The Kingston Trio
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The Kingston Trio is an American folk and pop music group that helped launch the folk revival of the late 1950s to 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 33⅓ rpm long-playing record albums (LPs), and helped to alter the direction of popular music in the U.S.[1]
The Kingston Trio[2] was one of the most prominent groups of the era's pop-folk boom that started in 1958 with the release of their first album and its hit recording of "Tom Dooley", which sold over three million copies as a single.[3] 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,[4] a record unmatched for more than 50 years,[5] and the group still ranks after half a century 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.[6]
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."[7] Music historian Richie Unterberger characterized their impact as "phenomenal popularity",[8]
and the Kingston 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]
Formation, 1954–1957
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.[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, 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.[11] Reynolds was also able to create and sing tenor harmonies, a skill derived in part from family singalongs,[12] 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 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". None of the three at that time had any serious
aspirations to enter professional show business, however,[14] and Shane returned to Hawaii following his graduation in late 1956 to work in the family sporting goods business.[15]
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.[16]
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.[17] Bogue left with Gannon, and Guard, Reynolds, and Werber invited Shane to rejoin the now more formally organized band.[16]
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.[18]
The four drew up a contract as equal partners in Werber's office in
San Francisco, deciding first on the name "Kingston Trio" because it
evoked, through its association with Kingston, Jamaica,
the calypso music popular at the time, and second on 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.[19]
Era of peak success, 1957–61
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[14] with some harmonies created by Reynolds.[20]
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[21] and Werber plastered the city with handbills announcing the engagement.[22]
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.[23]
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 33⅓ rpm albums had more potential for the group's
music.[24] 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.[21] On Gilmore's strong recommendation, Capitol signed the Kingston Trio to an exclusive seven-year deal.[21]
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 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 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 unknown as of 2015.[26]
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.[27]
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.[28]
"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.[29]
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 in the Grammy's scheme. The next
year, largely as a result of The Kingston Trio and "Tom Dooley",[30] 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 their first five studio albums achieved number 1 chart status and
were awarded gold records.[31] By 1961, the group had sold more than eight million records,[32] earning in excess of US$25 million for Capitol,[33] roughly US$200 million in 2015 dollars.[34] The Kingston Trio was responsible for 15 percent of Capitol's total sales[33] when Capitol also recorded among many other popular artists Frank Sinatra[35] and Nat "King" Cole,[36]
both of whom were also producing high-charting profitable albums. One
indication of the Kingston Trio's popularity during this era was that
for five consecutive weeks in November and December 1959, four Kingston
Trio albums ranked in the top ten of Billboard's Top LPs chart,[37][38][39][40][41][42] an accomplishment unmatched by any artist before or since.[5]
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, 1961–67
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,[10]
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,[43]
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.[1]
Shane and Reynolds felt that the formula for song selection and
performance that they had painstakingly developed and rehearsed still
served them well.[43]
Furthermore, over $100,000 appeared to be missing from the Trio's
publishing royalties (an accounting error eventually rectified)[43]
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,[44] including "Tom Dooley" (though Guard eventually lost a suit over copyright for that number to Alan Lomax, Frank Warner, and Frank Proffitt)[45] and "Scotch and Soda".[44]
The situation became intolerable for all concerned, and Dave Guard
resigned from the Kingston Trio in April 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[33] 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 of
groups that sprang up hoping to imitate 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.[27]
Stewart began rehearsing and recording with the group nearly
immediately, commencing public appearances with the Trio in September
1961.
According to Shane, "We did nearly as well with John as we did with Dave."[46] 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.[47]
Beginning in 1964, however, the Kingston Trio's dominance in record
sales and in concert bookings 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 EMI/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,[11] and none of the four sold especially well.
By 1966, Reynolds had grown weary of touring and Stewart wanted to
strike out on his own as a singer-songwriter, so the three musicians and
Werber 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.[48]
The group followed this strategy successfully, and on June 17, 1967,
the Kingston Trio ceased to be an actively performing band.[49]
Hiatus and the New Kingston Trio, 1967–1976
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.[50] 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.[50]
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,[51]
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[52]—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.[53]
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.[54]
The third phase, 1976–present
In 1976, Bill Zorn left the New Kingston Trio to work as a solo performer and record producer in London.[55]
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.[56]
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.[55] 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.[57]
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."[58]
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.[59] Guard implicitly disparaged Shane's current group, and Shane asserted a distaste for performing again with Guard,[59]
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)[60] 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.[61]
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,[62] Decca Records,[63] Collector's Choice Music,[64] and Folk Era Records[65]
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.
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