The Kingston Trio

Cafe Society
1

[Longish intro]

My early grade school years (K-2) placed me in something of a time warp, musically speaking. My father was in the Army, and from 76-79 we lived in Germany. Since no one in my family could speak German, our entertainment choices were pretty limited. There was one American TV station, one American radio station (which played disco…bleah), and my father’s record collection. So on many a family evening, not to mention many a long road trip, my parents, my sisters and I sang along with dad’s Kingston Trio collection. There was also some Peter, Paul & Mary, or the Brothers Four tossed into the mix, but these were all secondary. The Trio reigned supreme.

Once we left Germany, my musical isolation ended, and dad’s record collection started a collection of its own – dust. The vinyl-bound treasure trove of childhood memories lay hidden away, never entirely forgotten but always under the surface of my musical consciousness. It was a full ten years later that my dad asked me to catalog his albums. He was preparing to retire from the Army and wanted a complete list just in case any of his musical investments failed to survive the transition to civilian life. As I filed through the record sleeves (some of them so pristine that they still bore the sales sticker – from 1963!) I took note of the song titles. My, but these sounded familiar. I pulled out two or three albums, stacked them on the turntable, and cranked 'em up. It was incredible. I hadn’t heard these songs since I was eight years old, and now, ten years down the line, I could remember almost every word to every song.

So having rediscovered the music of my childhood, I started scouting for Kingston Trio albums around town (El Paso). This was right about the time when LPs were being phased out of most music stores. Search though I did, I found nothing except one used copy of a pretty forgettable reunion album. Perplexed, I started asking my friends at school to keep a lookout whenever they hit the music stores. The replies were unanimous – “The Kingston who?” None of my friends had ever heard of them. Peter, Paul & Mary? Sure, they knew who they were. Joan Baez? Oh yeah, that Diamonds & Rust lady. C’mon you’ve heard of Tom Dooley, MTA, The Merry Minuet? Nope. Nada. Unbelievable. I figured at the time that my impression of Nick, Bob & Dave’s impact on the music world was not nearly what I had expected.

In the fifteen years since, I’ve amassed a pretty decent Kingston Trio collection on CD. And I’ve finally gotten the hell out of El Paso. Even though I have now been to a concert by the current incarnation of the Kingston Trio (featuring Nick Reynolds, one of the original members), and recognized them as the targets of parody in A Mighty Wind, I’m still unsure just how influential these guys were. The booklet in one of my CD box sets claims that the Trio singlehandedly rescued the acoustic guitar industry from oblivion and that the music of Bob Dylan (and all those who followed in his wake) owed everything to them. I somehow suspect that this is a more than a little exaggerated. But I’d like to get some opinions from my fellow Dopers.

[/longish intro]

So just how much of an impact did the Kingston Trio have on popular music?

2

The Trio were one of the major names in the folk revival of the early 60s, and may the group most responsible for the movement. They had several big hits and introduced folk music at a time when the radio was rock and roll. So, for a short time, they were highly influential.

However, once the Beatles came along, folk music went back to being a niche genre. In a way, the Trio could be called the Beatles of folk music, but their music did not remain popular as long.

3

Are you sure that was Nick Reynolds? He was interviewed briefly in the recent PBS special on the Trio (just wait for the next pledge period, they’ll show it again) and he sounded like he’d had a stroke.

At one time they had 4 albums in the top 10 list, something not even the Beatles did.

4

Everyone I know (and at least 50% of them are musicians) knows who the Kingston Trio were and will discourse at length about their contributions to folk music. I didn’t know that anyone would not at least recognize the name.

5

Other great bands/musicians from the Early '60s Folk Music Scare:

The Chad Mitchell Trio

Harry Belafonte

The Limeliters

The Folksmen :wink:

6

I was pretty sure that until recently the only actively performing member of the original Trio was Bob Shane. I’d been enormously disappointed in myself for the missed opportunity when I heard that he’d at last retired from the group a couple years ago. Now I’ll never get to hear any of them play in person, dang it. Although if Nick Reynolds is really touring with the current Trio, then just maybe I’m wrong about that… I’d like to think so, anyway. It’d be hard to confuse Bob and Nick, wouldn’t it? One sings “Scotch and Soda” and is like four feet taller than the other one.

7

My dad’s staples seemed to be the Kingston Trio, the Beach Boys and Kris Kristofferson.

Eclectic dude. And Jesus was a Capricorn- how can you argue with that? :wink:

8

The version of the Trio touring now has no original members. Bob Shane kept the group going for years after the (second) original group disbanded. Nick was back in that version for awhile and then finally retired. Shane kept it going but he had a heart attack a few years ago and had to quit. He still owns the rights to the name “The Kingston Trio” and the performers who are in the group now work for him.

I’ve also heard that John Stewart had an accident awhile ago that left him with memory problems. Can anyone confirm?

The Trio were not only hugely successful but very influential. Dylan gave props to Dave Guard in Chronicles, Volume One and Lindsay Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac has acknowledged being a big fan of theirs when he was growing up. In addition to popularizing (some would say sanitizing) American folk music, they explored and opened up areas of world music–thirty years before that phrase existed–to America but without the pendantic streak that people like Pete Seeger brought to it.

9

I have a copy of the Billboard Book of #1 Albums floating around here that I can’t find, but it informed me that the Trio were major stars in their day, in the pop world as well as the folk world (and not just a bunch of records in my Mom’s collection). I believe that five of their albums hit #1 on the pop album charts, and they had a chart longevity that other acts merely dream of.

10

As far as I’m concerned, the Kingston Trio started the whole folk music revival “Hootenanny” days ca. late-1950’s. It may just be a product of my generation, but pre-KT groups (Weavers, Pete Seeger, etc.) felt too “authentic”, and therefore less commercial. The Trio made folk music commercial and less of merely historical interest.

In my college years, a Hootenany was THE form of entertainment to expect around campus. Rock N Roll would never die, but it carried a slightly less respectable connotation. Folk music was devoid of sexual connotations and appealed to a wide audience range, so you could take your parents with you to a Peter, Paul & Mary concert, but not to a Motown, Buddy Holly or Ike & Tina Turner show.

Probably the only group that Hootenannys didn’t appeal to were jazz musicians.

Haven’t heard anything recently about John Stewart, but I worked with him after the Trio when he tried a solo career. I think you could call it mildly successful.

11

I just remember when, after growing up in MA, I moved to Chicago for college and would make the occasional “Charlie on the MTA” jokes to my friends while riding the subway. I was inevitably met with blank stares. I guessed that the song was not as popular has Boston radio had led me to believe.

12

I discovered the Trio in the late 1980’s along with Irish folk music. I can’t speak like a professor but I wore out several needles playing their records over and over and the huge 6-disc Capitol set CD is not gathering dust.

I remember seeing an old Jack Benny show when the Kingston Trio were the guests. The songs they performed were very well staged, “Tijuana Jail” among them, there was a whole skit built around it, featuring Mel Blanc!

Besides, without the Kingston Trio, we’d have never had the Smothers Brothers, and that’s a world I wouldn’t want to live in.

13

My mom had a Kingston Trio album which is a good thing because my boss likes to say “so and so was like Charlie on the MTA” and thanks to mom and the trio I know what she’s talking about. What I don’t know is why Charlie’s wife couldn’t just give him carfare instead of a sandwich. :confused:

14

I grew up listening to them, because my fatherwas friends with them in school. He even played drums with them for a short while, long before they were famous, of course.

Still, it’s fun to introduce my dad as the Pete Best of the Kingston Trio.

15

Didn’t “too 'authentic”" to many people (not including yourself) actually mean “too Red”? Many of the pre-KT folkies like Pete Seeger ended up being blacklisted during the early 50’s for their supposed left-leaning political sympathies. In their effort to be more commercial, the Kingston Trio (or, more likely, the record indsutry PTB) neutralized a lot of the more political aspects of folk music so it would be “safer” for mass audience consumption.

Since I wasn’t around then I’m only guessing at this but didn’t maturity play a role in the popularity of folk music c. 1960? It’s my impression that many of the kids who listened to the first wave of rock n’ roll in the 50’s shifted over to folk when they entered college because it seemed more sophisticated and adult. Rock n’ roll certainly had less respectability at the time but it was due less to its rawness and more toward it being viewed as merely “kid stuff” that you put away once you got out of high school. By the early 60’s, the “barbaric yawp” of rock n’ roll had become more polished and, due to a number of reasons (like, for example, Elvis being “tamed” by the Army and scandals derailing the careers of Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis, etc.), a lot less threatening to the cultural mainstream.

16

You might enjoy A Mighty Wind.

17

And it’s not like the idea that folk singers were “left leaning” came out of nowhere: listening to Leadbelly’s “Bourgeois Blues” and Woody Guthrie’s “Farmer Labor Train”, you might begin to suspect they had certain sympathies. And I feel confident that Henry Wallace (Progressive Party nominee, '48) has had more folk songs written in his honor than any other presidential candidate that year.

Not that that justified blacklisting in any way, shape, or form.

18

Not to me, but I may not have been typical. I was totally unaware of accusations of “red taint” in music until decades later when I studied it historically. I guess, as the song says, “You have to be carefully taught (to hate).”

Interesting theory, and your scenario certainly followed my experience. Maybe I just moved in different circles, but I found rock, which I liked a lot at the time, to be difficult to spontaneously gather people together to enjoy and contribute. If a rock band began playing at a party, it was loud and raucous, prevented conversation and couldn’t be joined in by the average party goer. They simply weren’t good bands, either – if they had been good, maybe things would have been different.

In contrast, if someone sat down with an acoustic guitar or at the piano, we could all sing show tunes or folk tunes, we didn’t need earplugs and we didn’t have to be really expert to have a good time. Those instruments didn’t lend themselves well to rock.

It seemed like every college mixer, frat house front room or church social hall had a piano, which I would usually get pushed in front of for hours, and many people played acoustic guitar. But if electric guitars and drums came out, things changed.

19

One of the finest reunion shows ever staged was that of the Kingston Trio. As Allmusic.com puts it,“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.”

PBS showed it for several years, and it’s a serious classic. (The Kingston Trio & Friends - well worth hunting up) One great moment came when John Stewart did a song with Lindsay Buckingham. In the intro, Stewart told the audience that he’d worked hard to learn electric guitar after embarking on a solo career, and he’d heard a lick Buckingham had done that he couldn’t figure out. So he finally called Buckingham and asked how it was done. Buckham’s response was that was bowled over by the request because he had originally learned how to play guitar listening to Kingston Trio records.

It was one of the perfect moments where “the unfolding of the universe was especially apt.”

Let me also hasten to recommend the rare “Once Upon a Time” live double album recorded in 1966 but not issued until 1969 . It is a musical treasure (reviewed here) If you can find a copy, by all means snap it up if you can, it is a stone classic.

20

A hip, modern band that’s heavily influenced by the Kingston Trio: Moxy Fruvous. Look like the Chili Peppers, sound like the Folksmen.