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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 originated 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 33 1/3 rpm long-playing record albums, and helped to alter the direction of popular music in the U.S.[ first = Bruce ]
The Kingston Trio was one of the most prominent 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 as a single, 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 albums charted during the same week among the Top 10 selling albums in December 1959, a record unmatched for nearly 50 years,[ first = Peter] and the group still ranks after half a century in the all time top ten of many of Billboard's charts, including those for most weeks with a #1 album, most total weeks charting an album, most #1 albums, most consecutive #1 albums, and most top ten albums.[ first = Joel ]
Music historian Richie Unterberger characterized their impact as "phenomenal popularity", 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.
Formation of the Trio Dave Guard (b
. Donald David Guard, October 19, 1934–d. March 22, 1991) and Bob Shane (b. Robert Castle Schoen, February 1, 1934) 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. While in Punahou's secondary school, Shane taught first himself and then Guard the rudiments of the six string guitar,[ first = Elizabeth] 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 (b. Nicholas Wells Reynolds, July 27, 1933–d. October 1, 2008), 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, a refined ability to sing tenor harmonies derived from family singalongs, and the ability to 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. They usually billed themselves 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.[Kingston Trio On Record, p.17] 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. Bogue left with Gannon, and Guard, Reynolds, and Werber were unanimous that they should invite Shane to rejoin the now more formally organized band.
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.[Kingston Trio On Record, p.19]
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 and eclectic repertoire of calypso, folk, and foreign language songs, suggested by all three of the musicians though usually arranged by Guard with some harmonies created by Reynolds.
The first major professional break for the Kingston Trio came in late June 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[ first = William] and Werber plastered the city with handbills announcing the engagement.
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 revolutions per minute (rpm) 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. 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.
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. 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 2009.
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.[Kingston Trio On Record, p.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 #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. "Tom Dooley" also spurred the debut album to a #1 position on the charts (the first album by a group to do so), earned the band a gold record for the album, and remained charted on Billboard's weekly reports for 195 weeks.
title="Tom Dooley" (1958)
The success of the album and the single earned the Kingston Trio a Grammy award for Best Country & Western Performance 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", the Recording Industry Association of America 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 #1 chart status and gold records and by 1961 had earned more than $25 million for Capitol,[ first = ] roughly $175 million in 2009 dollars. Notably, the Kingston Trio was responsible for 15% of Capitol's total sales
Change and a second phase, 1961-1967 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,[Bush, Frets Magazine (March 1984), p. 26] 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 do
Furthermore, over $100,000 appeared to be missing from the Trio's publishing royalties (an accounting error eventually rectified)[Kingston Trio Liner
]Copyright Citations
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