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 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.[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 Top 10 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 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.[5]
Music historian Richie Unterberger characterized their impact as "phenomenal popularity",[6] 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]
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")[64] 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.[65] Its editor Irwin Silber referred to "the sallow slickness of the Kingston Trio"[66] 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 them as "prostitutes of the art who gain their status as folk artists because they use guitars and banjos."[67] 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."[68]
Frank Proffitt, the Appalachian musician whose version of "Tom Dooley" the Trio re-arranged, 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."[69] 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.[70] 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",[71] according to folk historian Robert Cantwell, who also notes that the Kingston Trio's version of the song left out several verses from the traditional lyric.[72] 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 live[sic]".[73] As recently as 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."[69]
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 are not folksingers in the accepted sense of the word."[74] 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."[75] 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."[75] 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."[76]
Origin Palo Alto, California
Genres Folk, pop
Years active 1957–67 (original lineup; continues to the present with different members)
Labels Capitol, Decca
Associated acts Whiskeyhill Singers
The New Kingston Trio
Website www.kingstontrio.com
Members George Grove
Bill Zorn
Rick Dougherty
Past members Dave Guard
Bob Shane
Nick Reynolds
John Stewart
Roger Gambill
Bob Haworth
Notable instruments
Martin Guitars
Martin D28 6-string guitar
Martin 0021 6-string guitar
Martin 018T 4-string tenor guitar
Vega Banjos
Pete Seeger model long-neck 5-string banjo
Vega plectrum 4-string banjo