim Gorelangton
- Buddy Woodward
- Bob Shane
- Nick Reynolds
- Dave Guard
- John Stewart
- Jim Connor
- Pat Horine
- Roger Gambill
- George Grove
- Bob Haworth
- Bill Zorn
- Rick Dougherty
- Josh Reynolds
- Don Marovich
The Kingston Trio was one of the most prominent groups of the era's folk-pop boom, which they kick-started in 1958 with the release of the Trio's eponymous first album and its hit recording of "Tom Dooley", which became a number one hit and 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. Four of the group's LPs charted among the 10 top-selling albums for five weeks in November and December 1959,[3] a record unmatched for more than 50 years,[4] and the group still ranks in the all-time lists of many of Billboard's cumulative charts, including those for most weeks with a number 1 album, most total weeks charting an album, most number 1 albums, most consecutive number 1 albums, and most top ten albums.[5]
In 1961, the Trio was described as "the most envied, the most imitated, and the most successful singing group, folk or otherwise, in all show business" and "the undisputed kings of the folksinging rage by every yardstick".[6] The Trio's massive record sales 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.[1]
The Kingston Trio continues to tour as of 2023 with musicians who licensed the name and trademark in 2017.
Formation, 1954–1957[edit]
Dave Guard and Bob 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. They had developed an interest in and admiration for native Hawaiian slack key guitarists like Gabby Pahinui.[7] While in Punahou's secondary school, Shane taught first himself and then Guard the rudiments of the six-string guitar,[8] 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 while Shane matriculated at nearby Menlo College. At Menlo, Shane became friends with Nick Reynolds, 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.[9] Reynolds was also able to create and sing tenor harmonies, a skill derived in part from family singalongs,[10] and could 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 its ranks to as many as six or seven, according to Reynolds.[11] They usually billed themselves under the name of "Dave Guard and the Calypsonians". None of the three at that time had any serious aspirations to enter professional show business, however,[12] and Shane returned to Hawaii following his graduation in late 1956 to work in the family sporting goods business.[13]
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 the members 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 provided they replace Gannon, in whose professional potential Werber had no faith.[15] Bogue left with Gannon, and Guard, Reynolds, and Werber invited Shane to rejoin the now more formally organized band.[14] Shane, who had been performing part-time as a solo act at night in Honolulu, readily assented and returned to the mainland in early March 1957.[16]
The four drew up a contract as equal partners in Werber's office in San Francisco, deciding on the name "Kingston Trio" because it evoked, through its association with Kingston, Jamaica, the calypso music popular at the time, and also on the uniform of three-quarter-length sleeved vertically striped shirts that the group hoped would help its target audience of college students to identify with them.[17]
Era of peak success, 1957–61[edit]
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[12] with some harmonies created by Reynolds.[18]
The first major break for the Kingston Trio came in late June 1957 when comedian Phyllis Diller canceled a week-long engagement at The Purple Onion club in San Francisco. When Werber persuaded 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 came, 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 Mister 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 rpm (revolutions per minute) singles only, whereas Werber and the Trio members both felt that 33+1⁄3 rpm albums had more potential for the group's music.[22] Through Jimmy Saphier, agent for Bob Hope who had seen and liked the group at The Purple Onion, Werber contacted Capitol Records, which dispatched prominent producer Voyle Gilmore to San Francisco to evaluate the Trio's commercial potential.[19] On Gilmore's strong recommendation, Capitol signed the Kingston Trio to an exclusive seven-year deal.[19]
The group's first album, Capitol T996 The Kingston Trio, was recorded over a three-day period in February 1958 and released in June that 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 supporting orchestral accompaniment that was nearly universal (even for folk-styled records) at the time.[23] 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 such as "Banua" and "Sloop John B" that were reminiscent of the popular Harry Belafonte recordings of the time, and a mix of both foreign language and contemporary songwriter numbers, including Terry Gilkyson's "Fast Freight" and "Scotch and Soda", whose authorship remains unknown as of 2023.[24]
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 DJs Paul Colburn and Bill Terry 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.[25] 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 number 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.[26] "Tom Dooley" also spurred the debut album to a number 1 position on the charts and helped the band earn a second gold record for the LP, which remained charted on Billboard's weekly reports for 195 weeks.[27]
The success of the album and the single earned the Kingston Trio a Grammy Award for Best Country & Western Performance for "Tom Dooley" at the awards' inaugural ceremony in 1959. At the time, no folk music category existed. The next year, largely as a result of The Kingston Trio and "Tom Dooley",[28] the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences instituted a folk category and the Trio won the first Grammy Award for Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording for its second studio album At Large.
This was the beginning of a remarkable three-year run for the Trio in which its first five studio albums achieved number 1 chart status and were awarded gold records.[29] By 1961, the group had sold more than eight million records,[30] earning in excess of US$25 million for Capitol,[31] roughly US$260 million in 2023 dollars.[32] The Kingston Trio was responsible for 15 percent of Capitol's total sales[31] when Capitol recorded many other popular artists, including Frank Sinatra[33] and Nat "King" Cole.[34] For five consecutive weeks in November and December 1959, four Kingston Trio albums ranked in the top ten of Billboard's Top LPs chart,[35][36][37][38][39][40] an accomplishment unmatched by any artist before or since.[4] The Trio also charted several single records during this time, made numerous television appearances, and played upwards of 200 engagements per year.
Hiatus and the New Kingston Trio, 1967–1976[edit]
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.[53] Stewart commenced a long and distinguished career as a singer-songwriter, composing hit songs like "Daydream Believer" for The Monkees and "Runaway Train" for Rosanne Cash. He recorded more than 40 albums of his own, most notably the landmark California Bloodlines, and found chart success in the top forty with "Midnight Wind", "Lost Her in the Sun", and "Gold", the latter reaching number 5 in 1979.[53]
Bob Shane decided to stay in entertainment, and he experimented 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,[54] 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[55]—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 prefix "new" to the band's title.[56]
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.[57]
Trademark and roster changes, 2017 to the present[edit]
In October 2017, Grove, Zorn, and Dougherty were replaced as the Trio by new licensees Josh Reynolds (son of original Kingston Trio founder Nick Reynolds), Mike Marvin, a close childhood friend of the Reynolds family, and Tim Gorelangton.[69] In 2018, Josh Reynolds left the group and was replaced by Bob Haworth, who became a member of the band for the third time.[70] At the end of 2018, Haworth left the group and was replaced by another former Limeliter, Don Marovich.[71] Marovich resigned from the group in early 2022 and was replaced by Americana artist Buddy Woodward. George Grove and Rick Dougherty continue to perform folk music by joining veteran entertainer Jerry Siggins as the Folk Legacy Trio.
Folk music label[edit]
Initial criticism[edit]
Almost from its inception, the Kingston Trio found itself at odds with the traditional music community. Urban folk musicians of the time (to whom Bob Dylan referred in Rolling Stone as "the left-wing puritans that seemed to have a hold on the folk-music community")[72] frequently associated folk music with leftist politics and were contemptuous of the Trio's deliberate political neutrality.[4] 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."[4] 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.[73] Its editor Irwin Silber referred to "the sallow slickness of the Kingston Trio"[74] 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 its members as "prostitutes of the art who gain their status as folk artists because they use guitars and banjos".[75] Following the Trio's performance at the premier Newport Folk Festival in 1959, folk music critic Mark Morris wrote: "What connection these frenetic tinselly showmen have with a folk festival eludes me... except that it is mainly folk songs that they choose to vulgarize."[76]
Frank Proffitt, the Appalachian musician whose version of "Tom Dooley" the Trio rearranged, watched their performance of his song on a television show and wrote in reaction, "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."[77] Proffitt had learned the song from his father and his grandmother, who had known Tom Dula and Laura Foster, the killer and the victim in the actual 1866 murder related in the song.[78] Both Proffitt and fellow North Carolina musician Doc Watson sang the older version of the tune, which had "a lively mocking tempo... that retained some of the ghastliness and moral squalor of an actual murder",[79] according to folk historian Robert Cantwell, who also notes that the Kingston Trio's version of the song omitted several verses from the traditional lyric.[80] The slower, harmonized Trio version of the Dooley song and other traditional numbers struck Proffitt as a betrayal of "the strange mysterious workings which has made Tom Dooly [sic] live..."[81] In 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."[77]
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 don't really consider ourselves folksingers in the accepted sense of the word..."[82] Guard later told journalist Richard Hadlock in Down Beat 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."[83] 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."[83] 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."[84]
21st-century perspectives[edit]
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 Independent on Sunday:
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."[4] Additionally, writing in the British daily The Guardian, also in an obituary for Reynolds, Ken Hunt asserted that "[the Kingston Trio] helped to turn untold numbers of people on to folk music... [T]hey put the boom in folk boom... They were the greatest of the bands to emerge after the McCarthy-era blacklisting of folk musicians and breathed new air into the genre."[86]
All rankings are from "American Album Chart Records 1955–2001"[5]