Kingston Trio

The Kingston Trio is an American folk and pop music group that was exceptionally popular in the late 1950s and early 1960s and played an important part in launching the so-called folk revival of that era. Fifty-one years after their initial formation in the Palo Alto area of Northern California, an incarnation of the Trio is still touring on a regular basis, although two of the original members, Dave Guard and Bob Shane, have died, and the third, Nick Reynolds, no longer plays with them on a regular basis. Earlier singers such as the Weavers and Burl Ives had enjoyed occasional success with folk-based music, but none of them rose to the sustained heights that the Kingston Trio reached for a few years. Not long after becoming famous with their surprise hit single, the ballad of "Tom Dooley", the Trio had, at one point in the early 1960s, four albums at the same time among the Top 10 selling albums, a unique achievement finally matched nearly 40 years later by Garth Brook. Along with many other suddenly popular folksinging artists such as Joan Baez and the New Christy Minstrals, the Trio's success was unrivaled except by that of a slightly later group, Peter, Paul and Mary; it came, however, to a relatively quick end with so-called British Invasion of the Beetles in 1964 and the disappearance of mainstream interest in folk music.