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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 early 1960s.
Kingston Trio was formed in 1957 in the Palo Alto, California, area by Dave Guard, Bob Shane, and Nick Reynolds, who were just out of college. Greatly influenced by The Weavers, the calypso sounds of Harry Belafonte and other folk artists such as the Gateway Singers and the Tarriers,, they were discovered playing at a Menlo College-area club, the Cracked Pot, by Frank Werber, a publicist then working at San Francisco's hungry i nightclub.
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Encyclopedia
The Kingston Trio is an American folk and pop music group that helped launch the folk revival of the late 1950s to early 1960s.
Formation and early success
The Kingston Trio was formed in 1957 in the Palo Alto, California, area by Dave Guard, Bob Shane, and Nick Reynolds, who were just out of college. Greatly influenced by The Weavers, the calypso sounds of Harry Belafonte and other folk artists such as the Gateway Singers and the Tarriers,, they were discovered playing at a Menlo College-area club, the Cracked Pot, by Frank Werber, a publicist then working at San Francisco's hungry i nightclub. He became their manager, and secured them a one-shot recording contract with Capitol Records. Shane would later tell concert audiences that the group first considered itself primarily a calypso group, and therefore named itself after the capital of Jamaica.
The group's first hit was a catchy rendition of a traditional folk song, "Tom Dooley", based upon the life of the tragic figure, Tom Dula; it earned a gold record in 1958. It was so popular that it entered popular culture as a catchphrase: Ella Fitzgerald, for example, parodies it during her recorded version of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer". It won the trio the first Grammy award for Best Country & Western Performance, at the awards inaugural ceremony in 1959. The next year, the group won the first Grammy Award for Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording for the album The Kingston Trio at Large and accounted for 20% of all record sales for Capitol.
In the early 1960s The Kingston Trio had four albums at the same time among the Top 10 selling albums, a record unmatched for nearly 40 years. In spite of this, they had a relatively small number of hit singles.
The group's music was simple and accessible, with much use of tight vocal harmony, signature riffs (often played on the banjo), and repetitive choruses. Capitol producer Voyle Gilmore enhanced their vocal sound with reverb and the relatively new process of doubletracking, in which the performers sang along with their own prerecorded part to produce a stronger sound than with a single voice, in part due to a natural gap of a fraction of a second between the original recording and the overdubbed part. At first, pairs of tape recorders were used, then later multitrack recording machines, to produce the effect.
Several of the group's most popular songs were humorous numbers, such as "Tijuana Jail", the tale of an ill-fated trip to Mexico, and "M.T.A.", the saga of a man who "never returned" from the Boston subway system. A concert favorite was the darkly humorous "Merry Minuet", written by Sheldon Harnick, a tuneful meditation on the prospect of nuclear war.
The '60s and later
In 1962, the trio guest starred in an episode of Gertrude Berg's situation comedy on CBS, originally entitled Mrs. G. Goes to College.
Dave Guard left the band in 1961 as part of a disagreement over its musical direction and with the way their publishing earnings were being handled. He formed the group Whiskey Hill Singers, and was replaced by John Stewart, who led the group through several more years of popularity, including another visit to the Top 10 with the #8 hit "Reverend Mr. Black", until the arrival of The Beatles and British invasion rock bands pushed them from the charts. Guard died of lymphatic cancer in 1991, and Stewart and Reynolds died in 2008 (of a stroke and respiratory disease respectively), leaving Shane as the only surviving original member.
The Trio disbanded after a final performance at the hungry i on June 17, 1967 (skipping an encore to attend the nearby Monterey Pop Festival). Shane, the lone member to resist the breakup, started a new group, The New Kingston Trio, in 1969 with Jim Connor and Pat Horine. He eventually reached a contractual agreement with his former partners, Guard, Reynolds, and Werber, to secure and license once again the original name, The Kingston Trio, in 1976.(Blake et al. 1986.) Shane continues to have rights to the name as of 2008.
By 1973 the trio was Shane, Roger Gambill, and Bill Zorn. Zorn left in 1976, and was replaced by George Grove. Bob Haworth, a member of The Brothers Four from 1970 to 1985, sang with the Trio from 1985 until 1988, filling in for Gambill, who was hospitalized, and eventually replaced him when Gambill died that year. In 1988, Nick Reynolds, one of the original three members, returned, replacing Bob Haworth. Reynolds retired in 1999, and Haworth returned to the Trio through 2005.
In 2005, Shane retired from the group due to health problems.
He was replaced by the returning Bill Zorn, leaving The Limeliters, who he'd been a member of in the 1990s. Also coming from the Limeliters was Rick Dougherty, who replaced Haworth, who'd also left the group.
As of 2006, The Kingston Trio consists of George Grove, Zorn, and Dougherty.
On August 19, 2008 Fort Collins Now reported that the Kingston Trio would be playing the Concert for Peace at the Peace Corps and Friends festival in Fort Collins, Colorado the weekend of August 22 to 24. Members of the group said that the Kingston Trio had far reaching roots into the history of the Peace Corps. "Back in the ’60s when Robert Kennedy came up with the idea of the Peace Corps, John Stewart was friends with Bobby Kennedy and wrote quite a bit of music that had to do with the new frontier," says George Grove. "The songs and the friendship of the Kennedys and the time—that was the involvement the Kingston Trio had."
Nick Reynolds, known within the group as "Budgie" or "The Runt of the Litter," died in October, 2008, at the age of 75.
"Scotch and Soda"
Through the years, the most requested song for The Kingston Trio was "Scotch and Soda", which was always performed as a solo number by Shane. The trio discovered this song through Tom Seaver's parents, who had first heard it when on their honeymoon. One member of the trio was dating Seaver's older sister at that time, and heard the song on a visit to the Seaver home. Although it is credited to Dave Guard, the trio never did discover the real songwriter's name, though they searched for years.
Discography and videography
Top 40 Hits In Chronological Order
- "Tom Dooley", #1 in 1958
- "The Tijuana Jail", #12 in 1959
- "M.T.A.", #15 in 1959
- "A Worried Man", #20 in 1959
- "El Matador", #32 in 1960
- "Bad Man Blunder", #37 in 1960
- "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?", #21 in 1962
- "Greenback Dollar", #21 in 1963
- "The Reverend Mr. Black", #8 in 1963
- "Desert Pete", #33 in 1963
Other well-known songs frequently performed by The Kingston Trio:
Awards and recognition
The Kingston Trio was inducted into The Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 2000.
The Kingston Trio won a Grammy for "Best Country And Western Performance" in 1959 for the single of "Tom Dooley". At the time, no "Folk" category existed. When a "Best Performance - Folk" category was initiated in 1960, the Trio won its second Grammy (the first awarded in this category) for its album The Kingston Trio At Large.
External links
- (fan page)
- - Article on Dave Guard and The Kingston Trio
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