To thine own self be true

concert book of the original trio 1958-1962: left to right–Bob Shane, Dave Guard (died 1991), Nick Reynolds (below, died 2008)

(concert program of 2nd KT version: quavery-voiced new guy on left: John Stewart (who later had hit singles “Daydream Believer” and “Gold”; this version performed from 1962-67)

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Bob was the leader and chief baritone voice-guitarist of the legendary Kingston Trio. The Trio launched what was called the Folk Era with the release of the single “Tom Dooley” in 1958, which peaked at No. 1 on the charts.

The group had 14 of its albums in the top 10, with 5 of them reaching #1. 7 of them remained on the charts for more than a year. It had 8 top 40 hits. 7 gold albums with 2-4 selling a million copies. They won 2 of 8 Grammy nominations.

The top chart singles:
Tom Dooley, 1958 #1
The Tijuana Jail, 1959 #12
MTA, 1959 #15
A Worried Man, 1959 #20
Where Have All the Flowers Gone? 1962 #21
Greenback Dollar, 1963 #21 (with the bleeped out “damn” on the single version)
Reverend Mr. Black, 1963 #12
Desert Pete, 1963 #33

(all their music  on Capitol)

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Below is a letter I wrote to Shane in August 20, 2012.

Hi Mr. Shane,

Trust this finds you comfortable and well.
A somewhat belated appreciation/thank-you letter from a long-time 63-year-old Canadian fan.

I first heard the trio in the summer of 1958 when I was about 8 at a friend of my father’s place in Winnipeg, Manitoba (where I grew up). He had just bought a new stereophonic record player and was showing it off to us, playing Mancini’s Peter Gunn and the first album of the Kingston Trio. Who could ever forget a first hearing of “Tom Dooley”?

After that, I was hooked and enjoyed the various singles that got air play on AM radio through the’50s and ’60s–“The Tijuana Jail”, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” (sorry PPM, the KT version was the more haunting, affecting version for me), “MTA” (what a crazy lyric!), “Worried Man” (that great final verse), “Greenback Dollar” (with “damn” bleeped out!), and the curious Stewart showcases “Desert Pete” and “Reverend Mr. Black”. Such an exciting, powerful range, so many truly great, remarkable songs.

I remember, later in my teens, babysitting two teachers’ kids and playing/discovering the previously-unknown treasures on their parents’ Greatest Hits album–“Raspberries, Strawberries”, “Merry Minuet”, “Take Her Out of Pity”, “Everglades”, the very funny “Bad Man’s Blunder” (a kind of cheeky humor which marked me for life), and your own signature cool, sexy, jazzy “Scotch and Soda”. Like so many other people my age, I started buying the cool KT style shirts and bought a banjo. (Unfortunately, I bought a 4 string which didn’t quite reproduce the folky 5-string KT sound so I settled on becoming a guitar player instead pretty fast.)

As the hootenany era was peaking simultaneously with the Beatles’ 1963-4 onslaught, I first taught myself to play guitar and sing “Tom Dooley”. Later, in ’67, as part of a duo, I sang your version of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” at an anti-Vietnam demonstration in Winnipeg. Over the years, I learned many of the KT songs, including those haunting Stewarts “For those Who Are Wise” and “Weeping Willow”. I sang “The Merry Minuet” to a very appreciative high school crowd in the ’90s (I taught h.s. English for 30 years)–talk about a timeless song! And more KT hits at two folk retro shows around 2000, again at my school.

Well, what goes around comes around, of course. In the past three years, I have been ‘catching up’, buying numerous KT CDs, LPs, books, songbooks, programs and the like, and recently a rare signed program of the original trio. Currently, I am listening to and replaying the #16, New Frontier, and Time to Think albums a lot and savouring the terrific harmonies, arrangements, humor, and above all the spirit of the equally strong KT2 lineup. Wow!

More and more, though, I have come to appreciate your own vocal stylings, choices of songs, lead and melody parts, and how much you anchored and were the leader and core stability that has been the great Kingston Trio over the long years.

As is often quoted, I’ll repeat “The Kingston Trio was first” and I would add “the best”. And, I’ll just add, finally, a personal thanks for how much you and the first two trios influenced my own life, directions, music, sensibility, and spirit.

Take care, Bob.
All the Best,

Richard Davies
Big Fan
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

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(two nice DVDs on the trio; feature live performances)

relative to survival, success, growth, and self-fulfillment:

Consciousness

Attitude

Personal Choices (based on the above 2)

Healthwise: diet and exercise.

don’t bet the farm on it in terms of immediate helpful help in case of a stroke, heart attack, or the like. Your best bet is still for you yourself to physically get to a hospital pronto.

re. the 2 satellites due to collide at 4:39 pm 560 miles over Pittsburgh.

An oldie I wrote about Skylab which fell apart over the Pacific Ocean in 1979, with apologies to William Blake:

Skylab, Skylab burning bright
Chunks are falling left and right.
What moronic hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

(the original wrap-around look of Steinbeck’s first edition)

Social realism in American literature and film made a major uptick with the release of John Steinbeck’s 1937 The Grapes of Wrath and the 1940 film version, the latter which looks terrific on the remastered DVD.

On the surface, the book was based on the real hardships of displaced Okie farmers trekking to California looking for the Promised Land, only to find unchecked corrupt picking establishments that exploited their suffering even further. Their misery and suffering is graphically depicted with many deaths, abuses, violence, and exploitation. Both the book and movie remain classics on the death of the original American Dream and illegal exploitation of poor, simple, decent folks.

Spoiler: Steinbeck’s book is well-adapted in the movie except for the key climactic scene with the pregnant Rose of Sharon feeding a dying man. Otherwise, screenplay writer Nunnally Johnson and director-great John Ford do a nice job of bringing Steinbeck’s social criticism to visual life. The gloomy Depression atmosphere is effectively recreated by black-and-white cinematography shot along the famed Route 66 highway.

There are strong performances by Henry Fonda (as protagonist Tom Joad), Linda Darwell (as his hopeful, long-suffering mother), and John Carradine (as Jim Casy, the crazy ex-preacher). Grapes remains the ultimate book and film document of 1930s North America and Steinbeck’s best novel as well as one of Fonda’s and Ford’s best movies. Hard-hitting still; highly recommended viewing into a long-forgotten episode of history.

Sure will be fun riding the gondola from October to March!
Given the funicular freezes and is not working much of the time, how often is this likely to happen to a frozen gondola inaccessibly stuck over the river valley?
What happens to the riders stuck in the gondola? How will they be rescued? How much will this cost? Who will pay for this reality?
What exactly are the entrepreneurs putting up for this attraction? Who pays for upkeep? breakdowns? rescues? advertising? etc.?
Should city taxpayers have to pay a cent for this crazy pipe-dream?
What makes the entrepreneurs so sure they will get millions of riders, especially from October to May?
Another crazy scheme being fostered by Don and city council to go along with the funicular, the expanded riderless LRT, broken down road system, unrealistic garbage collection plan, etc.

Watching the 1940 film classic of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is a truly ‘downer’ experience about how poor farmers were in the midwest during the Dirty Thirties Great Depression. Hard to believe times were ever so tough, brutal, and tragic for decent hard-working Americans (and Canadians, too).

And as I watched, I was immediately thrust back via memory to a Sunday about 1961 when my mother and I were the only ones living at home and we were down to something like 25 cents. I had complained about being hungry and my amazing hard-working, break-less, Ukrainian mother went to the cupboard and started pulling out things like flour, baking powder, and other basic ingredients to make me a facsimile of some store treat of the day. It was a miracle of sorts and reminds me of how she could manufacture/conjure something credible out of absolutely nothing. We did not go hungry that day which is probably why I remember this incident so well.

(my poor, stony-broke folks in 1950–not unlike millions of unskilled working-class Canadians–who started their marriage with next-to-nothing; there were many other hard times to follow, especially in the ’50s until both started working regularly in the hospital biz around 1964, when we moved out of our WWI house and into the new Billingsley Manor at Portage and Rita in St. James, the year of Beatlemania–the same year I met all my significant SHCI friends, and my life began to open up hugely. Although I would still have to get a student loan to get into the U of W, we would never be poor again. My Dad only finally learned to drive around 1970 and bought their first car about that time.)

broccoili which is past its expiry date. One needs to get the offending veggie outside promptly before its malodorous smell travels to every corner of a house or apartment.

is that our current, already inadequate power grids will not be able to support them. So electric car owners are at the mercy of them. Another new e-change that may very well be impractical when the masses are forced to make the switch-over.