R.I.P., Bob Shane, founding member of The Kingston Trio.*

The Kingston Trio was one of my major musical influences as a child. They are all gone, now. How sad. RIP, Bob, Nick, Dave and John. (You can't forget about John Stewart, given all the success they continued to have after Dave Guard left.)

 

I'm not sure about timeless. It was a fashion statement of the time, which automatically makes it look dated in 2020.

However, it's no more "dated" than Frank Sinatra's suits, the Beatles early 60s mop tops, the floral patters and flares of the hippie era, or the spandex outfits of glam metal bands.

I remember seeing a very early TV clip, in black and white, of Pete Seeger performing at some college concert, and think that he LOOKED like a communist. This was before I even knew anything about the McCarthy trials, in which Seeger was one of those called to testify. It was a military looking outfit, immediately evoking images of figures like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, and I'm quite sure the "fashion statement" was intentional, considering the nature of his audience.

 

How does one dress as a commie? I considered Pete a mentor and friend and he always dressed the same. a work shirt and jeans. He dressed up for the Weavers and was called a commie. Can't win I guess.

 

As they did The Four Freshmen's vocal harmonies.

 

I believe I answered that in my post.

 

Swiped, or channelled?

"Swiped" implies some kind of theft, such as profiting from someone else's song without paying royalties. It's not the right word to use here. "Influence" is a better word.

The Eagles were influenced by
the Byrds, who were influenced by
Bob Dylan, who was influenced by
the Kingston Trio, who were influenced by
Pete Seeger, who was influenced by
Lead Belly... and so it goes.

That's how musical evolution works.

 

I was in the 10th grade at Statesville Senior High School. We all went to the auditorium after lunch and there was The Kingston Trio to perform a free concert just for us. It was great!

Question: What is better than a free concert?
Answer: A free concert and getting to skip classes!

 

Our school got a free concert by MPD Ltd, a local group that were briefly extremely popular.

I would have preferred the Kingston Trio.

 

There were requests to release the album cut as a single, but knowing the radio wouldn't play the song if it had "damn" in it, their producer Voyle Gilmore decided to have a guitar chord strummed over the word. When Johnny Rivers recorded the song on one of his Whisky A Go Go albums, he sang, "I don't give a hang about a greenback dollar", but on the third chorus, he forgot to censor himself.

 

I learned how to play the banjo by listening to the Kingston Trio and Pete Seeger. Playing along with the records, I could almost keep up with John Stewart but Dave Guard would leave me in the dust. Dave was also a great folksinger. He had a certain controlled intensity. He was expressive but did not overemote. Now having said that, I have a special fondness for the Stewart configuration. I felt that John Stewart took them a bit closer to the cutting edge of folk, and he was their only real songwriter. Bob Shane kept a good thing going for many decades with a revolving door of other Trio members, George Grove being the longest lasting one (41 years) except for Shane himself.

 

I wasn't aware of them actually claiming authorship of that particular song. As for Mary never forgiving them, they seemed to have put it behind them in the 1981 reunion concert when they all joked about it and Mary sang the song with the then current version of the Trio (Bob Shane, George Grove, and Roger Gambill). At a later concert, Bob Shane joked that they felt so guilty for stealing that song that everywhere they went, they told everyone about Peter, Paul and Mary. Then he added, "We shouldn't have done that." A comment on how PP&M soon became far more popular than the KT.

 

It was a love triangle reportedly involving a social disease. There's an account of it in Alan Lomax's book Folk Songs of North America that says the "other woman" Anne Melton was actually the one who stabbed Laura Foster, and Tom Dula took the rap for her. Sometimes it's hard to separate fact from folklore.

 

The funny thing about it was that the majority of the students in the class decided it was the worst song they had ever heard, and the assignment was to make so many requests for it that the radio station would actually play it. It snowballed from there.

 

The plane that landed a little later at JFK from Britain did them no favors.

 

Cool! And those are 2 of their best and edgiest albums.

 

This was the other one they did five years before Sinatra:



Their last four albums (on the Decca label) are all just as good as the more celebrated Capitol stuff.

 

Really good clawhammer banjo.

 

I was thrilled recently to see Capitol put all of the Kingston Trio albums on streaming platforms. I don’t think there’s a bad one among them.

 

And they knew it was coming. When they saw one of the Beatles' early performances in England, John Stewart told Nick and Bob, "When this hits the states, it's all over." The Trio covered "Norwegian Wood" on one of their Decca albums after they had left Capitol (partially because Capitol had shifted their promotion from the Trio to the Beatles and Beach Boys), but by that time, the Trio's glory days were behind them.

 

No, they were already on the downside by the time four moptops departed that plane.

 

In the video biography Wherever We May Go they asked John about if Mary forgave them and he said "Noooo she did not". To be honest thats how the trio was getting a lot of their new material by then was from other performers. The Smothers Brothers joked about this on their first album claiming they had stolen Tom Dooley from Dickie.
You will note that Stewart was not singing with Mary.

 

That is 'way cool'! Isn't that the expression we youngin's use?
Great story.

 

When I was a tyke, our family musical fare, as I recall it, had "heavy rotation," so to speak, of the Kingston Trio, the Chad Mitchell Trio, the Limeliters, and--Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. The "folk revivalists" were primarily courtesy of my brother; Herb & co. were more from my parents' direction. (For whatever reason, my brother never got into Peter, Paul, and Mary, so they didn't figure in our listening at all. ) We had our favorites from each, but all got lots of play. Later, as I became a record collector in my own right, I was dismayed to discover that the records of the trios that we played most were "compilation" disks of extracts from other issues, and I started assembling the full versions for my own collection--not so easily done back in those pre-Internet days.

When I went off to college, I met up with a guy who was a real Kingston Trio fanatic and had, as far as I know, all or nearly all their records up to that time. He taped them for me, and I still have those cassettes somewhere, but I haven't played them in years. At the time, I came to the conclusion that the trio started out like a house on fire but went on too long, and over the years, while all three of my "childhood" groups remain near and dear to my heart, on the whole I'd give the Kingston Trio third place ranking, with the Mitchells (on Kapp) first and the Limeliters (again, earlier more than later) second. I have the impression all three groups gradually drifted from more "folk" to more "popular" over time, and in the Mitchells' case more political (after the transition to Mercury freed them to follow their preferences unhindered), and my interest fades as that transition accelerates.

Just how much the Kingston Trio was "the one to beat" at the time, however, is evident in a Limeliters album recorded live (I think at "The Hungry I," if memory serves); during a singalong segment of "Hey, Li Lee Li Lee," in which the audience contributes improvised couplets, one of the contributions is "Limeliters put on a show/Kingston Trio, out you go"!

My favorite Kingston Trio album is probably the early one with the Three Jolly Coachmen; they were at their freshest there. It was also a great favorite of the family. Fun memories. Nice to think of a family sharing music and all enjoying it; I wonder how much of that goes on in today's iThing-centric world? I know it doesn't nearly as much in my own.

 

I've been more a fan for Dave Guard and John Stewart, but I hadn't heard this news until now and it's good to know about. Feels something important passing away to say The Kingston Trio are all gone. We had the 'Live At the Hungry I' LP around when I was growing up, but I was more into The Seekers.