The Fredösphere

Today's featured library CD is An Evening With The Kingston Trio.

Credit the Trio for making the song Tom Dooley known to everyone:

Did he ever return? 
No!  He never returned,
And his fate is still unlearned.

What is it about that tune that works so well?  Must - learn - secret - of - great - melody - writing.  The success of Dooley seems especially mysterious because the tune frankly does not fit the words; it gives a driving, heroic quality to a stupid story about a guy who can't figure out how to escape from a friggin' city bus -- oh, wait, that's the plot of that Keanu Reeves movie that made a gazillion dollars at the box office -- as I was saying:  stupid.

The Trio has an official website.  Bob Shane has continued to work the crowds down through the years with a group called the New Kingston Trio.  Like The Who, the Trio had to appease long time fans angered over the replacement of an original member.  Unlike The Who, the Trio was not particularly known for smashing guitars (or even banjos) on stage.

An Evening is a live recording of a 1962 concert not released until 1997.  Most of their albums were not live, but the group's banter on stage was a great part of their appeal.  They certainly paid their dues; this is manager Frank Weber, in The Kingston Trio On Record, recalling the trio's days at the Purple Onion in San Francisco:

We did seven months there, daily.  We would do every job with a clipboard, and I would say I choreographed every song.  Every move was planned, every line ... and the character of the performance was developed in seven months of three and four shows a night, six nights a week, and a session after each show - football/basketball team style....  My sphere of reference never included records.  I was knowledgeable in performance, communication across the stage ... I never considered that this was to be a "record hit act."  I was really focusing on performance and projection and music, of course, but "Tom Dooley" .. I could never say I planned that.

Frankly, I find the yakking off-putting.  The guys seem extraordinary bored with what they're doing, and the jokes are brittle and in-bred.  The audience laps it up, but I suspect a lot of what they are experiencing is:  we're in the presence of celebrities!

I will never regard the Trio in any kind of normal light.  My introduction to them came via the purchase of a used stereo, the first my family ever owned.  Get this:  the thing had two speakers.  The people who sold it to us (via a garage sale, I imagine) threw in their entire record collection as part of the deal.  It was a sampling of music my family would never have bought, or even known about.  It all seemed so incredibly worldly to my young eyes, a mix of neo-folk, orchestral proto-musak, and (most shockingly) the soundtrack to Goldfinger.  (That song still gives my a multi-dimensional frisson to this day.)  Yes, I am the only person on earth who associates the Kingston Trio with worldliness.

UPDATE:  Silly me, I've confused the songs "Tom Dooley" and "The MTA." Thanks to CGHill who pointed out my mistake in the comments section. See this post for more reax from moi.