| abstract
| - 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 anORIGINAL lineup ofDave Guard, Bob Shane, and Nick Reynolds. ItROSE to international popularity, fueled by unprecedented sales of 33⅓ rpm long-playing record albums (LPs), and helped to alter theDIRECTION 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 albumand its hit recording of "Tom Dooley", which sold over three million copies as a single.[2] The Trio released nineteenALBUMS that madeBillboard's Top 100, fourteen of which ranked in theTOP 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,[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] 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."[6] Music historian Richie Unterberger characterized their impact as "phenomenal popularity",[7] and theKINGSTON Trio's massive record sales in its early days made acoustic folk music commercially viable, paving the way for singer-songwriter, folk rock, andAmericana 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 requiredMUSIC classes. They had developed an interest in and admiration for native Hawaiian slack key guitarists like Gabby Pahinui.[8] While in Punahou's secondary school, Shane taught first himself and then Guard the rudiments of the six-string guitar,[9] 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 inPALO ALTO, California, while Shane matriculated at nearby Menlo College. At Menlo, Shane became friends with Nick Reynolds, a native San Diegan with anEXTENSIVE knowledge of folk and calypso songs—in part from his guitar-playing father, aCAREER officer in the U.S. Navy.[10] Reynolds was also able to create and sing tenor harmonies, a skill derived in part from family singalongs,[11] 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.[12] 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,[13] and Shane returned to Hawaii following his graduation in late 1956 toWORK in the family sporting goods business.[14] 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.[15] Some weeks later (and following a briefPERIOD 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.[16] Bogue left with Gannon, and Guard, Reynolds, and Werber invited Shane to rejoin the now more formally organized band.[15] 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.[17] TheFOUR 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 ofTHREE-quarter-length sleeved verticallySTRIPED SHIRTS that the group hoped would help their target audience of college students to identify with them.[18]
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